Much recent debate has suggested Australia's technical and further education (TAFE) teachers not only need new knowledge and skills but need to perform their professional practices in new ways and in new contexts. What this debate has failed to recognize is that these change discourses are in effect constructing new professional identities for teachers, which interact and compete with the traditional discourses that once provided TAFE teachers with a distinct and separate educational identity. Any explanation concerning the construction of TAFE teachers' identities must look to both the historical and contemporary discourses that all circulate within the institutional life of the organization and must indicate how these discourses work to construct TAFE teachers as particular types of teachers. Three dominant institutional discourses within the institution of TAFE have shaped the formation of TAFE teachers' identities: industrial skill development, liberal education, and public service. The discourses of new vocationalism and economic rationalism have now joined the discourses of industrial skill development, liberal education, and public service in constructing the institutional practices of TAFE and its teachers. The failure of these discourses to make headway in changing TAFE teachers' understanding of who they are in VET can be accounted for because they leave little room for ambiguity and contradiction. (Contains 32 references.) (YLB)