Professional standards : maintaining a critical stance

The following article asks whether professional standards can provide a framework for practitioner inquiry and the renewal of the English teaching profession in Australia. This is in contradistinction to managerial pressures to impose standards for regulatory purposes. The article draws on research conducted for PRIME (Portfolio Research in Mathematics and English), a collaborative project involving members of the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English, the Australian Literacy Educators’ Association and the Mathematics Association of Victoria. PRIME was designed to explore the professional learning which English and Mathematics teachers experienced as they prepared portfolios within a standards framework. This article focuses on the experiences of one English teacher who participated in the project.