Professional standards, teacher identities and an ethics of singularity.

Clarke, Matthew ; Moore, Alex

Abstract: This paper offers a critical analysis of the education policy move towards teacher professional standards. Drawing on Lacan’s three registers of the psyche (real, imaginary and symbolic), the paper argues that moves towards codification (and domestication) of teachers’ work and identities in standardized (and sanitized) forms, such as the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership professional standards recently adopted in Australia, can be read as a colonization of the Real and the imaginary by (a rather static, mortified form of) the symbolic. The paper argues that in response to such normalizing moves, we need to consider how we might conceptualize the reanimation of what it means to teach and be a teacher, something we attempt in terms of enabling each of the psyche’s registers to inter-animate each other, as a means of engendering teacher identities characterized by criticality, creativity and passion – that is, by an ethics of singularity rather than by standardization.

Key words: education policy;professional standards;psychoanalytic theory;teacher identities

总结: 本文提供了一个教育政策走向的教师专业标准的关键分析。利用拉康的心理学的三个寄存器(真实的,想象的和象征性的),本文认为教师在标准化工作和身份的形式,如澳大利亚教学和学校领导专业标准研究所最近采用了在澳大利亚,可以解读为殖民的真实的和想象的(相当静态的,屈辱的形式)象征性的。本文认为,为了应对这样的规范动作,我们需要考虑如何概念化很重要，成为一名教师,我们尝试让每个灵魂的寄存器联系彼此,作为一种产生教师身份临界,创造力和激情——也就是说,起点的道德而非标准化。

来源:Cambridge Journal of Education. Dec2013, Vol. 43 Issue 4, p487-500. 14p.