ABSTRACT
Teachers worldwide are currently experiencing ‘difficult times’ as their work is assailed, prevailed upon, reformed and restructured almost beyond recognition by forces bent upon devolution, marketization, de-professionalization, and intensification. Increasingly impoverished enclosures are being constructed around teachers and their work in the form of measures designed to calibrate teaching more, thus supposedly leading to improved productivity and accountability (Smyth, 1995; Smyth, Shacklock and Hattam, 1997). The effects of these new technologies of power, which take the form of competencies, appraisal and effectiveness, is to subjugate teachers’ indigenous forms of knowledge through a constant process of the politics of derision (see Smyth and Shacklock, 1998). There are, however, instances of discourses of resistance as teachers find ways of keeping alive dialogue about what works in classrooms and schools as they craft, analyse and test local theories of pedagogy and school organization.
