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Teacher Professional Standards, Accountability, And Ideology: Alternative Discourses, Katarina Tuinamuana

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

Teacher professional standards and accountability are today writ large on the landscape of both schooling and teacher education practice around the world. This paper explores some of the related debates through a discussion of four discourses on teacher professional standards: namely, discourses of commonsense, professionalism and quality, managerialism/performativity, and strategic manoeuvring. It is argued that each of these discourses legitimises particular understandings of standards and quality, illustrating the competing set of lenses through which they are viewed, as well as the broader ideologies from which they emerge, including neoliberalism and technical rationality. These discourses also represent the interpretive practice that …

Race To The Top: An Example Of Belief-Dependent Reality. A Response To "Race To The Top Leaves Children And Future Citizens Behind", William J. Mathis

Democracy and Education

Although the federal government claims otherwise, Race to the Top is not research based. Rather, its foundation is in ideology and belief-based realism. The overall effort is fundamentally antiscientific and distracts valuable and needed attention, resources, and focus from the nation's real problems of social, economic, and educational deprivation.

Arts Education In Swedish Teacher Training – What’S At Stake?, Monica Lindgren, Claes Ericsson

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

Swedish teacher education has undergone several reforms in recent decades aimed at incorporating teacher education into the university setting and strengthening the teaching profession. In view of earlier research that has shown how arts education in schools is ruled by dominant knowledge ideologies, the purpose of the project is to critically scrutinize current discourses related to arts learning and arts education in teacher education. The study is based on social constructionist theory and data were collected by various means, including 19 focus group interviews with teachers and students at 10 Swedish teacher education institutes.

Our analysis shows that an academic …

Students As Customers: The Influence Of Neoliberal Ideology And Free-Market Logic On Entering First-Year College Students, Daniel Brian Saunders

Open Access Dissertations

Scholars have documented the ways in which the influence of neoliberal ideology, and particularly the extension of free-market logic, has resulted in meaningful changes within colleges and universities in the United States. However, largely omitted from these discussions is the impact of neoliberal ideology on college students. Concurrent with the discussion concerning neoliberalism and higher education, a separate dialogue focusing on the rise of the conceptualization of students as customers has been occurring amongst higher education scholars. Such an understanding of college students is consistent with free-market logic, as the relationship between students and their institutions become defined in economic …