ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that contemporary school education policy assumes a false classroom context, this being a teacher faced with a single student. Group relations are then often overlooked. It outlines in more detail important socioeconomic/cultural contingencies that affect learning in classrooms and introduce “caring” as an absent relational characterization of the good and “effective” teacher in contemporary school education policy. Identity and agency of teachers interconnect and both are shaped by dominant ‘macro level discourses and historical forces’. A critical understanding of teacher identity and agency points to the contemporary practice of modern schooling. The chapter provides a basis for recognizing some of the adaptations that teachers will need to make if the complexity and challenge of school education in the current period is to be more fully understood and acknowledged. It argues that classroom teaching is a complex activity.
