Quality teaching and teacher learning are centre stage on the current Australian schooling agenda. In the mix is a preoccupation with issues of professional standards and accountability, although there is some recognition of new times ushered in by rapidly changing economic, social and cultural conditions. In brief, the problems with teaching are constructed with and distinguishable by four sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory accounts: (1) teaching's aging and diminishing workforce; (2) the inadequacies of teachers' professional development programs; (3) disappointment with student outcomes, particularly those within government systems; and (4) the shortsightedness and irrelevance of much school curricula. Conversations in policy documents that champion these matters are informed by various discourses of human, social and cultural capital. However, proposals to address these issues, particularly those that might inform teacher action, require that attention also be paid to the twin realities of power/knowledge positions and stances that enable practitioners to address future challenges. In short, approaches that link conceptual and contextual fields are required to assist teachers to ask questions of themselves and others in order to build capacities to deal with new futures. Positioned in this way, teachers as learners are able to build capacities to shape new narratives that promote the development of new citizens and new social fields. In this paper some recent developments and proposals for quality teaching in Australia are discussed and an interruptive reading of key discourses informing conversations in new times is undertaken. The intention is to create new spaces for teacher learning and to explicate stances for innovation and equity by developing a language that makes it possible for people to work together across conceptual and contextual knowledge boundaries