Strengthening learners' perspectives in professional standards to restore relationality as central to teaching

Abstract

Australian teacher standards have effects on what is thought about teachers' work. Just as teacher standards give expression to some characteristics of quality teaching, so too do students' views if solicited and made public, yet the archive of teaching standards pays little attention to learners' perspectives. This paper uses a theoretical framework informed by Foucauldian discourse analysis to contribute to a critical deliberation of how the diminished account of learners' perspectives sidelines the relational aspects of teaching and learning which are thus placed as inferior-as having a low ranking-in this pervasive standardsdriven policy arena. In this qualitative study, exploring discourses circulating in young people's views of teaching accomplishment can advance understanding of these 'silences or blind spots' in teacher standards by unearthing subjugated knowledges to contribute to the (re)articulation of a relational view of standards. This has important implications for the work of teacher-educators, who must go beyond the current teacher standards.