ChatGPT, subjectification, and the purposes and politics of teacher education and its scholarship

The politics of scholarship in teacher education

The politics of scholarship in teacher education refers to the ways in which power, politics, and ideology shape and influence the production, dissemination, and use of knowledge in the field of teacher education. Scholarship in teacher education is a politically charged and highly contested domain, as it involves questions about what counts as knowledge and who has the authority to define and create it.

One of the key ways that politics influences scholarship in teacher education is through the funding and dissemination of research. Research in teacher education is often funded by government agencies or private foundations, and these organisations may have specific agendas and ideologies that shape the research questions and methods that are considered valuable and worthy of funding. Additionally, the peer-review process used to evaluate and publish research in teacher education can also be influenced by political factors, such as the ideology of the reviewers and the dominant paradigm in the field.

Another way that politics influences scholarship in teacher education is through the question of who gets to participate in the production of knowledge. Historically, the voices and perspectives of certain groups, such as white middle-class men, have been privileged and dominant in the field of teacher education, while the voices and perspectives of other groups, such as women, people of colour, and those from marginalised communities, have been marginalised and underrepresented. This imbalance in representation and voice can lead to a narrow and biased understanding of the issues and challenges facing teachers and students in the education system.

In addition to these broader political factors, the politics of scholarship in teacher education is also influenced by more specific policy and legislative debates. For example, there are often debates about the role of teacher unions and collective bargaining in shaping the conditions and experiences of teachers, as well as debates about the role of standardised testing and accountability measures in evaluating teacher performance and student learning. These debates are shaped by larger political ideologies and power structures, and they have a significant impact on the ways in which scholarship is produced, disseminated, and used in the field of teacher education.

In conclusion, the politics of scholarship in teacher education is a complex and multi-faceted issue that is shaped by a variety of political, economic, and ideological factors. Understanding the ways in which politics influences the production, dissemination, and use of knowledge in teacher education is crucial for advancing the field and promoting equity and justice in education. It is important to critically examine and challenge dominant political ideologies and power structures in order to ensure that the scholarship produced in teacher education is inclusive, diverse, and representative of the full range of perspectives and experiences in the field.

Subjectification and the purposes of education

The concept of “subjectification” refers to the process by which individuals come to understand themselves as subjects, or autonomous and responsible agents, who have the ability to make choices and take actions in the world. This process is seen as central to the development of individual agency and to the construction of a democratic and participatory society.

In the context of education, subjectification can be seen as an important goal because it helps students develop the skills and competencies they need to be active and engaged citizens. Education that promotes subjectification seeks to empower students to think critically and independently, to make informed decisions, and to take meaningful action in the world.

In this sense, the purposes of education can be understood as supporting the subjectification of students by providing them with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions they need to participate in society as active and responsible agents. This may include promoting critical thinking, ethical decision-making, and civic engagement, as well as providing opportunities for students to learn about and experience different cultures and perspectives.

By promoting subjectification, education can help to cultivate a democratic and participatory society in which individuals are empowered to shape their own lives and the world around them.

The purposes of (teacher) education

The purpose of teacher education is to prepare individuals to become effective and knowledgeable educators. There are several goals and objectives that guide teacher education programs, including:

1. Knowledge of subject matter: Teachers need a deep understanding of the subjects they will be teaching in order to be effective educators.

2. Pedagogical knowledge: Teachers must have a strong understanding of pedagogical practices, including best practices for teaching and assessment, to help students learn and grow.

3. Understanding of student development: Teachers must be aware of the different stages of student development and be able to adjust their teaching practices accordingly.

4. Cultural competence: Teachers must be able to understand and appreciate the cultural backgrounds of their students and use this knowledge to create inclusive and equitable learning environments.

5. Technology proficiency: In the digital age, teachers must be proficient in using technology in the classroom, both as a teaching tool and as a means of connecting with students and families.

6. Professionalism: Teachers must be committed to continuous learning and growth, ethical conduct, and professional responsibility.

The overarching goal of teacher education is to prepare individuals who are able to effectively and positively impact the lives of their students and contribute to the larger goal of creating a more just and equitable society.¹

The above opening paragraphs of this editorial, up to this point, were written by ChatGPT² on 10^th February 2023. They offer a machine generated overview of some of the ideas that we wanted to talk about in this editorial while also serving to show perhaps the power and limitations of the technology (at least as it currently sits). We will now proceed to discuss, albeit briefly, some of the issues we see at present with ChatGPT and then introduce the papers in this issue without the assistance of an artificial intelligence application. We hope that a difference in the quality of the writing will be apparent!

ChatGPT

At present (as far as we know in any case!) there are no reliable artificial intelligence (AI) tools to detect whether, and/or to what extent, this editorial has been written by a machine. Delegation of tasks to machines is not a new phenomenon, but what the artificial intelligence software does (apart from the generation of novel texts that can be difficult to identify as machine generated) is allow us to rethink the relations between the processes in, and the products of, in our case, teacher education and related scholarship. What it makes clear is that the outcomes/output focus in much teacher education policy has rendered opaque, or unimportant, the processes that go into producing this outcome/output- except to say of course that these processes entail “learning” (which is assumed to be [a] good). Perhaps more worryingly this opacity has meant that the politics of teacher education and scholarship in the area is likewise too easily muted. So where does that leave us?

Much of the worry about ChatGPT seems to be that it will render the current systems of assessment invalid (and thereby bring into question the foundations of academic integrity and the function of universities as gate keepers of knowledge and producers of qualificated people). Perhaps this will be a good thing as it will refocus attention onto the “processes,” and just what it is that we want these processes to be, and why. It will, we think, minimally, allow us to turn our attention to the “discourses of learning” (Biesta, 2022) that dominate education to help us ask again what it is that we are learning for, and whether this is what we want. The question for education that arises in the midst of the discussion about ChatGPT is “Is there a sufficiently robust investigation of the purposes of education to put the outputs of the interactions between machines and humans in their place?” Or framed another way, “how are the products of what are assumed to be learning processes, different from the products of what are assumed to be educational processes?” Or “if education were to produce anything at all, what might it be?” And so on.

The point is that ChatGPT will not be able to help us decide what the purposes of education are or should be; that is entirely a question to be answered by human beings. The opportunity that ChatGPT and its successors gives us is to think again about the current instrumentalization that has gripped educational thinking and to see how we can intervene into and against this hold on our collective imaginations – perchance to push back against the objectivation that our systems of education currently desire (at least in the Anglophone “West”). There is political work to do here as interventions into reality like ChatGPT, while being possibly upsetting to the business-as-usual of education systems, do not guarantee that there will be changes that make more sense educationally. For example, will we consider the broader purposes of education in more detail and shift our attention to the complex interactions between purposes that are not always in easy alignment and certainly bring into question the relentlessness of “learning” as the process and product? Biesta (see Biesta, 2014) has suggested that education has three interconnected domains of purpose- qualification, socialisation and subjectification, and that subjectification is the one that has been most absent, at least recently, and especially so in the Anglosphere. But what is subjectification about and what is the relation to ChatGPT?

Put simply, what is at stake in the idea of subjectification is our freedom as human beings and, more specifically, our freedom to act or to refrain from action. This is not about freedom as a theoretical construct or complicated philosophical concept, but concerns the much more mundane experience that in many — perhaps even all — situations we encounter in our lives, we always have a possibility to say yes or to say no, to stay or to walk away, to go with the flow or to resist — and encountering this possibility in one’s own life, particularly encountering it for the first time, is a very significant experience (Biesta, 2020, p. 93).

Clearly, if we are to consider subjectification as one purpose of education, and therefore we understand education as involving questions about human freedom this produces quandaries with relation to artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence seems to be very good at learning, but not so good at the much more complex issues that arise in the mix of educational purposes that always involve work by teachers (and their educators of course) to make wise judgements (see Biesta, 2014) in the midst of competing purposes (qualification, socialisation, subjectification).

The problems with “education as product” that the use of an application like ChatGPT makes more apparent may help us to defend and engage in a complex and nuanced discussion about the purposes of education. Likewise, perhaps, with the broader politics of our work as teacher educators- can we use this chance to speak up/back against the broader discourses of learning, performativity, instrumentality and objectification that are so prevalent in our work?

If we turn our attention to the papers in this issue specifically, each one shows different ways that teacher education scholars might attend to keeping the politics of our work on the agenda. What the papers have in common is that they take phenomena that are relevant to teacher education, and that may pass for being “business as usual” where perhaps it would be understood that “there is nothing to see here at all (move on!)” and direct our attention towards it. The rest of this editorial introduces each paper and discusses the possibilities for the politics of research that they offer.

The first paper in the issue, Controversial issues in the Australian educational context: Dimensions of politics, policy and practice by McPherson, Forster and Kerr interlinks the everyday work of teachers with the political and policy contexts of that work in Australia. Research on controversial issues in education has become increasingly important as right-wing nationalist, populist extremism rises in the “West.” This extremism has the potential to destabilise the already complex work of teachers and teacher educators. The paper by McPherson et al highlights how the ethical, political and epistemic work that teachers do has become more difficult (and also more crucially perhaps, difficult to characterise as being this kind of work), and this is compounded by a loss of trust in teachers to make wise judgements in complex circumstances (see Biesta, 2014). The politics of controversial issues that McPherson and colleagues explore highlights how current policy settings effectively mute education and “produce a regulatory effect on teachers and school leaders; namely, to ensure schools remain ‘neutral spaces’ where teachers avoid engaging with certain hot-button issues out of a sense of self- preservation and often fear” (p. 20). The paper presents a careful exploration of the non-linear interactions between policy and the everyday work of teachers. It tells us about how policy enactments are never straightforward while also serving to remind us that the effects of policy are not necessarily easily “visible.” So, the research here has undertaken the task of showing how the operations of education policy can in fact “work” inimically placing restrictions on what teachers, and schools are able to do; in effect, “neutralising” them. What this paper might lead us to do is investigate how we are ourselves “neutralised” and what we might or might not be able to do about that.

The second paper Curriculum materials and educative opportunities: Observing teacher positionings from teachers’ guides by Suh also highlights some of the issues that teachers in where? face when dealing with the complexity of their circumstances and in this case with respect to curriculum materials: “the main purpose in this study is to understand the educativeness of Teacher Guides (TGs) by observing the support they provide for teachers to better teach mathematics” (p. 4). The main finding in the study is that the Teacher Guides miss the opportunity to support teachers well. They were both too narrow and shallow in their presentation of possibilities for teachers thereby potentially limiting the range of available approaches to mathematics education (this is especially relevant for new teachers who may use TGs as a resource for thinking about how to teach). The research here is a careful exploration of materials that teachers have access to and uses complex theoretical tools that put into question how and why materials are produced for teachers. The research also shows how theory helps to bring to light certain features of texts that are not necessarily obvious in everyday educational use. It can help us to pay attention to the ways that texts create positions for their readers and brings up questions about whether these are the positions that we desire, and whether they are in fact desirable, in education (see Biesta, 2022).

The third paper Untangling the making and governing of Hong Kong teachers through neoliberal, Confucian, and affective technologies: With and beyond Foucault by Zhao & Lin tackles the current governance arrangements in education in Hong Kong, applying, but also interrogating, a Foucauldian approach. This paper details the complexity of teaching work in contemporary Hong Kong, and also brings a welcome depth of analysis, and crucially for a journal like Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, a discussion about some of the dilemmas and possibilities of “using” Foucault beyond the context in which his ideas originally arose. This paper tells us a lot about how teachers are governed and “how the technologies of domination of the others and the technologies of the self possibly encounter and negotiate in governing subjectivities through economic, cognitive, ethical, and affective conduct of conduct” (p. 11). The paper demonstrates the power of Foucauldian scholarship and how this power has its own dynamics, effects and limitations. As noted, the process at the end of the paper where the authors undertake an analysis of the tensions and dilemmas of drawing on the famous French philosopher’s work is really important in a journal such as ours and we look forward to other scholars building on this kind of work. Perhaps what the paper does for us (as teacher education researchers) is to show how to theorise about the theory we work with. It opens space also for us to discuss the politics of the methodologies we choose in relation to this theorising of theory and how this shapes what we are able to say about educational matters and who this matters for, and how.

The fourth paper, Professionalism and everyday practices in early childhood education and care: Singaporean pre-service teachers’ perspectives by Keary, Babaeff and Garnier also makes use of a French thinker as the analytical resource, namely Michel de Certeau. De Certeau is the famous philosopher of “everyday life” and makes the important distinction between strategy and tactics.

Strategy is a specific way of exercising power and is a regularised, rule governed, an institutionalised location from which relations are generated. In contrast, tactics involve practices of resistance to ideologies. They are not strongly separated from the institutionalised location and often take place within it. Tactics are about creatively using resources on the job to pursue a project. They are opportunistic and combine disparate aspects to gain a momentary benefit. Strategy is the domain of the powerful, while tactics is resistance through practices of everyday life which are positioned against strategy (Keary et al., p. 9).

Such a distinction seems vital in educational contexts where the strategies of those who seek to govern our work may be able to be contested in the everyday work of teachers, teacher educators and researchers. The politics of the interactions between strategy and tactics tell us something about how we may be able to creatively use resources to pursue projects that we devise “otherwise” to what the people who hold power may or may not desire. The paper by Keary et al., shows how “[T]hrough noticing creative everyday tactical use of resources and space, notions of professionalism were foregrounded that often remain hidden or are less visible to the EC (Early Childhood) field” (p. 29). “What is uncovered is the complex and ambiguous ways Singaporean PSTs (Pre-Service Teachers) understand professionalism and how these understandings shape their practices as EC teachers. The intertwined insights … provide a range of dynamic and ever-changing perspectives … disclosing the fragility, and paradoxically the strength, of the Singaporean PST professional self (p. 7). As these quotes from the paper show, the work here allows us to attend to the way that theory (in this case de Certeau’s work) can offer resources to investigate things that are often taken for granted. It allows the production of new texts (like the paper by Keary et al) about concepts such as professionalism that are taken for granted to be a “good,” which can, and in fact need to be, put under scrutiny (see also Moore & Clarke, 2016).

Ready, or not? Graduate teachers’ perceptions of their classroom readiness through a capstone assessment task by Ludecke and Cooper is the penultimate paper in this issue. Once again, the authors draw on rich theoretical resources in order to investigate a taken for granted aspect of teacher education in the Australian context – “readiness.” The resources utilised here concern the theorisation of liminality (deriving from Victor Turner’s work) through which the authors investigate how readiness operates. They note that “PSTs” readiness is situated in the liminal phase of letting go of their “student” persona and working towards the development of their “teacher” identity. This involves a combination of academic, practical and personal skills. We saw that PSTs have the capacity to reflect on their own ITE (Initial Teacher Education) experiences and make judgements about whether they feel “ready”” (p.21). They propose “the importance of liminality and the feeling of metaxis as a counter-argument to point-in-time ‘readiness’ in the transition to teaching” (p. 6) and argue that “Turner’s and others’ concepts of liminality are useful in understanding “classroom readiness” as a transitional stage of moving from not-a-student to not-yet-a-teacher” (p. 6). The work that Ludecke and colleagues adumbrate in this paper brings an interesting and important set of resources to bear on some of the assumptions that contemporary policy settings valorise.

In the final paper, Partnership or prescription: A critical discourse analysis of HEI-school partnership policy in the Republic of Ireland, Gorman and Furlong argue that “there is a need for a research agenda that questions the processes underpinning established policy agendas in this field” … . and that they

are engaging in policy activism (Yeatman, 1998). As teacher education researchers and practitioners, we are exploring the language of policy and the mechanisms at play in relation to how the concept of partnership has become a policy reality (p. 3–4).

The authors employ critical discourse analysis (CDA) (drawing on Fairclough’s well-known framework) to examine partnership policies in teacher education in the Republic of Ireland. They suggest that “the primary aim of CDA is to closely analyse texts that are influential to a given society, particularly texts that are deemed politically or culturally influential” (p. 8). The paper does this analysis and shows how the policies “set an agenda for the standardisation of HEI-school partnerships” (p. 17) and worryingly that the partnerships buy into the broader discourses of performativity in schools and in higher education that are evident in other jurisdictions. The authors also call for “the establishment of a critical research policy community in teacher education to ensure that all have the capacity to critically examine current and future policy development in this field” (p. 17), a sentiment with which we concur and support.

And so?

As students begin to use ChatGPT for their writing, questions will no doubt arise about what they have learnt. But, we wonder, will there be questions about whether learning is the main point anyway, and if it is, why is this so; will “what is education for” (Biesta, 2014, 2022) become a question more likely to be asked now as a result? Perhaps also ChatGPT can assist us to think about what scholarship does; will it help us to think carefully about why we should do which research? The Asia Pacific Journal of Teacher Education has a long history of focussing on the policy and politics of teacher education. And this has allowed the ways in which education is governed and enacted, and in whose interests, to be kept under scrutiny by scholars in our field. We look forward to further contributions that continue with this tradition, and also, of course, hope that you will enjoy reading the current issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Gert Biesta, who has introduced the idea of subjectification into the educational conversation, would like to note that what ChatGPT has generated about this notion is entirely inaccurate.

2. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence application, where GPT is the abbreviation for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. It is a large language model application that is causing quite a stir as it can produce texts, songs, poems and so on that are novel and that can be difficult to disambiguate from work that has been produced directly by a human being.