Disparate bodies: the role of the teacher in contemporary pedagogic practice

Abstract

The teacher’s body has a dubious status within contemporary pedagogic practice. The impact of progressivism in many western countries, with its emphasis on student‐centred learning, has resulted in a marginalisation of the teacher’s role in many classrooms. While its influence appears to be waning, in Australian primary schools, student‐centred methodologies such as group‐based and independent learning tend to dominate classroom practice. Relegated to the role of facilitator the teacher’s overall presence and bodily impact in classrooms has been greatly reduced. Drawing on a study of the practice of two kindergarten teachers in two schools in Sydney, Australia, this article will examine the ways in which they embody pedagogic space, the regimen they create and the techniques they employ in teaching their students how to write. In a sense the title ‘Disparate bodies’ has a dual focus. Not only does it relate to the different ways in which the two teachers deploy their bodies in the classroom, it also refers to the differential embodiment of their students which results from the affects that their teachers’ pedagogies engender.

Notes

1. This is a generalised statement based on commentary in teacher education texts and journals. In the United Kingdom, the Government has actually encouraged a greater use of teacher‐directed learning in strategies such as The Literacy Hour in primary schools. Implementation is largely at the teacher’s discretion and so, given the dominance of progressivism, the extent to which more teacher‐directed learning actually occurs is debatable. The scripted nature of the teacher direction promoted in the Literacy Hour, however, is not endorsed here. This seems a far too formulaic approach to pedagogy, which gives little consideration to teacher professionalism and the practitioner’s ability to match pedagogy with lesson content and student needs.

2. This critique of progressivist pedagogies should not be understood as justification for a return to traditional teaching techniques that often involved quite repressive disciplinary practices. Rather than conceiving education in terms of a binary of traditionalism and progressivism, this paper is working towards an alternate, more enabling pedagogy. What is envisaged is a post‐progressivism that reasserts the valuable position of teachers in classrooms and their role in cultivating the discipline to learn that enables students to acquire effective, creative and critical capacities.

3. The significance of the seventeenth‐century philosopher Spinoza for education lies in his rejection of Descartes’ view of the mind and body as two distinct substances. Spinoza, in contrast, was a monist. He rejected the duality of substance and instead understood mind and body as belonging to the attributes of a single substance. This philosophical distinction is significant in that it provides a theoretical foundation for much contemporary theorising of the role of the body in the formation of subjectivity.

4. Bourdieu tends to emphasise the reproductive tendencies of habitus, but it is a concept that also possesses agentic potential. It is used here to indicate the ways in which affect accumulates and is formative in terms of subjectivity. See Noble and Watkins (2003) for discussion of this point.