English in Australia Volume 48 Number 1 • 2013 9 9 Teaching Future Teachers Teaching English Teachers for the Future: Speaking Back to TPACK Graham Parr, Monash University Natalie Bellis, Monash University and St Paul’s Anglican Grammar School, Warragul Scott Bulfin, Monash University Abstract: This essay presents a critical, refexive account of a twelve-month collaboration, when a practising secondary English teacher was seconded to work with a team of English teacher educators in a faculty of education in Melbourne. The collaboration was made possible by funding from DEEWR as part of the Teaching Teachers for the Future project (TTF). TTF aimed to produce ‘systematic change in the Information and Communication Technology in Education (ICTE) profciency of graduate teachers across Australia’ with a particular focus on ‘enabling pre-service teachers to achieve and demonstrate … competence in the effective and innovative use of ICT’ in order to ‘improve student learning’ (ALTC & ACDE, 2011, p. 4). Adopting collaborative, inquiry-based approaches to teaching and learning and research within the TTF project, the authors explored what it might mean to think about and ‘do’ English teaching and new technologies more critically than the project guidelines recommended. In this essay we report on the practices and relationships negotiated in the TTF project as it was enacted in our particular context. We consider them critically within a broader investigation of standards discourses and practices that are currently impacting on the professional practices of English educators in schools and in universities. Systematisation comes upon the scene during an age which feels itself in command with a ready- made and handed down body of authoritative thought. A creative age must frst have passed; then and only then does the business of formalistic systematising begin – an undertaking typical of heirs and epigones who feel themselves in possession of someone else’s now voiceless word. (Voloshinov, 1986, p. 78) Introduction A visit to the newly renovated website for the National Professional Standards for Teachers (NPST) in Australia (AITSL, 2012) seems intended to show the visitor that ‘standards’ are inti- mately connected to all of the liveliest, most engaging and creative dimensions of educational activity in Australian schools. Prominent among the range of photos, graphics and text on the NPST home page is an animated video (accompanied by a funky contemporary musical track), claiming that the NPST offers a ‘new approach to teaching standards’, one which is ‘consistent with the different world in which we live’. Click on another animated video nearby, and you read uncontroversial statements such as, the ‘best educators are the best learners’, and ‘the best school systems are those that recruit and nurture the best learners’. This is followed by the globally familiar, but much more controversial, claim that standards are ‘key’ to all this. There are links to YouTube and Facebook, and a Twitter feed, which seem to promise dialogic spaces, but which tend to reiterate similarly monologic statements. Across the page, videos detail ‘illustrations of practice’, and the sceptical visitor is only ever one click away from evidence in the form of the ‘seventeen organisations that are piloting the standards’. In the section titled ‘Supporting teachers’, the visitor can, at a click, ‘fnd out more about how AITSL is supporting teachers through its ‘Leading Curriculum Change’ program’ and the standards-based ‘Charter