Matthew Clarke

• PhD Melbourne; BA Hons Oxford
• Professor at University of Aberdeen

In a range of international contexts, professional standards have been developed and adopted as vehicles for codifying and governing the work of teachers. The putative rationale for developing professional standards is that they provide a shared language for talking about teachers, teaching, and learning and thus serve as a common reference point f...

Since the latter half of the 20th century many political efforts and initiatives have been launched to ensure that teacher education provides teachers with a positive (orderly) knowledge base. This includes things like professional teacher standards and notions like ‘best practices’ and ‘evidence‐based practice’. Building on the work of Esposito an...

ABSTRACT At a time when there are renewed expressions of concern about how our societies are organised and the health of our democracies, this paper focuses on the role of education in a democracy. Informed by John Dewey’s and Martin Buber’s accounts of what it is to be educated, and Homi Bhabha’s concept of third space work, the paper presents the...

Education is widely seen as a force for good, associated with hope and optimism about better individual and social futures. By contrast, and controversially, this paper argues that education and education policy in recent decades has been far from benign, as evidenced in the growing alienation of significant numbers of teachers and students and, cr...

In this article we consider the current state of teacher professionalism in the neoliberalized context of 21st century education, characterized by intensified cultures of competitive performativity. As part of our discussion, we draw on interview data from early career teachers working in academies in the north of England, setting these alongside F...

The paper aims to explore how head teachers and other education service leaders and their teams have been experiencing shifts in their identities during the last decade of education cuts in Catalonia (Spain), and the possible effects during the current COVID-19 crisis on educational leaders. Our exploratory hypothesis covers the crisis years (2008–...

The editors of APJTE invited a group of teacher education scholars to have a conversation about what is ‘missing’ from the journal and/ or the field. In line with our celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the journal, we thought that it would be interesting to think about what hasn't been in the journal but might have been. We worked with people...

This chapter results from research examining pre-service teacher development in relation to experiences of mentoring during the Professional Experience component of their programme. The paper focuses on the interplay between pre-service teachers’ personal aspirations for their own practice and identity and their perceptions of more socialized...

This article identifies and explores a conceptual paradox between recent educational policy in England and a social-democratic understanding of critical literacy. Recent political events including Brexit, the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, and the Coronavirus pandemic have reiterated the importance of a pedagogic model that equips students to cri...

This special issue explores past, present and potential future imaginaries of ‘public’ education in Europe and beyond. The special issue is located in a contemporary context of political turmoil, in which one in four European voters allegedly supports populist political parties , with the largest support for far-right forms of populism; it is also...

Education is usually considered a force for good, associated with hope and optimism about better individual and social futures. Yet a case can be made that education and education policy in recent decades, far from being a force for good, has had nefarious effects at multiple levels. This can be seen in the growing alienation of significant numbers...

Conceptually and practically, feedback typically sits within a pedagogical, rather than a philosophical, framework. Drawing on a longitudinal study with student teachers seeks, this paper seeks to critically reframe feedback beyond the pedagogical by considering the moral tensions and ethical dilemmas within feedback, thereby revealing an inherent...

Recent educational reforms in England have sought to reshape public education in England by extending central government control of curriculum and assessment, while replacing local government control of schools with a quasi-private system of academies and multi academy trusts. In this paper, we resist reading this as the latest iteration of the deb...

Schools are where the future is written. For some, what is to be written is shaped under the glow of their preferred nostalgic past. For others, it is an imagined ‘good society’ yet to be created. The present realities tell of other stories. There are those whose wealth enable their futures to be clearly and comfortably mapped and those who struggl...

Paradoxes of Democracy, Leadership and Education engages both critically and creatively with important social, political and educational issues, and argues that the organisational forms of contemporary schooling are caught up in politically significant contradictions. Highlighting the inescapable paradoxes that educators must grapple with in their...

Neoliberal education promotes and naturalizes ideals of productivity, competition, and performance whereby the subject of education can only be thought of in terms of resilience, flexibility and adaptability, all of which require compliance rather than resistance, leaving no room for meaningful politics. Moreover, education, as in schooling, has be...

Lacan and Education Policy draws on the rich conceptual resources of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Using Lacans four discourses Matthew Clarke offers a sophisticated critique of recent education policy and the neoliberal model of political economy within which it sits, including the ways in which education has been diminished and trivialised through the...

This paper examines the tensions between education policy's attachment to notions such as excellence and inclusion and its investments in managerial tropes of competition, continuous quality improvement, standards and accountability that are at odds with and which undermine its attachments. In order to explore these tensions, I draw on the psychoan...

For many, the term ‘teacher identity’ carries purely positive associations, as something that provides a reassuring source of professional solidarity and support. Yet identity is something of a paradoxical and problematic notion. In thinking through the problematic of identity, and its relation to teachers’ lives and work, I draw on psychoanalytic...

This paper draws on a case study conducted in a Chinese university in the context of national College English reform. The aim is to investigate the policy enactment of the latest College English reform in China and the interaction between national policies, institutional policy, and teacher agency in responding to this educational reform from an ac...

Just over on hundred years ago, with the publication of Democracy and Education, Dewey made a case for the mutually dependent relationship linking a legitimate education system and a thriving democracy. A century on, many would argue that democracy and education have been decoupled and that both have been diminished and devalued as a result (Labare...

In this paper we examine the discursive structures adopted by the Iranian state in the context of public execution. Specifically, we argue that the state's insistence upon executing an offender in public is nourished by an intangible yet efficacious violence that has politically and psychically determinative consequences. As such, what is foregroun...

In contrast to a world that often feels filled with madness and disillusion, education is associated with reason and redemption. Yet from a psychoanalytic perspective, such positivity in relation to education suggests a fantasmatic dimension-a refusal of the inevitable dislocations that prevent life from being harmonious and complete. In this paper...

2016 marks the centenary of Democracy and Education, in which Dewey argued for the mutually dependent relationship linking a legitimate education system and a thriving democracy. A century later, it seems, democracy and education have been decoupled, with both undermined by developments such as growing inequality, declining participation and trust...

Concerns abound in media and political commentary regarding the purported political apathy of young people. This chapter shares the narratives of active engagement with politics on the part of a number of young people, as part of their efforts to resist the threats to youth services posed by the discourses and practices of neoliberal austerity. The...

Politicians and policy-makers in education routinely proclaim the centrality of schools and teachers in sustaining and consolidating democracy and democratic society. This article offers an account of teachers engaged in research in their schools and classrooms, with peers and students, so as to highlight the democratic potential of this engagement...

Teacher Education and the Political is a striking book which addresses the nature and purpose of teacher education in a global context characterised by economic and political anxieties around declining productivity and social inclusion. These anxieties are manifested in recent policy developments such as the promotion of professional standards, the...

This paper results from research examining pre-service teacher development in relation to experiences of mentoring during the Professional Experience component of their program. The paper focuses on the interplay between pre-service teachers’ personal aspirations for their own practice and identity and their perceptions of more socialized and forma...

From a commensense point of view, an ideology consists of a convergent set of ideas which promote and pursue a single strategic cause. However, the argument of this paper is that ideology can be nourished by a seemingly divergent, even antagonistic, set of ideas. To support this argument, this paper refers to the post-revolutionary (1979) Iranian s...

This paper stems from research in Australia examining pre-service teacher and mentor teacher experiences on the practicum. The paper focuses on findings from the research, highlighting the tendency among the pre-service teachers to either valorise or demonise their mentor teachers, reflective of what we describe, following Kristeva and Britzman, as...

This study provides a critical exploration of the way teachers’ attachment to notions of professionalism may facilitate a process whereby teachers find themselves obliged to enact centralised and local education policies that they do not believe in but are required to implement. The study argues that professionalism involves an entanglement of (pas...

In an anxious world increasingly perceived in terms of risk management, strategies for mapping, articulating and organizing knowledge provide a bulwark against uncertainty. For teacher education, one consequence has been a drive for fullness in relation to knowledge about what teachers should know and be able to do, usually conceived in instrumenta...

This paper explores the possibilities for critical policy analysis afforded by Lacanian discourse theory, with its emphasis on the unconscious and the agency of the letter, and considers its significance for critical policy analysis in education, in ways that complement and supplement the insights of post-structuralist discourse theory. To explore...

As a response to the 2013 special issue of Discourse on marketisation and equity in education, this paper suggests it is important to understand how school sectors (independent, Catholic and government) continue to play a significant role in how we constitute education, markets and equity in Australia. The first part of this paper provides a geneal...

Ability grouping in schools and classrooms constitutes something of a policy hiatus in the Australian context, in contrast to the conspicuous visibility of equity and quality as explicit policy goals. This article examines what I am calling the dialectics - i.e. moments of negation that allow for creation - and dilemmas inhering in the complex and...

This paper offers a critical analysis of the education policy move towards teacher professional standards. Drawing on Lacan's three registers of the psyche (real, imaginary and symbolic), the paper argues that moves towards codification (and domestication) of teachers' work and identities in standardized (and sani-tized) forms, such as the Australi...

This paper focuses on Stephen Ball's article, The teacher's soul and the terrors of performativity , since it is here that he analyses the issue of how neoliberal education policies shape teacher identities that I also wish to explore. I begin by providing a summary of the 2003 piece, noting how it locates teachers and their work in the midst of po...

Motivation is a concept more frequently found in venues concerned with educational psychology than in ones concerned with educational philosophy. Under the influence of psychology, and its typically dualistic way of making sense of the world, motivation in education has tended to be viewed in dichotomous terms, for example, as intrinsic or extrinsi...

Quality and equity are touchstones of education policy in the twenty-first century in a range of global contexts. On the surface, this seems fitting: after all, who could object to more quality and greater equity in education? Yet what do we mean by quality and equity, and how are they related? This paper draws on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to...

This article reports on how teacher educators from a university, acting as facilitators, supported teachers in conducting a school-based action research project as a practice of professional development in the context of reform in language assessment in Hong Kong. In particular, the article problematises how the facilitators and teachers negotiated...

Despite its ideological saturation, recent neo-liberal education policy has been deeply depoliticising in the sense of reducing properly political concerns to matters of technical efficiency. This depoliticisation is reflected in the hegemony of a managerial discourse and the decontestation of terms like ‘quality’ and ‘effectiveness’, as well as in...

This paper provides a critical analysis of the Australian government’s education revolution policy as promulgated in the media release document, Quality Education: The Case for an Education Revolution in our Schools. It seeks to problematize the government’s claim to marry quality and equity, via an analysis of the discursive strategies of the Aust...

Neoliberal concerns with effectiveness and accountability, in education in general, and teacher education in particular, have led governments to articulate a set of measurable standards, or competencies, that can be used to measure student learning and simultaneously to evaluate teacher effectiveness. Such trends are symptomatic of a technical, rat...

Mark Mason is professor at the Hong Kong Institute of Education, working in the field of comparative and international education and development, from a disciplinary background in philosophy, social theory, and education studies. He is regional editor (Asia and the Pacific) of the International Journal of Educational Development (Elsevier), editor...

A vast array of cultural traditions and languages can be found among China's 55 legally recognized minority nationalities. Mother tongue education has been the norm for several of the large minority groups (namely, Koreans, Kazaks, Mongolians, Tibetans, and Uyghurs) for most of the time since 1949. This article, which is based on empirical data, re...

The research presented in this paper was collected over a one-year period and is drawn from a wider two-year study of student teachers at the Higher Colleges of Technology in the United Arab Emirates, in a new Bachelor of Education degree, which prepares young Emirati women for English language teaching positions in local government schools. The st...

Identity is a contemporary buzzword in education, referencing the individual and the social, the personal and the political, self and other. Following Maggie MacLure, we can think of identity in terms of teachers ‘arguing for themselves’, or giving an account of themselves. Yet in the wake of poststructuralism's radical de-centering of the subject...

Set in the rapidly changing world of the contemporary United Arab Emirates and bringing together detailed linguistic analysis with cutting edge social theory, this book explores the development of the first cohort of students to complete a new Bachelor of Education in English language teaching, theorizing the students’ learning to teach in terms of...

The UAE, which celebrated independence in 1971, is a rapidly changing environment where aspects of traditional Bedouin culture co‐exist with the immense changes being wrought by the forces of globalization and the wealth brought about by the development of the oil industry. Emirati nationals are a minority within the UAE, comprising approximately 2...

This article examines the uptake of reflective practice, as one of a number of educational discourses, by student teachers in a new Bachelor of Education degree in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In a recent article, Pat Richardson [2004. International Journal of Educational Development 24(4), 429–436], argued that reflective practice is incongruen...