Good teaching in an age of learning: facing the neoliberal and performative pressures in Education through artistry and study

This paper results from research on policies for teachers’ education and the teachers’ profession carried out in Brazil from August 2021 to March 2024 and in Scotland between September 2022 and March 2023. By analysing the main national policy for teacher education and teaching in these countries, we tried to understand which are the expectations for Brazilian and Scottish basic education teachers, mainly in what it refers to the purposes of their teaching practices. The title raises a slight provocation based on the book ‘Good Education in an Age of Measurement’ (Biesta, 2010). We draw on its central idea to criticise these policies. The Brazilian policy analysed was the BNC-Formação (Base Nacional Comum para a formação inicial de professores da educação básica/Common National Base for initial teacher’s formation in basic education), launched through the resolution CNE/CP 02/2019 by the National Education Council of the Ministry of Education of Brazil (MEC) in December 2019 and last updated in January 2024, through the Resolution CNE/CP 01/2024. The Scottish policy was the Standard for Full Registration (SFR), originally established in 2000 and last updated by the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTSC) in August 2021. We decided to analyse the BNC-Formação because basic education in Brazil has been deeply reformulated since at least 2017, especially regarding the curriculum, to teachers' education programmes and the teachers’ profession. As regards the SFR, our justification lies on the fact that Scotland was a pioneer in legally regulating the teachers’ profession, considering that in 2012 the GTCS became the world’s first independent professional and regulatory body for teaching (Matheson, 2015). We looked at these policies as texts, what means to keep in mind that policies are representations codified in complex ways, through struggles, compromises and authoritative public interpretation and reinterpretation, as well as decodified in complex manners too, for the meanings and interpretation people might have on a policy text are often influenced by their contexts, abilities, experiences etc. (Ball, 1993, p. 11). Furthermore, policies are usually developed by multiple authors through plural processes of production, which means that their texts might be incomplete or fuzzy (Ball, 1993, p. 11). Therefore, we tried to identify the missing points of these documents and what could be rewritten or combined to their texts, to comprehend what kind of teachers they expect to form and which purposes teaching is supposed to reach in these countries. There are two main findings of our analysis worth highlighting here. First, both policies seem to be inserted in a context centred on neoliberal principles and on the culture of performativity that have been shaping educational policies worldwide since at least the early 1990s (Ball, 2003; Rizvi & Lingard, 2010; Mayo, 2015; Apple, 2019), which one of the most impacting consequence is a growing tendency to organise educational practices seeking to raise teachers’ and students’ performativity by producing predictable and measurable learning outcomes (Ball, 2003; Biesta, 2010). Second, these policies barely mention teaching and studying as educational activities teachers should practice, prioritising the learning aspect of education and requiring teachers to ensure that pupils achieve quantitative learning results, which means teaching has been going through a learnification process (Biesta, 2010; 2022) in these countries. To deal with this, we argue that policies for teacher education and teaching should aim for developing teaching not as a mere technical skill, but mainly as an artistry (Stenhouse, 1988; Biesta, 2023) steered to fostering the dimensions of qualification, socialisation and subjectification in teachers and students, instead of trying to determine their value by their capacity of producing measurable learning results. That would require teachers to have the material and structural conditions to be studious and to make their pupils become students (Larrosa, 2019), as well as to develop a capacity to think critically to make good educational decisions in their daily pedagogical practices. Moreover, it would be worth replacing the currently dominant educational paradigm, centred on learning and learners, with a new one that considers teaching and studying as indispensable activities for teachers’ and students’ formation, in addition to aiming for essentially world-centred educational purposes (Biesta, 2022). Hence, the educational practices carried out in schools could better equip teachers and students to live in and with the world in an grown-up and ethically responsible way (Freire, 2019; Biesta, 2022), enabling them to face the neoliberal and performative pressures in education, as well as to better cope with every sort of violence and inequalities, such as socio-political, cultural, racial, gender, environmental and so forth. References Apple, M. W. (2019). Ideology and curriculum (4th ed.). Routledge. Ball, S. (1993). What is policy? Texts, trajectories and toolboxes. The Australian Journal of Education Studies, 13(2), 10–17. Ball, S. J. (2003). The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), 215–228. Biesta, G. (2010). Good education in an age of measurement: Ethics, politics, democracy. Paradigm Publishers. Biesta, G. (2022). World-centred education: A view for the present. Routledge. Biesta, G. (2023). Outline of a theory of teaching: What teaching is, what it is for, how it works, and why it requires artistry. In A. K. Praetorius & C. Y. Charalambous (Eds.), Theorizing teaching: Current status and open issues. Springer. Brasil. (2019). Resolução CNE/CP nº 02, de 20 de dezembro de 2019. Ministério da Educação. Available: http://portal.mec.gov.br/component/content/article?id=12991. Freire, P. (2019). Pedagogia da autonomia: Saberes necessários à prática educativa. Paz e Terra. General Teaching Council for Scotland. (2021). The standard for full registration: Mandatory requirements for registration with the General Teaching Council for Scotland. GTCS. Larrosa, J. (2019). Esperando não se sabe o quê: Sobre o ofício de professor. Autêntica. Matheson, I. (2015). The General Teaching Council for Scotland: The first fifty years. GTCS. Mayo, P. (2015). Hegemony and education under neoliberalism: Insights from Gramsci. Routledge. Rizvi, F., & Lingard, B. (2010). Globalizing education policy. 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