Power, prestige and pedagogic identity : A tale of two programs recontextualizing teacher standards

Worldwide there has been a range of initiatives in the area of standards for teachers as part of a discourse of professionalism. In Australia there are a plethora of standards: state and territory frameworks, generic and subject-specific, systemic and cross-systemic, for pre-service, beginning and experienced teachers. Little has been written as to how teacher education programs are responding to the standards agenda. This paper positions standards as integral to the recontextualizing field (Bernstein, 2000) for teacher educators and their programs. Using Bernsteinian concepts of fields, identities and framing, we compare the responses of two physical education teacher education programs to their state's standards imperatives. The authors conclude that the academic orientation of the university, together with the framing of the standards, affect the degree of programmatic change it will undertake in response to the changes in teacher certification standards.C