1st Edition
Critical Perspectives on Teachers and Teaching Professionalism, Responsibilities and Development
This book draws attention to the new ways the field of education is problematising the emerging and evolving conditions that shape the work, lives and identities of teachers. It offers geographically diverse accounts of ‘the teacher’ and ‘teaching’, demonstrating what it means to do critical research well.
Teachers and their practice have been, and continue to be, important sites of critical research. This book offers varied perspectives from diverse geographies to examine how teacher subjectivities are shaped by conditions of possibility. Collectively, they show how critiquing conditions (rather than the teachers themselves) provide a means for problematising ‘the teacher’, while also advocating the well-being of teachers as humans. Contributions offer compelling examples of how critical scholars can emphasise teaching as a political and value-laden exercise, and therefore treat the teacher subject as also being constituted through political and value-laden discourses.
Critical Perspectives on Teachers and Teaching offers a provocation to inspire new questions moving forward. That is, critical researchers have an obligation to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions – not only by looking outwards at the policymakers, edu-businesses, and intergovernmental agencies (e.g., OECD), but also by looking inwards and challenging their assumptions about power, discourse and subjectivity. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies in Education.
Introduction: Teachers and teaching: (re)thinking professionalism, subjectivity and critical inquiry
Jessica Holloway
1. Teacher-entrepreneurialism: a case of teacher identity formation in neoliberalizing education space in contemporary India
Achala Gupta
2. Punching the clock: a Foucauldian analysis of teacher time clock use
Chris Gilbert
3. ‘Quality’ at a cost: the politics of teacher education policy in Australia
Melissa Barnes and Russell Cross
4. Integrated networks of care: supporting teachers who care for Latina mothering students
Ganiva Reyes
5. The Pluto Problem: Reflexivities of Discomfort in Teacher Professional Development
Matthew A. M. Thomas and Frances K. Vavrus
6. Teachers’ critical interculturality understandings after an international teaching practicum
Rogerio P. Bernardes, Glenda Black, James Otieno Jowi and Kevin Wilcox
7. Re-professionalizing teaching: the new professionalism in the United States
Jory Brass and Jessica Holloway
Biography
Jessica Holloway is a Senior Research Fellow within the Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education (ILSTE) at Australian Catholic University, Australia. Her most recent books include Expertise (with Jessica Gerrad, 2023) and Metrics, Standards and Alignment in Teacher Policy: Critiquing Fundamentalism and Imagining Pluralism (2021).