Drawing on Bernstein's notion of policy recontextualization, this study analyzes the exercise of neoliberal governmentality in the case of teacher education policy reform in Taiwan by analyzing data collected from official documents, meeting minutes, articles of legislation and media reports. The findings show that senior policymakers actively engaged in policy reconfiguration through paradigmatic adjustment. The resulting ‘recontextualized neoliberalism’ suggests that agents in the pedagogical recontextualizing field, through public activism in education, are speaking back to official policy discourses and forcing a softening of neoliberal market agendas in education.11The authors would like to express their appreciation to Dr. Parlo Singh of Griffith University for her insightful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper.