The ethical practice of teaching literacy: accountability or responsibility?

Kostogriz, Alex ; Doecke, Brenton

Introduction

Over the last three decades, teachers around the world have witnessed myriad instances of the idea of educational accountability. In most cases this idea has been materialised in the 'right-to-know' policies that demand public access to school performance data so that the quality of education is increasingly scrutinised and educational outcomes are supposedly more transparent. Calls for greater accountability have often been justified by public concerns about the productivity of school systems and teachers, in times of ever increasing economic competitiveness within a global market place. Many governments have developed strategies that are designed to improve the performance of their education systems, and most of these strategies are about tightening control over the teachers' work. The demand for greater accountability has triggered therefore a more visible shift from a belief in the value of the relative professional autonomy of teachers (as in 'classical professionalism' (Hargreaves & Goodson, 1996, p. 4)) to test-based accountability systems as a means of external control (through the nationally mandated mechanisms of monitoring teachers' performance and compliance). Although the reasons for introducing these performativity mechanisms can vary across developed countries, it is clear that accountability today is a core concept of neoliberal policy-making in education around the world. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that educational accountability is both fashioning and normalising what counts as teacher professionalism and quality teaching in the 'audit society' (Power, 1997).

Educational accountability mirrors the prevailing economic values, and the reasons for its proliferation can be found in a political and economic context in which schooling is seen to play a major part (Leithwood, 2005). Literacy in Australia, for example, has been identified as a key to improving labour market outcomes and economic productivity (Shomos, 2010). As a result, businesses have put pressure on policymakers and education systems to increase the literacy capability of the national workforce in order to meet the higher literacy demands of contemporary workplaces. The Productivity Commission report, Impact of COAG Reforms: Business Regulation and VET (2012), in particular, emphasises the link between literacy levels and employability of people. Although the connection between literacy and job opportunities has been discussed many times over several decades, it is only recently that literacy has been officially promoted on the national scale as a set of basic or foundational skills, reinforcing standards for adult literacy education (see LLNP discussion paper, 2012). Equally, and largely for the same economic reasons, increasing the accountability of teachers for literacy outcomes has become a hallmark of standards-based reforms of schooling in Australia.

Previously, teacher performance in literacy education was managed on smaller state, regional and local scales by bureaucratic and professional forms of accountability (e.g., through diagnostic tests such as An Even Start, TORCH, PIPS, PAT-R). It is only with the introduction of the National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) in 2008 that schools and English language teachers have experienced increasing political involvement in literacy education on the national scale. NAPLAN, in particular, has consolidated a test-based system of accountability with the intention of making teachers responsible for the literacy outcomes of all students, regardless of their social and cultural advantages and disadvantages. This type of accountability with respect to the 'outputs' achieved has been supplemented by a simultaneous investment in 'inputs', such as fiscal resources (e.g. Building the Education Revolution (BER) investment), teacher quality (e.g. the new National Professional Standards for Teachers and School Leaders) and the curriculum (e.g. the Australian Curriculum). All these 'input' measures are intended to trigger a positive change in the quality and effectiveness of education, more broadly, and literacy outcomes, in particular. However, due to the high-stakes nature of NAPLAN and associated emphases on competition and school choices, as determined by the so-called 'transparency' of performance data on the My School website, this test-based form of accountability has also produced a number of negative effects.

Research into this new Zeitgeist of educational policy and practice has revealed its various effects on teachers' work and students' learning. The most sustained critique of high-stakes assessment regime and standards-based reforms comes from the US and the UK (Armein & Berliner, 2002; Au, 2008; Koretz, 2008; Taubman, 2009). Critics argue that mandated literacy testing narrows down the curriculum, distorts teaching and learning and does not promote 'real' improvements in student learning. This is because the information generated by tests is predominantly oriented to external audiences rather than to the teachers themselves. Because of this external pressure, teachers and principals are motivated to demonstrate higher results by teaching to the test. As a consequence, high-stakes tests negatively affect local teaching practice. They mediate relationships between teachers and their students in a way that undermines teachers' capacity to respond to the felt needs of young people, reproduce dominant social relations in education, pathologise social and cultural disadvantage, particularly of EAL/D students, thereby making learning environments culturally and textually poorer (Doecke, Kostogriz & Illesca, 2010; Kostogriz, 2011, 2012; Kostogriz & Doecke, 2011). Some critics claim that high-stakes literacy testing produces a negative emotional impact on teachers that goes beyond the oft-reported issues of stress and overwork (Oplatka, 2009). Teachers experience a loss of power and control, and the sense of being permanently under a surveillance regime can lead to fear, disaffection, anger and resistance (Ball, 2003; Kostogriz, 2012; Perryman, 2007).

We do not intend to dwell on these negative effects of accountability, though we believe that a lot could be said about them in the Australian context of mandated literacy testing. The purpose of this paper is rather to focus on the effects of test-based accountability on the professional ethics of teaching. Focusing on professional ethics means explicating the effects of external accountability measures on fundamental aspects of teaching practice, most notably the relationships between teachers and their pupils and the ethical obligations that inhere within those relationships. One can argue the primacy of ethics in teaching simply because education, among other things, has to do centrally with the relationships between people (teachers, students and others). All other aspects of education, such as its quality and effectiveness with respect to pupils' learning, can be productively addressed only if teaching is responsive to others and if the other is acknowledged. The objective of this article is, therefore, to examine the effects of educational accountability on the teachers' sense of responsibility as an essential component of their stance as educators vis-a-vis the young people in their care.

Accountability and responsibility in literacy education

It is difficult, and probably unproductive, to argue against accountability in education. Accountability has been always central to teachers' work. Depending on for what and to whom accountability is owed, schools and teachers have experienced various waves of moral, bureaucratic, fiscal, professional and legal accountability measures. More than a century ago, it was not uncommon for parents to judge teachers on their ability to keep classroom order or to have a virtuous life beyond the school to an extent that is both unthinkable and unlawful today (McDermont, 2011). Studies into educational policies have analysed various accountability shifts and revealed differences between how systems, schools and teachers understand their obligations to provide an account of themselves. It might be helpful therefore to start with a more general definition of accountability before engaging with the issue of test-based accountability, which is currently the most visible form of accountability in education.

In definitional terms, accountability is usually understood to mean one's 'liability to be called to account' for what one has done or not done (Macquarie Dictionary, 2009). The account may include a report, explanation, statement, justification or excuse, depending on the level of accountability and on who is accountable to whom and for what. In education, this gives rise to an understanding of accountability that is not simply the responsibility of an individual teacher but something for which the profession as a whole is responsible. For instance, if it is a system-wide situation then the profession lays itself open to criticism and takes responsibility for collective actions and their consequences on a social plane of educational accountability. This kind of accountability involves a social contract and moral relationships between the profession and the state and between the teachers and the public (i.e., parents and care-givers). Usually this form of accountability involves both an internal or profession-based accountability and an external accountability to the state and the public. On an individual plane, a teacher who is held accountable for her actions becomes subject to various responses to her account of the action such as, for example, praise or blame and reward or punishment. One's sense of accountability in teaching practice can depend, however, on whether or not a teacher accepts a causal relationship between her actions and the learning outcomes achieved by her students.

This understanding of accountability, by and large, assumes 'the position of a subject-cause, an agent or an author who can be displayed as a subjectum for its actions' (Raffoul, 2010, p. 5). Increasing calls for teachers to be more accountable for literacy outcomes are based on such understanding of agency, positioning teachers as being the direct cause of their students' learning. This is particularly visible in discourses of quality teaching that identify teachers as one of the most important factors influencing student achievement (e.g. Darling-Hammond, 2003, 2006). Based on reviews of studies of student achievement in the United States, Darling-Hammond, LaFors & Snyder (2001, p. 10) concluded that teachers' knowledge, expertise, education and experience 'account for a larger share of the variance in students' achievement than any other single factor, including poverty, race, and parent education'. In Australia, a number of studies have similarly concluded that the quality of teaching is an important factor accounting for variations in school students' achievements (e.g. Cuttance, 2001; Rowe, 2003; Rowe, Turner & Lane, 2002). Hattie's work (2003, 2008, 2011) is cited regularly to reinforce this position. Policy-makers interpret this research narrowly 'as a single biggest variable' affecting school outcomes in order to justify a system of teacher control through NAPLAN and My School (Gillard, 2008). The insistence on such positioning of teachers and their accountability deserves more attention, particularly with regard to the professional ethics that it promotes and how this may affect their sense of responsibility.

In conditions of external accountability, when teachers are made solely accountable for numbers (in the form of test scores), it is impossible to discuss professional ethics as a pedagogical act in which one is personally implicated and for which one carries responsibility vis-a-vis the other. The world of numbers--the world of My School--is a place of abstraction in which particular teaching practices and events, as well as social relationships between teachers and students, disappear. This world is indifferent to the everyday life of teachers in schools, their unique locations in communities, their decision-making about what and how to teach, and their situated sense of responsibility for students. The world of numbers recognises teachers as a workforce --a collective subject that is both the 'cause of' and 'accountable for' learning outcomes (test results); as an agency that should have a capacity to influence students who, in the current system of accountability, are empty spaces to be filled with the knowledge and skills that are deemed to be requisite for participation in the labour market.

What follows from this is a universalised and seemingly empowering representation of teachers as a 'free' subject that can make a difference on the basis of their professional knowledge and skills, and also on the basis of a moral duty attached to such a view of the subject. Because these capabilities and morality are perceived as a cause of the subject's quality teaching, accountability presents itself as simply a matter of productivity. The accountable teaching workforce is a self-directed and rational collective subject that is motivated to improve its productivity through quality teaching. Paradoxically, students become reduced to merely a means of improving the performance data. There is no space in the world of numbers for the relationality of teaching and for the 'eventfulness' of teaching and learning events (see Bakhtin, 1993). Consequently, there is no space for one's responsibility understood as an ability to respond to others. This effect of test-based accountability on the professional ethics of teachers has emerged in our project as one among a number of other concerns.

Focusing on the experiences of accountability in schools

Our project has revealed different consequences of implementing mandated assessment to make schools accountable for literacy standards, focusing on six public schools in Victoria and South Australia. This objective has informed our methodological design that is based on institutional ethnography developed by Dorothy Smith (2005) and others. Institutional ethnography has offered a set of strategies for developing an understanding of schools as institutional settings in which the effects of test-based accountability are experienced at the level of everyday life. Our project team has focused, in particular, on how NAPLAN, associated with its official and semi-official texts, and new paid literacy workers (e.g., coaches, data analysts) mediate what teachers and principals do, how their work has been re-organised, intensified and reified (see Comber, 2011; Comber & Cormack, 2011; Kostogriz & Doecke, 2011; Doecke, Kostogriz & Illesca, 2010). We have also identified that a system of test-based accountability in which teachers, their practices and students are treated as measurable, instrumentalised objects of scrutiny (to be rewarded or punished), deflects attention from ethics in education and from the moral dilemmas that teachers face. Interestingly enough, the way teachers cope with the effects of accountability also opens up the prospect of teacher responsibility as a professional commitment to social justice and as a means of resisting to reification.

Institutional ethnography as a method has allowed us to uncover teachers' everyday experiences and the way the everyday shapes the ethical practice of literacy teaching. By using this methodological approach, we have been able to identify the underlying social relations and experiences that constitute school life from the point of view of participants. This type of analysis has been attempted by some ethnomethodologists who focus on the problematic of everyday practices (see Smith, 1987). However, instead of focusing on the analysis of participants' micro-interactions, institutional ethnography is more interested in the development of a participant-centred method of inquiry that recognises the integrity of everyday life and, hence, does not reduce the 'lived' character of experience. For instance, Smith (2005) argues that participants have a distinctive standpoint in perceiving their social reality and that this standpoint is situated in particular socio-historical circumstances (i.e., in the institutional or structural context of practice). What this means for our research into the professional ethics of teachers is that we resist representing their everyday experiences by using general concepts, and strive to understand their lived experiences in relation to the 'particular local historical sites' in which they operate. This approach has allowed us to disclose the everyday experiences of teachers as sites of multiple and sometimes contradictory relations. More specifically, the contradiction between accountability and responsibility has emerged as a major issue in the professional lives of teachers and principals.

We shall briefly illustrate this contradiction by drawing on interviews conducted in two Victorian schools--a big secondary college and a small primary school. The secondary school is located in a middleclass suburb of Melbourne and has been competing with several private and public schools for students. The school has focused on improvement in the area of literacy and numeracy, implementing a number of strategies. Diagnostic assessment of students' literacy has been used in this school for several years in order to inform and enhance teaching practices. The principal perceives the value of NAPLAN in the context of a school assessment culture, where it is 'simply another instrument of measurement ... It's important in the sense of ... it gives us another check'. The school has employed a data analyst to 'pull the data apart'. The NAPLAN data are then used by teachers to identify the areas of improvement and by school administration to detect individual teachers who are or are not performing well, as reflected by the results that their students achieve. The school uses such tests as PAT R and PAT M in addition to NAPLAN in order to make an informed decision about the teachers' performance. 'Now, if there's a trend across there, if it's not one student or two students, but it's a trend, then you've got an issue with the teacher', the principal says. 'That's where we'd have to address that straight away. It's a checkpoint for us.'

The primary school, by contrast, perceives and uses NAPLAN and other test data differently from the secondary school. This school is located in a suburb of Melbourne that is undergoing gentrification. The school community has been very multicultural for several decades, and this has contributed to the school's emphasis on recognition and social justice. The principal and the teachers have a deep sense of responsibility to their students and the community. Furthermore, they perceive themselves as a community within this larger community, as a place where people from a diverse range of backgrounds come together. The principal argues that a new system of accountability attempts to transform schools into corporations, and 'we are not a corporation--we are a school'. Teachers in the school have also used diagnostic assessment tools in order to help them to address their students' needs, but they do not see any value in NAPLAN because it has no diagnostic significance and the test results become available only at the end of the school year. As one of the teachers says, 'the problem is, with the NAPLAN, the time that we do it until the time that we get the results, by the time we get the results, the kids have moved on anyway'. As a consequence, teachers perceive the test purely as a means of political accountability that requires schools to provide performance data. The principal argues in this regard, 'we have a lot of pressure to supply these data and to become public with this information. You don't really think it's about the children. You think it's about the politicians.' The teachers do recognise the importance of being accountable, but they resist the reduction of their work and the quality of their interactions with students to NAPLAN results. Education for them is about relationships with students and their parents. The school's emphasis on the ethics of care and responsibility for the students' wellbeing is a counterpoint to the demand for external accountability.

This brief illustration of how these two schools engage with NAPLAN captures differences in the way accountability and responsibility define the professional ethics of teachers and principals in contrasting institutional settings. The big secondary school feels obliged to promote teachers' accountability for NAPLAN results. This is understood as a detached approach to professional ethics that involves generalisations, abstraction and impartiality. This kind of ethics is based on the separation of the right and the good, prioritising the right. In this sense, the school perceives teaching quality as a right--i.e., the right for a quality literacy education. The issue here, however, is that the quality of literacy education is believed to be something that can be measured and represented numerically. Numbers therefore come to mediate teachers' understanding of what possible issues are and what counts as the right way of addressing them. As the secondary school principal argues, 'in our case, it is a real tool to use in the sense of pulling the data apart to look at the kids specifically'. Decision-making about students is based on numbers rather than on the teachers' knowledge of their students as human beings. This means that teachers are encouraged to make their decisions deductively, moving from the data to decisions about what to do, rather than from a student and to how to respond to her needs.

Unlike the secondary school, the teachers and the principal in the small primary school have a situated perspective on professional ethics. From their point of view, literacy education is situated in the context of their school and community. Teachers talk about their responsibility as an ability to respond to the concrete circumstances and felt needs of their students. They use the word 'care' quite often to talk about their relationships between each other and the students. As one of the teachers puts it, 'we're really lucky here because we do care for each other. A lot of us have been here for many years because it's a great school and it's very supportive'. Similarly, they see literacy education as a socially situated pedagogical practice that is based on an ethic of care:

When we've got them [students] here in grade three or Prep and those kids are screaming out for help ... we're the ones that are concerned. We don't care about the NAPLAN testing for those kids. We care that that kid, at 21, feels good about society and feels good about themselves ... We care. Schools care a lot. And that's why we go out on stress, because we care. (Sally, primary school teacher)

Literacy teaching in this school is based on a deep sense of professional and social responsibility that involves an attitude of care and attentiveness to the students. Teachers do not use the various classroom assessment approaches to simply justify their intervention, but rather to provide constructive and encouraging feedback to students that will enable them to develop their language and literacy. We would like to provide an extended quote to illustrate this:

When we come to our assessments for writing, it's not the one test we give. It's the whole year. It's not just one snapshot. It's a whole year of observing, listening to these kids, getting them to read their stories, and once in a while you see it and you think, 'Oh my God, I didn't know that this kid could write like that.' And why can that kid write like that? Because you just gave a topic, for example, that they really, really loved. And something has just happened. Like, I've got a boy who is dyslexic, and his father came and saw me a week ago. He said, 'Melissa [pseudonym], I don't know what has happened, but my kid is up to his 20th page of writing.' And I said, 'I saw it the moment that question went out.' It just happened. We read the stories and stuff like that. I said, 'How about if we write stories about a dragon?' And that kid just loved it. So after that, it's just on and on and on and he wants to publish it and make a book. So maybe I wouldn't have been lucky enough to see that in this kid this year, and I would have gone on thinking that this kid, nothing. But I saw it and I thought, 'Wow!' And of course he's got his words back-to-front and whatever, but who cares! He's writing. And what is he going to get back from the NAPLAN? Nothing. He's going to get nothing. Whereas, from me, at least I can say, 'Look, he did this fantastic story this year.' (Melissa, primary school teacher)

We do not want to overgeneralise the results of this study in terms of the effects of test-based accountability on the professional ethics of literacy teachers. Yet, these two examples of how schools are handling the demands of standardised testing nonetheless raise questions about the ways that testing is mediating the teachers' sense of themselves and their obligations towards the students in their care. Mandated literacy testing produces conditions in which teachers and their students are reduced to quantifiable dimensions that ignore the social life they enact in school each day. The reactions of teachers in these two schools have been varied--not all see standardised testing as undermining their professionalism, as the statements by the secondary school principal show. But nor can the concerns expressed by the primary school teachers about the negative effects that standardised testing is having on their relationships with their students be ignored.

The standpoints of the teachers we have interviewed have revealed a possibility of recovering a sense of a relational ethics--of a sense of human relations based on care and recognition--that teachers enact to counter these negative effects. The accounts that the primary school teachers give of the conflict they are experiencing between NAPLAN and their capacity to care for their students is interesting because it opens up the possibility of recovering a sense of relational ethics In this regard, we ourselves find this a source of hope. By turning to the ethical as we have sensed it being enacted by these teachers in our project we feel that we are able to envisage other ways of thinking about our work as educators. In our view, there is no question more topical in the current contexts of literacy education than the question of professional ethics, understood as a recognition of others and professional responsibility for the students' future.

It is therefore important to turn to situated approaches to ethics as a framework that enables us to question what counts as literacy education in conditions of test-based accountability and, in turn, to think about the possibilities of opening up education to the other, to social and cultural differences, to the multiplicities of abilities and needs of students in schools. In a word, it is important to 'meet the other face-to-face' (Levinas, 1969) to defy the reduction of socio-cultural differences to numbers and test scores. Central to this social project in literacy education is, therefore, a focus on the primacy of ethics that is other oriented. To counteract the dehumanising effect of 'teaching by numbers' or 'measuring up', one needs to situate responsibility for literacy teaching in proximal relations with others. There is a rich tradition that we can draw upon in this regard. For instance, the work of Levinas (1969; 1990), Derrida (2000), Bakhtin (1993) and others is particularly useful in developing a dialogical or relational perspective on the ethics of literacy teaching.

According to these continental philosophers, responsibility arises from relational experiences of responding to or answering a call. Teaching literacy well--quality teaching--from this perspective is not so much about a teacher's response to numbers but rather about her response to a call from a student. This may be a call that numbers simply cannot capture, such as a call out of the student's sense of vulnerability, misrecognition, affective state or a creative idea. Responsibility in this sense is not just a matter of choosing how to act but rather of deciding how to respond to a demand placed on the teacher. The increasing emphasis on teacher accountability (i.e., teacher as a subject-cause of test results) can be linked to the reduction of one's capability to respond to a call from an individual student, and this is what many teachers recognise as a negative effect of test-based accountability. Because it affects the foundational core of the profession, the resistance to external forms of accountability stems from a residual sense of the value of care in teaching practice. It seems to be that teachers emphasise the importance of care because it retrieves the ontological origin of responsibility in education--i.e., caring for students is tantamount to being able of responding to them. Reflecting on the importance of care in teaching relationships, Melissa argues:

And I think that's where that pressure comes in. It's great to be the parent for that kid who needs a hug or a touch during the day, and you might have quite a few of those kids. And you can't hug them and give them the parenting while you're doing a study test or that sort of an activity. You know from your own kids, it comes out during play. So the more play you give to the children, that's when they sit down and they become children and you can go and have a bit of a chat. That's where the nice feelings come out and the kids feel good and you feel good. But the way that I think that teaching is changing for me is that I feel the pressure that the kids will be tested, and the parents want those high scores. (primary school teacher)

So, here we have an alternative practice of ethical literacy teaching that runs parallel to the test-based accountability. Responsibility emerges as the core of 'being-for-the other' in education. Responsibility is not for the sake of scores; it defines teachers as professionals. Social justice, happiness, goodness and educational success come later and so is accountability for students' outcomes. It is for this reason that Bakhtin (1993) and Levinas (1987) define ethics as prima philosophia, as something that is prior to all other matters. Importantly, this implies that reforms that have negatively affected, or have a potential to affect, professional ethics are destined to be unpopular and unsuccessful. Alternatively, it is important to see quality teaching not as something that arises from a duty to be publicly accountable but rather from a situated notion of professional ethics, which involves professional responsibility to students. Teaching is always already situated in relation to others insofar as teachers are obliged to respond to the call of their students and, in turn, to act ethically. How one acts ethically in a particular event of everyday professional life and how one understands her responsibility 'here and now' is played out fully only relationally (Critchley, 1999; Derrida, 2000). Hence, exploring how teachers conceive of ethics in their local practices, particularly in the domain of classroom events, enables us to illuminate the teachers' sense of responsibility and, indeed, to approach the notion of 'ethics' in professional practice as the very condition of pedagogical possibilities and justice in education.

Concluding remarks

We have been able to discuss here only some of the consequences of test-based accountability for the professional ethics of teachers and to reveal how it might still be possible in the current climate to teach ethically. How do teachers perceive their responsibility in the current climate? What are the real effects of accountability, as compared to its rhetoric and normative assumptions? How does the external accountability model affect the relationships of literacy teachers with their students and their professional decisionmaking? These have been main questions that we have attempted to address by presenting the accounts of teachers, narrating about their work and their experiences of accountability measures. We have focused on only two schools to illustrate the experiences of teachers in contrastive settings. These schools, characterised by significantly different institutional cultures and practices, have provided a small window on how some teachers encounter, perform or resist the demands of national accountability measures. Social relationships with students and colleagues in a small public school are arguably not mediated by managerial structures to quite the same degree as those of teachers in a large secondary school, with the result that the contradictions that these primary school teachers experience with the introduction of mandated literacy testing can be identified and described more starkly. At the same time, we feel these experiences provide a perspective on the struggles experienced by teachers in other settings. The validity of our representation of their experiences, however, does not depend on the possibility of generalising those experiences, but on the extent to which it provides insights into each specific situation as these teachers experience it (cf. Smith, 2005; Bakhtin, 1993).

Understanding the effects of test-based accountability on the professional ethics of literacy teachers is important particularly today when standards-based reforms have become a global phenomenon. In this process, teaching as a social professional practice has been re-conceptualised in terms of economic discourses. Outcomes, performance standards, service delivery to clients, customer satisfaction and accountability are just a few words that capture these discourses. These business-like discourses are largely incompatible with the historical mission and idea of education (as opposed to training) and professional ethics (as opposed to service provision). The managerial practices of introducing and implementing these reforms have consistently ignored their detrimental effects on the ethical practice of teaching, calling to intensify its 'rational', measurable aspects. Repeatedly in their conversations with us, teachers have described pedagogical events in which they attempt to reclaim the space and time for responsive practice that is orientated towards the public good. We can build on these forms of resistance. If test-based accountability attempts to interrupt the project of democratic education, ethics holds out the prospect of professional agency that can continue this project.

Acknowledgement

This research was supported under Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects funding scheme (project DP0986449). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Australian Research Council.

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Alex Kostogriz and Brenton Doecke Deakin University

Alex Kostogriz is Associate Professor in TESOL and literacy education at Deakin University. He has published widely on issues of diversity, ethics and professional practice of teachers and teacher educators. Addressing these issues, he has argued the case for Thirdspace pedagogy, development of transcultural literacy, and education that is more hospitable and responsive to the other. He has co-edited Dimensions of Professional Learning (2007) and Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Classrooms (2009), as well as special issues of numerous journals on teaching and learning in multicultural conditions. His current research focuses on the preparation of teachers for work in socially and culturally diverse schools and on the effects of standards-based reforms in education on the professional practice and ethics of teachers.

Brenton Doecke is a Professor of Education in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University. He is a life member of both the Australian Association for the Teaching of English (AATE) and the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English (VATE). Brenton has written extensively on English curriculum and pedagogy, and is a former editor of English in Australia, the journal of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English (AATE). He played a major role in the development of the Standards for Teachers of English Language and Literacy in Australia (STELLA) and has since engaged in research on the impact of standards-based reforms on the professional identity and practice of English teachers.