Stepping outside: collaborative inquiry-based teacher professional learning in a performative policy environment

This paper provides a critique of the performative assumptions of the teacher professional learning policy direction being adopted in Australia. Through international policy borrowing, the policy direction in Australia is similar to many other countries in that it encourages increasingly standardised teaching practice to afford a more quantitative approach to evaluation. The intent through this paper is to encourage greater imagination with regards to what counts as useful in teacher professional learning. This is achieved initially through highlighting the evidence of teacher learning within the Australian Sustainable Schools Initiative (AuSSI), a programme that makes use of collaborative professional inquiry around authentic problems. The social theory concepts of cross-field effects and linked ecologies are then deployed in an analysis of the emerging national policy framework for teacher professional learning in Australia, arguing that this policy framework can suppress the types of learning occurring in approaches such as the AuSSI.