Recent reforms to Initial Teacher Education in England are a continuation of a decades-long political project, aiming to change the whole social complex around teachers' professional education. But the most recent frameworks present some new inflections to the construction of learning, pedagogical relationships and difference. Positivist versions of knowledge and progress and standards-based reform as 'a solution' to social inequalities, need to be countered strategically with accounts of teaching and learning that reclaim the affective realm in public discourse. This investigation sets the new frameworks against the work of one early-career teacher on his master's research project. It draws on excerpts from his dissertation and accounts by a teacher educator of working with him, concluding that hybridised accounts of learning flexible enough to encompass affect and autobiographical experience, as well as policy, research and critique, are not only professionally purposeful for those involved but also offer wider strategies of resistance.