Patrick Alexander and Jacques-Olivier Perche
Robert Smithson, Rocks and Mirror Square II (1971)
Is professional development actually developing teachers, or is it quietly grinding teachers down?
In the contemporary educational landscape, professional development presents itself as both a moral obligation and a professional necessity. Teachers are told that effectiveness must be constantly demonstrated, that improvement is never complete, and that the next programme, framework, or technological intervention will finally close the gap between who they are and who they ought to be. Education consultants and professional learning providers increasingly operate on the assumption that their products derive value from their promise of effectiveness, whether in behaviour management, curriculum design, or wellbeing. This logic has intensified alongside the growth of educational technologies and generative artificial intelligence, which promise efficiency while further mechanising professional learning.
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What this machinery produces is not flourishing, but what Stephen Ball famously describes as auditable performance. Educational practice is reorganised so that visibility, comparison, and measurement stand in for professional judgment. Teaching becomes legible only insofar as it can be rendered measurable. Forms of knowledge that resist quantification are not simply neglected but actively erased. The violence enacted here is not overt. It operates through more insidious means, most notably through the perpetual positioning of teachers as deficient subjects who require constant remediation through externally validated programmes that treat practitioner knowledge as epistemically suspect. As Karl Marx observed in his analysis of capitalist labour, when all activity is subordinated to productivity, even time devoted to learning is converted into negotium, time that must justify itself through output rather than understanding, rendering intellectual activity valuable only insofar as it can be made productive.
Teachers are rarely told explicitly that their experience does not matter. Instead, they are told that their experience only counts once translated into sanctioned forms, aligned with approved frameworks, and validated by external metrics. Jacques Rancière named this process abrutissement, the enforced stultification that arises when some are positioned as knowers and others as perpetual learners, dependent on expertise they can never fully possess. Traditional schooling enacted this logic upon students. Contemporary professional development increasingly enacts it upon teachers.
This architecture of control fragments professional identity into competencies, micro-credentials, and standards that can be assessed and found wanting. Teachers are positioned within teleological narratives of perpetual improvement, always oriented toward a future competence that legitimates present inadequacy. Michel Foucault’s account of discipline and governmentality is instructive here. Professional development operates through examination, normalisation, and surveillance, producing what Foucault described as docile bodies. Teachers learn not only how to comply, but how to govern themselves, censoring thoughts and doubts that might mark them as resistant, unprofessional, or insufficiently committed.
The supreme irony of this arrangement is that professional development frequently claims to cultivate critical professionals. Workshops encourage teachers to “speak truth to power” while simultaneously reinforcing the very power structures that render such speech professionally risky. This is not resistance. It is the simulation of resistance, a performance that stabilises existing arrangements while making genuine critique harder to articulate.
What disappears in this process is the practical knowledge teachers develop through sustained engagement with complex classroom realities. As Donald McIntyre argued, teaching involves ongoing practical theorising, the exercise of judgment in situations that cannot be resolved through the application of general rules. Official professional development privileges techne over phronesis, technique over practical wisdom. Teaching is reduced to a set of transferable strategies detached from context, relation, and embodiment. Knowledge that cannot be standardised is dismissed as subjective or unscientific, even though it is precisely this knowledge that sustains ethical and responsive practice.
The affective consequences of this erasure are profound. Ball accurately describes the terrors of performativity that proliferate under such regimes. Constant surveillance, evaluation, and comparison reconstruct professional identity around anxiety and inadequacy. Teachers are positioned as perpetually behind, always in need of remediation. Rather than alleviating this condition, professional development often intensifies it, producing exhaustion rather than growth. As we have written about elsewhere, engagement with technology amplifies this dynamic, alienating teachers from their own judgment under the guise of efficiency and effectiveness.
Despite this saturation, many teachers recognise that something is wrong. They experience a growing gap between professional development rhetoric and classroom reality. They feel professional learning as extraction rather than nourishment. Yet within official discourse, there is little vocabulary to articulate this experience without risk. To question professional development is to risk being labelled resistant. To trust one’s own judgment is to appear unprofessional. Power operates here less through direct suppression than through self-policing. Teachers learn, through what is framed as decision capital, which thoughts can be safely expressed and which must remain unspoken.
Accountability itself becomes difficult to comprehend, even as it saturates professional life. Acting as what Tim Morton’s describes as a hyperobject, accountability is massively distributed across time and space. Teachers encounter it through local manifestations such as data walls, learning walks, and performance metrics, yet cannot grasp its totality. The governmental, economic, and ideological assemblages that produce these encounters remain largely invisible. Accountability becomes atmospheric. The atmosphere thickens; accountability becomes the air teachers breathe rather than a discrete policy that might be contested or refused.
In this climate, teacher knowledge does not disappear. It goes underground.
Teachers understand that metrics often distort learning more than they capture it. They know that standardisation undermines the relational and responsive dimensions of pedagogy. They recognise the ethical compromises required to reconcile policy demands with students’ needs. But this knowledge circulates through unofficial channels, in carpark conversations, in coded language, in lesson plans that appear compliant while pursuing different aims. Deborah Britzman describes these as the repressed dimensions of teacher knowledge, understandings that must remain unspeakable for institutional coherence to be maintained.
This is where dark professional development already exists.
Dark professional development names the forms of professional learning that must remain unofficial in order to survive. It is the knowledge teachers develop, share, and refine in the shadows of performativity regimes, not because it lacks rigour, but because its rigour cannot survive audit. It unfolds in the gap between official discourse and lived experience. As Jacques Derrida might describe it, this gap is structured by différance, a space of deferral and difference in which teachers must perform engagement with sanctioned professional learning while knowing that it cannot address the realities they face.
To take dark professional development seriously is not to romanticise resistance. It is to acknowledge a structural condition. When
professional learning is subordinated to measurement, the most vital forms of knowing must operate beyond institutional visibility. The question is not whether dark professional development exists. It already does. The question is what it costs teachers to sustain it, and what becomes possible when it is recognised not as deviance, but as a condition of intellectual survival.
In Part II, we turn to what dark professional development makes possible: the restoration of noetic syntonia, the creation of intellectual clearings in time and space beyond surveillance, and the uncertain courage required to dwell in professional learning that offers no guarantees.
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