Looking like a teacher: fashioning an embodied identity through dressage

Abstract

This article makes a case for bringing in the body from the margins of research on teacher education. In doing so, it considers the personal and socio cultural issues reported by seventeen pre-service teachers (PSTs), who are part of a one-year post graduate diploma in post-primary teaching, when learning to embody and fashion teacher identity. The article focuses on embodiment drawing on qualitative interview data from a large-scale government-funded study on initial teacher education. Drawing on Foucault’s general theory of dressage, at the center of which reigns the notion of disciplining and applying the methodology of critical discourse analysis, this article presents three themes tethered to the analysable and manipulable teacher body, namely dressage as compliance, dressage as discipline and dressage as performance. For PSTs, ‘looking like a teacher’ and dressage as a practice of power is a significant part of the fabric of their professional school life.

Keywords:

• pre-service teacher education
• teacher identity
• dressage
• Foucault
• embodiment

Additional information

Funding

The Learning to Teach Study (LETS) was funded (2008–2010) by the Department of Education and Skills, Ireland. Work on this article was also supported by funding through the Re-imagining Initial Teacher Identity and Learning Study (RiiTILS), an Advanced Collaborative Research Award (2012–2013) to the second author from the Irish Research Council. http://www.irchss.ie.