Social anxiety, sex, surveillance, and the ‘safe’ teacher

Abstract

Foucault's view of the body as a detailed text from which can be read a system of power is used to consider some aspects of contemporary teacher work. In particular, this paper considers the impact on primary school teachers of social anxiety about touching children. One effect has been an intensification of self‐surveillance by teachers, and increased experience of child‐touch and child‐proximity as ‘uncomfortable’. Paradoxically, teachers' need for visibility so they can be seen as innocent has the effect of constituting teachers as always and already guilty—as potential sexual abusers. This guilt is now enacted in the everyday common sense actions of ‘safe’ teachers. The argument is developed with reference to teacher union policy texts and interview data from teachers in a range of New Zealand primary schools.

Notes

* Corresponding author: School of Education, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand. Email: [email protected]

Teachers and principals in several randomly selected Auckland primary schools, and a group of principals from throughout New Zealand, participated in audio‐taped focus groups during 2002 to discuss ‘the social anxiety about teachers touching children’. Selected representative excerpts from these conversations are reproduced here. For another paper discussing data collected for this project, see Jones (2003); see also Jones (2001a) for related research on male primary graduates.

For Foucauldian analyses of the teacher's body see also Middleton (1998), McWilliam and Taylor (1996), and O'Farrell et al. (2000). The erotics of pedagogy—a view that understands pedagogy as seduction and therefore the significance of the teacher's body in the pedagogical encounter—has been explored by Gallop (1997), Epstein and Johnson (1998) and others in relation to older students and their teachers.

A residual anxiety about teachers' potential physical abuse or violence towards children remains alive in the rules about touch.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alison Jones *

* Corresponding author: School of Education, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand. Email: [email protected]