Empowering educators: Promoting enabling teaching and learning in research and practice

An abiding ambivalence attends the work and identities of contemporary educators. On the one hand, few informed and well-disposed commentators would doubt the importance of teaching and its transformative potential, encapsulated in representations of the teaching profession both in films (Ellsmore, 2005) and in novels (Carr, 1984). On the other hand, teachers are seen as increasingly pressured and under threat, including through (albeit often reluctant) complicity with high-stakes standardised testing (Au, 2011), responding to individual accountability and school league tables (Perryman, Ball, Maguire, & Braun, 2011), engaging with school leaders who have varying degrees of competency (Tschannen-Moran, 2014) and sometimes experiencing feelings of not belonging at school and of emotional exhaustion (Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2011).