Professional standards in teacher education: tracing discourses of professionalism through the analysis of textbooks

Abstract

This article explores aspects of the relationship between professional standards for teachers and the curriculum for teacher education in the lifelong learning sector in the United Kingdom. Drawing on an analysis of different editions of three core textbooks for teacher education in the lifelong learning sector, which are positioned as acting as proxies for the teacher education curriculum, the article explores the relationship between professional standards and the curriculum for teacher education in the sector. Starting from a standpoint that foregrounds the material nature of professional standards – that is, that the standards need to be conceptualised and made sense of as an embodied, physical textual artefact – the argument presented here is that in order to understand any impact that professional standards might have beyond the discursive, the ways in which the standards as a material text might be seen as interacting with other relevant texts that embody different aspects of the profession – such as textbooks – must be considered. The article concludes that whilst curricula can and ought to be expected to change over time, the impact of professional standards on curriculum change would appear to be relatively minor.