Humanism and autonomy in the neoliberal reform of teacher training

Abstract

This article analyses the discursive unities which make possible the current transformation of teacher training and our understanding of teaching as a profession, while focusing particularly on European educational policy and the situation in Slovakia. Using Foucault's archaeological method, we reconstruct the discursive link points between the circumscribed, and at first glance, different approaches to teacher training, where on the one hand, we have a humanistic and constructivist prism, and on the other, we find the pragmatic, economizing pressure of neoliberal educational policy. Discursive reconstruction, however, shows that these approaches are not contradictory, rather that a humanistic and constructivist discourse, by shaping a specific kind of subjectivity (the teachers), supports the neoliberal reform of teacher training and constitutes the reasoning upon which it is based. The analysis is conducted by drawing together various components: the logic of the higher education reforms, the changes to the epistemological basis of teacher training, the regulation of professional development through professional standards, the psychological content and general permeation of entrepreneurial culture into education right through to the performance culture of the ‘portfolios’, which are the typical attributes of neoliberal governmentality, and not only in teacher training.

Keywords:

• archaeology
• humanism
• neoliberal governmentality
• professionality of the teacher
• European educational policy
• teacher training
• portfolio

Acknowledgements

This project is the output of the research projects VEGA 1/0224/11 ‘Archeology of neoliberal governmentality in contemporary education policy and in educational theory’ and VEGA 1/0172/09 ‘Changes of a school environment with respect to the reproduction of cultural literacy’.