AUSTRALIAN PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS FOR TEACHERS
Standard 7: Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community
Through an enhanced understanding of theory and reflexivity and their relationship to teaching as a profession, this chapter enables readers to more meaningfully engage with school professionals and communities through a critically aware and socially cognisant lens.
[M]y students’ desire to learn about issues related to social justice seems to have been limited to those issues that did not confront them with their own complicity with oppression … Many of my students acknowledged and condemned the ways schools perpetuate various forms of oppression, but asserted that, as teachers, their jobs will be to teach academics, not disrupt oppression. By separating the school's function from the individual teacher's role, they were able to maintain their belief that they do not – and, as future teachers, will not – contribute to these problems.
(Kumashiro, 2002, pp. 1–2, on pre-service teachers)Introduction
In today's world, teachers’ work is more complex than ever before. This is due to: changes within the last 50 years in global economic forces and highly competitive production modes; the merging of finance, trade and communication knowledges; rapidly advancing technologies; political instability; and environmental concerns. There has been an intensification of migration and labour markets, bringing into contact diverse languages, cultures and identities in ways never before experienced (Romain, 2011). Those living in the Antipodes have not been untouched by changing global forces. These both result in and coincide with a local range of social, cultural and political complexities. These include, but are not limited to: economic disparities in and between postcodes; continued social disadvantage of Indigenous Australians; intolerance towards religious and other forms of diversity; changing mores in relation to gender and sexuality–diverse people; the rise of single-parent and same-sex-headed families as well as changing family constellations; and a political imperative that reduces access to social services, which have been increasingly privatised.
The increase in privatisation is one element of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, an economic theory that gained popularity in the late 1970s, has considerable influence on schooling. Claiming to offer individuals greater choice and freedoms, neoliberal educational policies have significantly impacted on the functioning and intent of education, requiring schools to produce particular kinds of work-ready subjects.