Dressing the Corpse :

Abstract

In this article, I reason that as students sometimes are positioned as being low ability, average, or high ability—a like belief of teachers’ and schools’ “intelligence” undergirds decisions about professionalism and learning, and sanctions substituting “some inner resource” in lieu of sustained professional learning. I argue that professional development has largely become a matter of implementing “proven” programs and products produced by external developers. In examining these manifestations, I situate development as an epic construct (Bakhtin, 1981) where meaning is understood as a transferable commodity and examine this effect. I suggest that implementation of programs as a substitution for professional learning undermines teachers’ agency, obscures our capacity to recognize anomalous situations, and diminishes thinking and learning. As a counter-model to development, I describe professional learning as rhizomatic (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) and advocate for locally determined professional learning.