Chapter 6: The Modern Teacher: A Textual Analysis of Educational Restructuration

For some time, research in the UK and elsewhere has charted the way that teacher education and what it means to be a teacher has been susceptible to reforms and restructuring in the light of market disciplines and new managerialism (Lawn, 1995; Lingard, 1995; NCTAF, 1996; Gewirtz, 1997; Darling-Hammond & Sykes, 1999; Ball, 1999; Apple, 2001). As Furlong et al. (2000, p 163) have argued, “Systemic change in education, including teacher education, is … a transnational phenomenon and not just a peculiarity of the English.” “New policy frameworks have been done to teachers who have been perceived as implementers of policies framed elsewhere and by other people” (Lingard, 1995, p 1). In England, as elsewhere, educational reforms have been tied in with marketisation and standards and consequently, the need to reform teachers has been part of this movement. In this paper, I intend to examine how these reforms are discursively brought off in the English setting. In what follows I want to concentrate on one dominant motif in what Hartley (2001) has called the social policy lexicon of New Labour; that is, the move to modernisation.