Knowing how to feel about the Other? Student teachers, and the contingent role of embodiments in educational inequalities

Abstract

This paper explores affective dimensions to the positioning of teachers within persistent educational inequalities. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of ‘affective economies’, we argue that inequalities are not maintained through how teachers and student teachers ‘feel about’ ‘different’ students per se. Rather, the very possibility of becoming a particular subject and object of feeling is itself already part of the production of learner differences and inequalities. We examine how affects circulate to shape particular objects (e.g. a teacher’s physical body) and collective attachments to particular signs (e.g. ‘the national teaching body’). We argue that contemporary changes to Irish and European teacher education policy reinforce rather than question educational inequalities. They produce and align ‘shock’ at student underachievement with teachers’ physical and collective bodies, while ‘sympathetically’ responsibilising teachers to professionalise in order to cope with or compensate for persistently ‘different’ and/or underachieving students. To explain how this process is lived and resisted, an analysis of interviews with our own student teachers explores how the affective economy which constitutes teacher education may become contingently directed in socially just or unjust ways.

Keywords:

• student teachers
• policy sympathy
• affect
• embodiment
• inequality
• teacher education

Acknowledgements

The Learning to Teach Study (LETS) was funded (2008–2010) by the Department of Education and Skills, (Ireland). Work on this article was also supported by funding through the Re-imagining Initial Teacher Identity and Learning Study (RiiTILS) an Advanced Collaborative Research Award (2012–2013) to the fourth author from the Irish Research Council: www.research.ie.

Notes

1. The term PDE will be used in this article to refer to the course both in its ‘Postgraduate Diploma’ and ‘Professional Diploma’ forms.

2. This one-year Post-graduate or Professional Diploma in Education (PDE) is changing to a two-year Professional Master in Education from 2014.

3. The first three years of secondary schooling in Ireland are known as the Junior Cycle, after which students take a state examination, the Junior Certificate. This is followed by an optional Transition year, during which schools are free to design their own curricula. The final two years of second level finish with the Leaving Certificate examination.