Abstract:
The release of the policy document Quality Matters - Revitalising Teaching: Critical Times, Critical Choices (Ramsey 2000) in retrospect served to signal an escalating agenda to fashion new versions of the teacher and teacher education as well as a new discourse of professionalism. This discourse serves to link teacher professionalism with quality teaching and learning within mandated structures and processes of explicit accountability and standardisation. The establishment of the NSW Institute of Teachers and the development of its Framework of Professional Teaching Standards are serving to demand new versions of student teacher and teacher subjectivities as well as new pedagogical orientations and responses within teacher education. Drawing on a policy-as-discourse approach, a critical reading of the Ramsey Report provides the foundation for discerning the disciplinary effects of such changes in policy and practice. In constructing a binary between what is termed 'a quality profession' and 'a mass profession', a version of the (student) teacher as strongly individualistic yet standardised, entrepreneurial yet accountable and self-accounting has been created. Whilst teacher educators need to productively respond to this standards agenda, it can be argued that an imperative exists at this time to establish and maintain counter discursive and pedagogical spaces within teacher education.