Teacher competence discourses: exposing, controlling, and punishing the ‘bad’ teacher

Although improving teacher competence might sound like a commonsense approach to teacher practice, we argue that the current global movements that are mobilizing teacher competence rhetoric are problematic in how it constructs the ‘good’ teacher. We conducted a critical discourse analysis of recently approved local legislation that seeks to monitor, manage, and regulate ‘bad’ teachers. Guided by poststructural theory, our analysis illustrates the ways in which teacher competence enlists discourses of instrumentalization, individualization, and deprofessionalization. The findings illustrate the effects that competence discourse has on understandings of the identities of teachers, the work of teaching, and the profession itself, arguing that competence discourses construct ‘good’ teaching as a technical practice not as an ethical and relational endeavour. Although derived from a local legislative example, the analysis is instructive for other contexts, calling attention to – and disrupting – the neoliberal reform efforts at work in/through policy texts and the effects these have on teachers and teaching.