Teacher professional learning and development: linear discourses and complexities of teacher learning

ABSTRACT Understanding teacher learning, and relations between that learning and practice, has become a research priority in the quest for quality. Managerial policy discourses that commodify teachers as academic capital encourage institutions to adopt linear models of professional learning and development (PLD) as auditable value-adding, yet this perspective is at odds with conceptualisations of teacher learning as complex, unpredictable, and individually unique. Whilst teacher PLD defies reductionist theorisations guiding its provision and evaluation, government and institutional policies continue to be dominated by rather simplistic linear and outcomes-focussed conceptualisations. Drawing on interview data, this paper explores practitioners’ own understandings of lived experiences of learning through formal PLD in settings seemingly dominated by linear discourses of relations between learning and practice. We discuss how teachers understand and (re)negotiate their formal PLD experiences in and through practice amidst relational complexities to offer suggestions for rethinking how teachers and institutions approach, participate in, and learn from formal teacher PLD experiences, and for disrupting the linear discourses that dominate and complicate the complexity and nature of teacher learning and practice.