ABSTRACT
Quality assurance and teacher standards have become increasingly important in education, including TESOL teacher education, in the past decade. Quality assurance as teacher standards, however, has not been immune to criticism, including charges of inflexibility and the erosion of teacher autonomy. At the same time, there has been a rapid growth in interest by researchers and practitioners in teacher identity construction (TIC). This chapter considers the implications of this growing interest in TIC for understanding and operationalizing quality assurance and teacher standards in TESOL. It is argued that a TIC perspective on quality assurance might contribute to addressing some of the concerns about standards-based views. Specifically, a TIC perspective means that quality assurance must adopt a holistic, multi-layered perspective on quality TESOL teaching and teachers and that standards for teachers must be sufficiently flexible and situated to reflect the emergent and variable understandings and operationalization of quality teaching that will occur across diverse teachers, teaching contexts, and social settings.
