Abstract:
Professional teaching standards are consequential for a range of stakeholders and central to a program of education reform which has been active in a range of countries for almost two decades. This paper explores the extent to which these standards can capture the actualities of teaching practice and thus become not only compelling representations of teachers' work but also resources that can sustain this work. Adopting a practice-based perspective on teachers' work and using concepts drawn from actor-network theory, it is argued that standards are primarily to be seen not in terms of the intrinsic capabilities or potentialities of teaching professionals but rather performances of teaching and learning in networks of practice. Concerned with answering normative questions, standards are also a fruitful site for exploring issues of sustainability in teaching and responsibility in research. Utilising video case data collected over the course of 'capturing' accomplished geography teaching, the practice of teachers as they go about their everyday work in classrooms is juxtaposed with accounts of this practice by classroom participants, as well as with published standards statements. The claim is made that juxtapositionary practices afford a glimpse of the conditions of possibility of a new approach to developing and using professional teaching standards. This is an approach that inhabits tense spaces of precarious categories, spaces from which learning that sustains teaching can emerge. These spaces provide for the recognition of radical difference and propel a politics that seeks to make use of this difference. Implications for the field of standards research are discussed.