Calculating the Professional: Standards and the Government of Professional Practice

Abstract

Professional standards are increasingly defining and organising the working life of professionals today. In teaching and school leadership-the research focus of this thesis-professional standards are relatively recent and global in extent. Scholarly research into teacher professional standards, however, tends to be dominated by either a progressivist or a critical form of intellectual practice. Although philosophical antinomies, these paradigms are both, characteristically, 'meta-theories of promise'.This thesis proposes an alternative, more problematising approach based on a postrealist orientation. This approach, it is argued, is better suited to the thesis' central research question which seeks to disclose the discursive and material relations through which professional standards are constituted as a domain of governmentality.Utilising the Foucaultian concept of governmentality-coupled with insights from actor-network theory-the thesis investigates the conditions of possibility of teacher professional standards in Australia today. It does so over three separate published papers, each of which analyses a separate facet of the assemblage of practices and discourses of teacher professional standards in which such conditions are found. The thesis finds that such standardising practices are not only disciplinary in their effect on teachers' time and obligations, but governmental in their bid to shape professional conduct-particularly in ways that evoke the neoliberal figure of the enterprising self. Such governmental action, the thesis finds, is complex andcalculating. An analysis of the programmes and practices of standardising that centre on the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership discloses a strategic logic of regulation that seeks not simply to shape behaviour, but to activate professional freedom-to open it to unknowns-in order to produce more or less precisely defined results. Practices of standardising are also found to be imbricated in the ethical-governmental practices of professional (self-) formation that centre on teachers' and school leaders' professional and personal-professional activities and undertakings. This occurs, the thesis finds, according to the interplay of the multiple variability of the enfolding of authority by which a professional self-one stylised as more agile and adaptive than its predecessors-is formed.