ABSTRACT
In our advice to postgraduate student teachers (Addison and Burgess 2000) we recommended that entrants to the profession needed to see themselves as agents of change, teachers who would question the orthodoxies that privilege the subject as uniquely creative, a distinct and autonomous realm divorced from other forms of social and cultural production. What student teachers find when they get into schools is a subject squeezed of resources: human, material, spatial and temporal. They meet resistance both from pupils, who prize the subject as an escape from the logocentric curriculum, and teachers, who use the prevailing orthodoxies to maintain high grades in external examinations. This is an inevitable strategy in the present audit climate where it is necessary to demonstrate each subject’s contribution to the school’s position in national league tables. Why question what is working?
