An unprotected species? On teachers as risky subjects

Abstract

This paper explores the issue of teacher vulnerability at a time of ‘child panic’. It does so by first elaborating risk‐consciousness as a powerful social and cultural rationality for producing moral climates and organisational identities, and then investigating how this rationality works through the fraught issue of teacher touch. Empirical data is drawn from two studies of teacher work in Australian and New Zealand schools to demonstrate that the relatively recent historical phenomenon of heightened teacher vulnerability to allegations of abusive touch is an effect of a new regime of truth that constitutes child protection. It is a regime that produces new tyrannies for the teacher at the same time that it works to eliminate tyrannies for the child.

Notes

The excerpts from interview data reproduced in this paper are from respective studies in Auckland, New Zeland and Queensland, Australia, primary schools and teacher education settings. The data and its collection are further discussed in Jones (2001, 2003), and McWilliam and Singh (2003).