The 'Good' Teacher? Constructing Teacher Identities for Lifelong Learning

The symposium will focus on trans-national constructions of the 'good' teacher through popular culture, through professional development orthodoxies and through professional practices such as professional growth plans, inspection and teacher regulation. We all recognise trends such as a focus on performance aspects of teachers' work; the development of competence models based on standards derived from industry; a resulting standardisation in ideas of the 'good' teacher; and dramatic increases in levels of teacher accountability. The professional standardisation of the 'good' teacher through specifications and norms is regulated through a wide range of mechanisms: performance measurement, technologies of professional development, quality assurance and inspection, as well as teacher competence frameworks, professional bodies, and so on. These measures are part of a response to global economic restructuring in which governments have sought to use education as 'a tool of micro-economic reform, through are-skilling of the workforce'(Smyth, 1995, p.3). Teaching is thus construed as a vehicle for implementing economic policy, with a wide range of measures to ensure that teachers do the business. Thus, not only do teachers have to guarantee their students' learning, with learning defined externally, but they are also responsible for changing the economic performance of countries through the training and retraining of workers. At the same time, the rhetoric of lifelong learning, so familiar to many of us transnationally, has brought with it a surge of both academic and policy interest in workplace learning. Broader conceptual understandings of learning as embodied and relational offer us a chance to explore teachers' identities as relational, and to think about teaching as a site of workplace learning (that is, the classroom, the community centre, the university and so on). Here, therefore, we focus on constructions of the 'good' teacher in a number of ways: through popular culture, through professional development orthodoxies and through professional practices such as professional growth plans, inspection and teacher regulation. We have chosen examples from the UK and North America, and from across educational sectors, because we believe that these illuminate trans-national trends. Adult educators are not if they ever were an identifiable group of people, separate from those who work in schools, colleges and universities. Those teaching children may be working with parents; those teaching adults may find themselves working with adolescents; those teaching undergraduates are more likely than ever before to be teaching mature students. Boundaries between institutions, workplaces, sectors, disciplines are dissolving. Simultaneously, the trends we observed above affect all teachers. We therefore need to consider what we might learn about the construction of the 'good' teacher from across the educational terrain. We also recognise that teachers are adults and we should be concerned with their education in the broadest sense. We want to expand the notion of 'education' here to include