Teachers' professional development in special needs settings: creating 'kid-cool' schools in challenging times

This paper explores the nature of teachers' professional development (PD) practices in special needs/special education settings in Australia under current neoliberal and managerial conditions. The research is based on individual interviews with teachers from a juvenile justice centre and a dedicated special needs school in a regional city in the state of New South Wales. Bourdieu's conception of social practice as contested is applied to make sense of teachers' understanding of the conflicted nature of PD practices in these schooling settings. The findings reveal teacher PD in these special needs settings is influenced by the increased commodification of education, broader accountability pressures which seek to individualise teachers' PD experiences, and increased attention to a narrower range of educational outcomes, particularly students' test scores. However, at the same time, these settings also enable more localised, collaborative inquiry focused upon specific students' needs, and PD relevant to a multi-faceted conception of students' learning. In this way, teacher PD contributes to a focus upon student learning in all its complexity, even as it is simultaneously confined by neoliberal and managerial pressures.