[Additional authors: Ben Smit (smit@iclon.leidenuniv.nl, Leiden University) & Lena Tyren, lena.tyren@hb.se, The University of Borås)] This presentation sets the scene for the symposium by exploring the broader policy and political context of teachers’ initial and continuing learning within and across national and international contexts. In this paper, we reflect on how broader policies and associated policy artefacts within specific national contexts constitute teachers’ learning. We argue that, collectively, these artefacts constitute key vehicles for flagging ‘what matters’ at the discursive level. The paper also endeavours to set out, in broad terms, whether and how the broader neoliberal policy regime which is influencing educational practices in many parts of the world (Connell, 2013), including Anglo-American and European contexts, plays out in the form of current teacher learning policies. We also seek to problematize more performative policy discourses by reflecting on how they contrast with more context-responsive, site (Schatzki, 2002), and practice-based (Nicolini, 2013) conceptions of professional learning. Specifically, and following the work of Kemmis, Wilkinson, Edwards-Groves, Hardy, Grootenboer & Bristol (2014), we outline what we describe as a praxis-oriented approach to the policy and politics of teacher learning, and how such an approach contrasts with the forms of ‘transnational salience’ of ‘fast policy’ approaches (Peck & Theodore, 2015) that characterize more decontextualized approaches to policy making and ‘taking’ (enactment). We outline what we understand by praxis, and how a more praxis-oriented approach can serve as a vehicle to contest more performative policy conditions having such a pervasive and problematic impact upon schooling practices within and across different national and sub-national contexts. To help ground our research, we draw suggestively upon specific instances of teachers’ learning in policies and associated politics informing different initial and continuing teacher professional programs in varying European contexts, and Australia. Specifically, we draw upon insights from teacher professional learning policies in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Netherlands and Australia to help understand how teachers’ learning is constituted for both increased control of teachers’ learning, and opportunities to engage more productively with local practices and processes – context – and in more value-based educational ways (Biesta, 2010). Ultimately, we seek to argue that it is through better understanding the contradictions and potentialities within such policies that we are able to contest not only more performative practices at the local level, but policy discourses that do not adequately establish the conditions for more genuinely education-oriented approaches to practice.

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