The courage to question: critical professionalism in a performative age

In a performative age often defined by accountability measures, data targets, and policy compliance, the courage to question is vital to sustaining professional integrity. This mini keynote offers a critical reflection on how teacher educators can use questioning to uphold ethical purpose and professional judgment within systems that often prioritise performance over principle (Ball, 2003; Biesta, 2015).

Drawing on experience as a classroom teacher, college leader, and teacher educator, I explore how values such as care, equity, and autonomy are frequently challenged by the dominant discourse of outcomes and efficiency. While policy rhetoric claims to raise standards, it can paradoxically narrow judgment, silence moral purpose, and erode professional trust.

It also raises a troubling question: to what extent are teachers and leaders complicit in their own professional erosion? By complying with initiatives that contradict the fundamental purpose of education, have we, perhaps unintentionally, contributed to the very forces that undermine our practice? Is this compliance driven by fear, long-term conditioning within an accountability culture, or a genuine belief that such measures serve teaching and learning? Perhaps, too, there is resignation, a quiet acceptance that resistance is futile and that the system is too entrenched to challenge.

Yet within these constraints, teacher educators continue to show acts of quiet courage, questioning the taken-for-granted, modelling integrity, and creating spaces for authentic dialogue and reflection (Day & Sachs, 2004). Through a critical lens, this keynote considers how we might nurture beginning teachers to interrogate policy rather than simply implement it, and how inquiry, ethical reasoning, and agency can be fostered in environments that reward compliance. These questions lie at the heart of “critical professionalism”, a stance that values reflective judgment, social responsibility, and the moral courage to act (Cochran-Smith, 2020; Giroux, 2011).

Moments of questioning within everyday practice reveal how reflection itself can be transformative. Courage in education is often expressed quietly through dialogue, relationships, and acts of integrity that place care at the centre of professional life. Questioning becomes both a professional responsibility and an ethical necessity, a means of resisting the reduction of teaching to performance and reaffirming education as a moral and deeply human endeavour. Ultimately, the courage to question is not only an act of resistance but also an expression of hope.