Teachers' memories of disciplinary control strategies from their own school days

Abstract

This article provides a vision of school disciplinary strategies as provided by childhood school memories of practicing or unemployed teachers. This narrative approach allows us to understand the school and its daily routines and rituals from an insiders' point of view, drawing upon the double perspective teachers employ when reflecting on their own experience as school children. The results of the study demonstrate a wide range of disciplinary practices coinciding with a Foucauldian disciplinary structure – a system of micro‐penalty governing time, activity, behavior, speech, the body, and sexuality. Analyzing the systemic regulation of bodies in schools can uncover institutional meanings and make them available for questioning, perhaps even negotiation. Recognizing the ways in which teachers' roles are inextricably bound with the disciplinary power relations of their institutions can help alleviate frustration and burnout and help teachers make more informed pedagogical decisions.

Keywords:

• discipline
• school memories
• narrative methodology

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to extend our deepest appreciation to those who participated in this investigation for giving us the opportunity to delve into their lives and to recognize ourselves in their pain and joy.

Notes

1. While others, like sociologist Erving Goffman, have analyzed ‘totalizing institutions,’ we find Foucault's genealogical analysis of the emergence of certain kinds of institutions and the available discourses that make them possible to be particularly useful for analyzing school practice.