The national curriculum for teacher training: playing politics or promoting professionalism?

Abstract

Government reforms of education are crucially predicated on the redefinition of teacher professionalism. This article offers a critique of the technicist discourse of teaching emerging in draft Teacher Training Agency proposals for a framework of professional standards in Information Technology and Continuing Professional Development. Such prescriptions arguably construct the way teachers think about themselves and their work, and thus constitute the ‘mental’ in governmental intervention. Unless teachers engage more fully with other stakeholders in the political process to challenge such dominant models and to reappropriate a more humanistic concept of teaching, the crises of low morale and falling recruitment in the profession will be exacerbated to the ultimate detriment of children's learning