Colouring inside, around and outside the lines: creating hopeful conditions for policy engagement and enactment
FORUM - Print ISSN 1474-7685 - Online ISSN 2047-7171
Volume 68 Number 2 (2026)
Colouring inside, around and outside the lines: creating hopeful conditions for policy engagement and enactment
Charlotte Wright pages 37‑46
DOI: 10.3898/forum.2026.68.2.06
Abstract
Debates about the future of teaching increasingly focus on how teachers navigate expanding policy demands, heightened accountability and shifting expectations of autonomy. Within this context, teacher education plays a crucial role in shaping how future teachers encounter, interpret and enact policy. Policy work in pre-service teacher education can feel paradoxical: educators are tasked with inducting preservice teachers into standards and frameworks while also encouraging contextual adaptation, principled enactment and critical interrogation. This article traces my evolving engagement with policy – as a classroom teacher, doctoral researcher and now teacher educator – to examine how hopeful, future oriented policy negotiations can be demonstrated and encouraged among those entering the teaching profession. By foregrounding how early experiences with policy shape emerging identities, practices and senses of agency, I argue that teacher education must model forms of policy engagement that can sustain teachers throughout their careers. The article proposes an approach to teacher education that would support pre-service teachers to work within, around and beyond policy frameworks, positioning such engagement as essential to imagining and enacting more expansive and hopeful futures for the profession.
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To cite this article
Charlotte Wright (2026) Colouring inside, around and outside the lines: creating hopeful conditions for policy engagement and enactment, FORUM, 68(2), 37-46 . https://doi.org/10.3898/forum.2026.68.2.06