Across many education systems, teacher education has become a key site of contemporary governance. Internationally, schooling systems are increasingly organised through performance metrics, standards frameworks, and audit cultures that seek to render educational practice visible, comparable, and accountable (Ball, 2003; Lingard, 2011). Teacher education sits centrally within these shifts. In Australia, accreditation requirements, Professional Standards for Teachers, and performance-based assessments are coordinated through national regulatory organisations such as the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL, 2011). These policy infrastructures define what counts as quality teaching, legitimate evidence, and professional readiness. They also align teacher preparation with broader regimes of governance-by-numbers, where professional trust is increasingly mediated through indicators and compliance structures (Lingard & Lewis, 2017; Mockler, 2013). Across many education systems, teacher education is therefore increasingly governed by performance-based accountability, professional standards, and accreditation regimes, shaping how teachers come to experience, narrate, and perform professionalism across their preparation and early careers.

In Australia, final-year Teacher Performance Assessments have become high-stakes gatekeeping instruments. They define what counts as readiness to teach. They also shape how professional competence is narrated, displayed, and judged. These mechanisms are designed to assure quality and public trust. Yet they do more than measure practice. They privilege forms of evidence, authorise specific professional identities, and offer to structure what can legitimately be said, done, and valued in teaching (Ball, 2003; Lingard, 2011; Mockler, 2013). What they make visible matters, as well as what they push to the margins. Following Biesta’s (2015) critique of the evidentiary turn, this research work begins from the concern that contemporary accountability regimes risk narrowing professional judgement to system-recognised performance. Professional judgement, understood here as the capacity to discern what a situation calls for and to act responsibly amid uncertainty, depends on practical wisdom, ethical deliberation, and responsiveness to context (Kemmis et al., 2014). These dimensions of practice do not sit easily alongside assessment systems that prioritise standardised indicators and auditable artefacts.

At the same time, teachers enter classrooms shaped by relational demands, social complexity, and unpredictable learning environments. Research on teacher identity and agency reminds us that good teaching is inseparable from personal commitment, vulnerability, and relational work (Kelchtermans, 2009; Palmer, 2017; Mockler, 2011). Yet policy and accreditation discourses continue to privilege what can be standardised and measured. A misalignment emerges between what research suggests teachers need to flourish professionally and what institutional systems recognise as evidence of effectiveness.

This research adopts a critical-normative orientation and does not claim neutral description of teacher education systems. Instead, it examines how accountability arrangements shape professional becoming and asks how alternative conditions might better sustain professional judgement, ethical agency, and democratic responsibility in teacher education.

Analytically, the research draws primarily on the Theory of Practice Architectures (Kemmis et al., 2014), which conceptualises how cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements enable and constrain practices in particular sites. This is complemented by an ecological understanding of agency (Priestley et al., 2015), framed as an achievement emerging through interaction with enabling and constraining conditions rather than as an individual attribute. Together, these frameworks support analysis of how institutional arrangements shape what preservice and early-career teachers can say, do, and aspire to be across time. This work introduces the concept of ‘Architectures of Becoming’ as a modest extension of Practice Architectures theory. Practice Architectures focuses on how arrangements structure practice in particular settings. Architectures of Becoming shifts the lens. It foregrounds how repeated encounters with these arrangements shape the temporal formation of professional subjectivities, how identities, sense of responsibilities, and capacities for judgement stabilise, fracture, or are re-worked overtime. Using a qualitative longitudinal design, the research follows seven preservice teachers from completion of their final practicum and Teacher Performance Assessment into their first year of teaching (Neale, 2018). Semi-structured interviews and analysis of assessment artefacts trace how participants narrate competence, judgement, and responsibility within authorised discourses of quality and evidence, and how these narratives are renegotiated as participants encounter new institutional expectations in schools. Initial coding follows reflexive thematic analysis to identify recurring patterns across interviews before interpretive analysis through practice architectures (Braun & Clarke, 2021). By positioning Australia as a case of intensified accountability governance, the research offers empirically grounded and conceptually informed insights into how accountability instruments operate as knowledge-producing infrastructures in teacher education. Rather than proposing universal solutions, this work develops critical propositions for re-thinking existing practice architectures in ways that may better sustain professional judgement and ethical agency under contemporary conditions of governance-by-numbers. In doing so, the study responds to current calls to chart ways forward for teacher education that rebuild trust, sustain teachers’ professional voice, and resist reductive logics of measurement in education.

This research contributes empirically, conceptually, and normatively to debates on teacher education under contemporary accountability regimes. Empirically, it offers longitudinal accounts of how preservice and early-career teachers narrate competence, professional judgement, and responsibility as they move through performance assessment and early professional practice. The analysis illuminates how the sayings, doings, and relatings of quality and evidence are learned, how identities of compliance or resistance take shape, and where relational and ethical commitments rub up against performative demands. This research follows how these trajectories emerge, shift, and sometimes fracture over time. Conceptually, the study advances the notion of Architectures of Becoming as a modest extension of Practice Architectures theory. Existing work has shown how arrangements structure practices in particular sites. This research shifts the focus to how repeated encounters with these arrangements shape the temporal formation of professional subjectivities. It offers a way of seeing accountability instruments not only as tools of evaluation, but as infrastructures that quietly produce particular forms of professional identity, judgement, and agency. This work develops conceptual implications for understanding how accountability-driven teacher education systems authorise certain forms of evidence and professional life while marginalising others. These implications speak to Australian and international contexts grappling with intensified governance and policy control in education (Lingard, 2011). Practically, the study offers critical re-configurative propositions for re-thinking teacher education and assessment. These are not neutral improvement strategies. They are grounded provocations for asking different questions about what teacher education should cultivate, what counts as legitimate evidence of practice, and how accountability might be arranged in ways that sustain rather than suppress professional judgement. In this sense, the research aims not only to diagnose contemporary conditions, but to chart directions forward for teacher education systems seeking to balance public accountability with democratic responsibility

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