The profession(al) in professional learning

This article issues from the 2024 Radford Lecture to AARE. It summarises the story of a large-scale professional learning program in New South Wales, Australia, as way in to discussing a number of aspects of professional learning. An outline of the program is followed by participating teachers’ commentary, the thrust of which suggests one potential epistemological framework for professional learning in the notion of ‘reconsideration of the familiar’ (and then as ‘re-cognition’). I place this teacher commentary in the context of a theoretical discussion by Reid on teacher programming as itself an act of teaching, especially one in which teachers come to terms with significance as an important area of classroom work. Sitting behind questions of significance is a concept of the professional, framed in this essay, along with concepts of ‘professionalism’, by the work of Biesta. I contrast the positioning of the teacher as professional practitioner in such work with the positioning of the profession by mandated pedagogical practice as lately exemplified in the Australian review of initial teacher education that issued the report entitled Strong Beginnings.