Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to re-center playfulness as a humanizing approach in teacher education. As teachers navigate the current moment of heightened control, surveillance, and systemic inequity, these proposed moves in teacher education can be transgressive. Rather than play as relegated to childhood or infancy, what does it look…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to theorize teacher agency as enacted through a P/policymaking lens in three elementary classrooms. Big-P Policies are formal, top-down school reform policies legislated, created, implemented and regulated by national, state and local governments. Yet, Big-P policies are not the only policies enacted in…

Purpose: This paper aims to report on the decisions two teachers made about how to engage with a five-year school-university collaboration that used professional development (PD) to foster changes in language instruction for teachers of multilingual learners. Design/methodology/approach: A longitudinal case study was used to examine the…

Purpose: By recognizing high-stakes testing as a key constraint to teacher agency, this paper aims to provide a close analysis of one teacher's testing narrative to illustrate how emerging positioning is relative to high-stakes testing shapes perception of pedagogical agency. Design/methodology/approach: Data were generated through a series of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to deflate some of the pressure-orienting teachers toward following a curricular script. Design/methodology/approach: The authors connect effective classroom teaching and learning practices to a dialogic instructional stance that values local resources and student perspectives and contributions. The authors…

The purpose of this article is to describe the stances put forward by a selection of professional development resources interpreting the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts (ELA) teachers, and to analyse where these resources stand in relation to research in ELA. Specifically, we analyse resources written by English educators…

Along with a range of other neoliberal managerial incursions into education, the bureaucratisation of teachers' work has included the development of Professional Standards that regulate the profession and purport to improve teacher quality. This paper begins by contrasting two alternative approaches to standards in Australia, the new, centrally…