Professional standards for teachers: how do they ‘work’? An experiment in tracing standardisation in-the-making in teacher education

Abstract

During the last two decades, professional standards describing competencies for teaching staff have emerged in nation states all around the world. This article reports on a pilot-study that applies a sociotechnological ‘lens’ to examine this standardisation process in educational policy. In line with ethnographic analyses drawing on science and technology studies and actor-network theory, the authors present a case study of teacher education in Flanders to demonstrate empirically how professional standards for teachers are being translated in (material) reality. First, we show where the Flemish professional profile and the core competencies of the teacher are being inscribed in teacher education. Second, we register how they gather an assembly of people, documents, procedures, instruments, etc. into specific types of stable and self-evident practice, and, third, we describe who and what is therefore set in motion. By displaying where the core competencies of the teacher function as ‘obligatory points of passage’, we make visible how their activity intensifies the standardisation network. This indicates, then, how the presence of professional standards in education is being stabilised or ‘black boxed’. Thus, our analysis traces the role played (or the type of work done) by professional teaching standards.