麻豆淫院

We Are Not Machines: Immunisation, Professional Standards and the Politics of Teacher Knowledge

Contemporary teacher education is increasingly organised around professional standards, core content frameworks and evidence-informed prescriptions that promise consistency, quality and accountability. While such developments are often presented as politically neutral mechanisms for improving teacher quality, this keynote argues that they reflect a broader political emphasis on the technicization of workforces in many professions: a widespread reimagining of work as a practice that can be standardised, replicated and audited. Drawing on Sarah O’Connor’s (2026) We Are Not Machines, I begin by asking what happens when, rather than simply technicizing work, we begin to technicize ourselves. What kinds of teacher—and teacher educator—are thus imagined by contemporary policy?

Using England’s Initial Teacher Training and Early Career Framework (ITTECF) as a point of departure, I explore how increasingly prescriptive frameworks position professional knowledge as authorised, measurable and transferable. While the English context represents a particularly developed example, similar trends can be identified internationally through the growing influence of teacher professional standards, competency frameworks and OECD policy discourses emphasising teacher quality, effectiveness and measurable outcomes (OECD, 2005, 2019). Drawing on Roberto Esposito’s (2011) concept of immunitas, I consider how professional standards function as technologies of immunisation and ask what such policy seeks to immunise teacher education from. What emerges from this question is a view of the ‘messier’ elements of humanity (being-together-with-others, knowledge, difference, power, equality, culture) as ‘harmful’ points of uncertainty, inconsistency and risk. Across diverse policy contexts, such uncertainty and risk is increasingly framed as a problem to be eliminated through technical specification. This, I argue, has profound epistemic consequences. Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s (2007) notion of epistemic injustice, I suggest that relational, embodied, situational and affective forms of teacher knowing become increasingly marginalised because they resist codification and audit.

The keynote then moves beyond critique by returning to the nature of teaching itself. Engaging with Hartmut Rosa’s (2019) concept of resonance and Étienne Souriau’s (2015/1943) philosophy of incompletion, I argue that teaching is not (only) the implementation of technical procedures but an ongoing accomplishment of attentive, relational practice. Teachers are continually responding to the emergence of situations that cannot be fully anticipated or standardised. Teacher education, therefore, must go beyond the logics of progress that it finds itself caught up within, to cultivate student teachers’ capacity for attentive judgement within the inevitable uncertainty of educational life. I make the case for greater focus in teacher education for building student teachers’ capacities for vigilant dynamism and response-ability relating to the relationships forming between pupils, each other, and the world that is conceptualised within and beyond the curriculum.

At a time when teacher education is increasingly subject to policy intervention across national contexts, this keynote invites teacher educators to reconsider what forms of professional knowledge are worth protecting—and whether efforts to immunise teacher education against uncertainty risk diminishing the very humanity upon which teaching depends.

References

• Esposito, R. (2011). Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Polity.
• Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press.
• OECD. (2005). Teachers Matter: Attracting, Developing and Retaining Effective Teachers.
• OECD. (2019). A Flying Start: Improving Initial Teacher Preparation Systems.
• O’Connor, S. (2026). We Are Not Machines. Penguin.
• Rosa, H. (2019). Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. Polity.
• Souriau, É. (2015/1943). The Different Modes of Existence. Univocal.

From Barriers to Leverage Points: Opportunities for decolonising teacher education through practice

There has been an increased awareness of the concept of decolonising curricula in more recent times, and perhaps most urgently in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. Nonetheless, within Initial Teacher Education (ITE), this work has often remained uneven, fragile, or positioned as an additional demand alongside an already crowded curriculum. Drawing on my (and colleagues’) research with teacher educators, preservice teachers, and practising teachers, this keynote aims to shifts the focus from barriers to opportunities: ways to make meaningful change in teacher education by making the most of developing existing opportunities.

Our findings from research with teachers, teacher educators and preservice teachers suggest that they consistently frame their engagement with decolonising practice through their subject expertise. This suggests that using disciplinary knowledge as a key entry point to explore what and whose knowledge is valued, how it is constructed and understood, can provide great opportunities for those of us who are involved in teacher education. At the same time, my study of a collaborative teacher network highlighted how co-production and shared professional spaces can support the development of agency, as well as addressing common challenges such as time, access to resources, and subject knowledge. Complementing this, work we did with preservice teachers demonstrated the potential of guided reflexive practice in supporting critical engagement with the ‘rethinking’ required in order to start to decolonise our own knowledge and understanding, as well as the curricula we teach.

Building on these findings, this keynote identifies four key opportunities for teacher educators:

1. Using subject expertise as a gateway to epistemic and curricular transformation
2. Embedding reflexive practice as a core element of professional learning to begin the process of decolonial thinking and action
3. Developing collaborative networks to enable co-production and shared capacity-building
4. Positioning student teachers as active participants in shaping decolonial practice

Rather than positioning decolonising work as an additional requirement, this keynote argues that these opportunities are already present within teacher education practice. The challenge, therefore, is not to introduce something entirely new, but to recognise, resource, and extend these existing leverage points in more intentional and sustained ways.

References:

• /publication/summer-2022
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• /blog/radical-imagination-enacting-anti-racist-practice-and-decolonial-praxis-in-initial-teacher-education-in-england

Developing Teacher Identities