ABSTRACT
What we wish to explore in this space is the impact of globalisation on professional and disciplinary auto/biographies, as those working in education and training as teachers, etc. are themselves as much subject to the processes outlined earlier as others, including those they teach. And there is little doubting the senses of dislocation experienced by many in education and training as different and increased demands have been placed upon them (and us) and their pedagogic practices (see, for instance, Edwards and Usher 1996; Nixon 1996; Ainley and Bailey 1997; Nixon et al. 1997; Hodkinson 1998; Vidovich and Currie 1998). Indeed, the concern for the impact of changing practices upon educators sometimes seems to be greater than the concern for learning and learners, with the education ‘profession’ seeing itself as the guardians of certain innate educational values. For
instance, in their study of academics in Australia, Vidovich and Currie (1998:206) found ‘many respondents contrasted an ideal of a community of scholars who were capable of self-regulation in the interests of students and the wider community with the reality of the government intervening to construct its own version of accountability’. Most often articulated as resulting in teacher stress, work intensification, deskilling and deprofessionalisation, many such analyses, often constructed in and through some notion of ‘crisis’, already betray their cultural specificity and subsumption within modernist grand narratives. Here, there are often nostalgic resonances of a time in which educators were left to their own devices as the guardians of knowledge and developers of democratic citizens.
