Notoriously, Bruno Latour insists that "we have never been modern." 1 His argument is that modernity presents itself as gleaming, consistent, and coherentas something that is pure rather than fuzzy. Think, for instance, of the mass transit system in twentieth-century London. 2 You have that utterly familiar modernist icon, the red London bus. It is all curves and flat surfaces. You have the underground interior, again all curves and smooth surfaces. On every vehicle, bus stop, and tube station you have a logo in the form of a modernist roundel (more curves and straight lines). You have a clean sans serif typeface that is used for every sign. And you have the distinctive and endlessly mimicked underground map designed by Harry Beck, which appeared in 1933 to replace its more geographically faithful predecessors. Famously, Beck reasoned: "If you're going underground, why do you need [to] bother about geography?. . .

Changing conditions in the realm of teacher professionalism have consequences for teachers’ professional values and ethics. To a large degree, the literature concludes that increases in accountability policies seem to result in more restricted space for teachers’ professional values and ethical autonomy. Less attention has been given to which kinds and forms of ethics and value logics teachers negotiate and prefer in situations involving accountability policies. In this paper, we analyze how the Union of Education Norway negotiated teacher values in the process of developing their professional ethics code and the final code text. Previous research has shown clashes and struggles between two value systems, or as a change from traditional professional to neoliberal values. However, based on the analyses in this article, a third relation is suggested—one where increased accountability creates a paradoxical situation for teachers’ professional values and ethics—in which the professional ethics of opposition may analytically empty teacher practice of ethical aspects and where professional ethics of engagement may lead to decreased conditions for ethical engagement.

This article is a contribution to the discussion of learning processes in religious education (RE) classrooms. Sociocultural theories of learning, understood here as tool-mediated processes, are used in an analysis of three RE classroom conversations. The analysis focuses on the language tools that are used in conversations; how the tools mediate; the dynamics they create between pupils and teachers; and how new language tools are created and enrolled. The following three modes of learning are found: distancing, dynamic and expansive. These modes are collectively enacted by teachers and students in the context of the classroom. The article therefore argues that RE classrooms can best be understood as social practices, rather than sums of individual cognition. Empirically, religion is in the making in RE -in the shape of bits, pieces and processes. In the material, however, RE is an educational practice, not a religious practice.

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