Discourses of Competence and Performance: Determining Teacher Proficiency Through National Standards

• In Event: Roundtable Session 79
  In Roundtable Session: Exploring Discourses of Teaching and Being a Teacher

Abstract

Globally, initiatives are being undertaken to reform teacher education by focusing on teacher quality. Long existent What Teachers Should Know and Be Able to Do (NBPTS, 1987) in the United States and the newly formed National Professional Standards for Teachers in Australia (AITSL, 2011) demand that students get a competent and performance oriented teacher. In this paper, through critical discourse analysis (Chouliaraki & Fairclough 1999; Fairclough, 2001) these texts are studied to argue that, while standards assist to determine teacher performance, the neoliberal, disciplinarian discourses that underpin the standards in each of these documents fails to acknowledge that knowing alone is not enough. The paper concludes by suggesting that teaching be considered as beyond a discourse of competence and performance.

Author

• Radha Iyer, Queensland University of Technology