Assembling the ‘Accomplished’ Teacher: The performativity and politics of professional teaching standards

Set within the socio‐political context of standards‐based education reform, this article explores the constitutive role of teaching standards in the production of the practice and identity of the ‘accomplished’ teacher. It contrasts two idioms for thinking about and studying these standards, the representational and the performative. Utilising the material‐semiotic approach of actor‐network theory, it addresses the issue of how the representational idiom of teaching standards has become so authoritative that it readily eclipses other ways to think and ‘do’ them. In tracing the development of a specific set of teaching standards as part of a national research project, the argument is made that standards should be understood as performative knowledge and identity practices. And, accounting them should also be performative. Accordingly, attention is given to key locales in which this development is taking place. Teaching standards emerge as ontologically variable and it is struggles around this variability that can create conditions for a renewed practice and politics of education reform.

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