Payback time? Discourses of lack, debt and the moral regulation of teacher education

Abstract

This paper analyses recent policy and discourse in the UK lifelong learning sector to identify a tension in discourse which positions teacher educators as essential to the knowledge economy while simultaneously insisting on the deficits they represent. Drawing on critical analyses from Friedrich Nietzsche, Maurizio Lazzarato and Gilles Deleuze, I challenge altruistic views of professional motivation and situate individual professionalism under a construction of an indebted subject. Examining recent attempts to redefine professional standards in the sector, I argue that teachers are positioned as subject to homogenisation and ethically indebted to a higher ideal. Ethical commitments to adult learning, I suggest, are a cost-effective instrument of social control because of their imbrication in this discourse of irredeemable moral debt to the sector. Responses to this situation, I argue, are likely to include forms of professional mobility which undermine it.

Keywords:

• debt
• lifelong learning
• teacher education
• Nietzsche
• Lazzarato
• Deleuze

Notes

1. The IfL was created in 2002 to promote the professional interests of teachers and trainers in LLL. I refer regularly to recent publications by the organisation on the grounds that its highly accessible voice is potentially influential for practitioners.

2. The UK Government Department of Business, Innovation and Skills has responsibility, among other things, for economic growth, investment in skills and education, promoting trade, boosting innovation and business growth.

3. The TLRP was created in 2000 with the aims of examining teaching and learning practices over the lifecourse and linking findings with policy.

4. The Commission for Adult Vocational Teaching and Learning is an independent organisation established by the UK Department for Business Innovation and Skills in 2011 to raise the quality and impact of vocation teaching and learning.