The Australian professional standards for educators: analysing cognitive, affective and pedagogical expectations in First Nations education policy

Abstract

The Australian Professional Standards for Teachers, Middle Leaders, and Principals detail the minimum professional expectations that educators ought to demonstrate at each level. They were developed to ensure equitable practices across the entire Australian education system, including schools and initial teacher education programs. However, limited scholarship has explored the capacity to which these professional standards assist educators in supporting nationally stated goals of First Nations students’ attendance, achievement and attainment. In this manuscript, we examine how the standards came to reflect and direct Australia’s sociopolitical and education policies and practices. We then undertake two connected analyses: one using taxonomies to critically assess the professional cognitive, affective, and pedagogical expectations of educators, and one using a poststructuralist lens to discuss the potential impacts of the standards on enacting equity and reconciliation in schooling. Our analysis reveals that in relation to the specifically tagged Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander standards, the minimum expectations for all levels of professional practice are cognitively and affectively low but pedagogically high. We argue that these minimum expectations are complicit in perpetuating deficit cultural discourses of underachievement, and thus, call for a rethink of the actioning language of the standards to tackle ingrained sociopolitical structures of racism, relationality, and bias inherent in Australian schooling.