Stories of teaching and teacher education: Still speaking back to standards-based reforms

Public lecture by Associate Professor Graham Parr

Literary theorist and cultural critic Roland Barthes argued that the narratives of the world are ‘numberless’. This is certainly borne out by the varied stories of teaching and teacher education currently circulating the world. The narratives tend to agree that if we want to improve education for current and future generations, teaching and teacher education matter. But there is no consensus about how they matter.

In many of these narratives, standards are what matter – more than anything else. A familiar ‘standards narrative’ portrays teachers and teacher educators as both the fundamental problem in school education (they’re the reason standards are falling) and the solution to the problem (if only they’ll do what they’re told). Other narratives tell a different story. They argue that standards themselves are the problem, that standardisation is blunting our efforts to meet the needs of kids in multicultural classrooms, that it’s deprofessionalising the teaching profession and denying the academic freedom of teacher education. Still other narratives chart the rise and rise of standards-based reforms, showing how the language of standards now so completely dominates local, national and international policy and practice that it is difficult to imagine how educators ever taught, or researchers ever researched, before the notion of standards was coined.

This lecture is in the form of a critical narrative that draws and builds on these ‘other narratives’. It includes a critical account of current projects, where teachers and teacher educators are working in creative, collaborative, praxis-based partnerships across institutions and sectors. I show how the central figures in this narrative have little alternative than to negotiate with the language of standards, and yet they are building communities of educators with the capacity to speak back to standards narratives and standards-based reforms. I argue that this is a more productive way to improve the quality of teaching and teacher education than studied compliance with standards and standards narratives.