Accounting for Teacher Knowledge: Reterritorializations as epistemic suicide

Abstract

Educators are experiencing a knowledge crisis and, as a result, they are committing epistemological suicide. The crisis is born out of two different conceptions of teacher knowledge, each containing a limitation that generates fissures within the respective knowledge paradigm. Educators commit epistemic suicide when surveillance technologies, masked as performance-based accountability systems, demand evidence of their knowing. Unable to account for their knowledge, educators fabricate pedagogical and curricular apparitions to be seen as compliant. I discuss how pedagogical fabrications constitute a teacher's subjectivity through the processes of exterritorializing, deterritorializing, and reterritorializing their knowledge. In the end, I argue that any conception of teacher knowledge ought to include overt conceptualizations of power within professionalization attempts. I sketch a politics of meaning as a way to reclaim teacher knowledge.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Paul S. Loeb for his thoughtful and insightful discussions over the last 15 years. This article was entitled through his recent work. I also thank Dawn Butler and the three reviewers for insightful comments regarding this work.

Notes

1. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/education/2000/bett2000/600667.stm and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/582475.stm (accessed August 15, 2006).

2. Data surveillance is “the collection of information about an identifiable individual [and organization], often from multiple sources, that can be assembled into a portrait of that person's activities” (Stanley & Steinhardt, 2003, p. 3).

3. I am aware that some readers don't consider the gerund “surveilling” a word. However, I use it throughout the discussion, borrowing from Fraser (1989), because it signifies an intention to coerce. I use the supposed verb “surveil” and past participle “surveilled” for their rhetorical benefits as well.