Nowadays, teachers are being subjugated by the neoliberal discourses in education (Phelan & Janzen, 2024), which reduced and recasted them as “skilled clinicians” (p.3) or “obedient servant of the authorities” (Connell, 2009, p. 215). The being of teachers is thus “constrained in advance by a regime of truth that decides what will and will not be a recognizable form of being” (Butler, 2005, p.22).

The situation in Hong Kong, known as one of the high-performing systems (Tan, 2018) in the world, is no exception (e.g., Tang, 2015), with an added layer of complexity due to the recent socio-political changes in the city. The flowing of structural and systemic violence in the system, such as the (re-)production of failure, exclusion, and inequality through test scores and public examinations (Säfström, 2023), thus called for a response and ongoing struggle to reclaim the space for discourses about education and teaching, as a “non-violent” approach to “negotiate fundamental ethical and political ambiguities” (Butler, 2020, p. 23).

In face of this, a course named “Rethinking and Reimaging Education” is developed for teacher candidates in a Hong Kong university. The course aims to create a personal and collective journey to explore the meaning of education and aspire for new possibilities for professional practice. The course design also critically reviews the three taken-for-granted understandings in the educational experience of teacher candidates (Ruti, 2012): The self (i.e., the seemingly coherent professorial identities underpinned by discourses), the world (i.e., the conscious and subconscious understanding of the ruling and ordering in the world), and the meaning of life (i.e., the pursuit for a successful life where one can thrive in the current materialistic world) (Rüsselbæk Hansen & Phelan, 2024). Building on this, the current study aims to explore the experience of teacher candidates and their inquiry into education and teaching in the ethical, political, and educational senses. It highlights how alternative discourses, like those which “emphasize the importance of critical and creative reflection and their potential to complexify and transcend the status quo” (Clarke & Moore, 2013, p. 489) are important for the teaching profession.

The current study adopts the psychoanalytic perspective to examine the experience of teacher candidates in the course. The adoption of psychoanalysis can help in this study since, as Ruti (2009) highlighted, it “is not a practice of discovering who or what we are in any essential sense, but rather of finding evocative modes of signifying facets of existence that in one way or another feel valuable to us or that manage to spark our desire to know more” (p.6). Specifically, this study adopts Lacan’s theory of four discourses (i.e. discourse of the master, discourse of the university, discourse of the hysteric, discourse of the analyst) to understand how teacher candidates situate and perceive themselves in the temporal frames of past, present, and future, in connection with their personal, social, and educational experience of which their understanding of education and teaching is based upon. In the Lacanian view, the subject “is not a unified, seamless, self-sufficient or hermetic entity but is divided from itself by a series of disjunctions involving language, desire and the unconscious.” (Clarke, 2019, p.45). Living in the current world filled with a cacophony of conflicting discourses, Lacan’s theory allows us to tease out the functioning of discourses in a unique way, and through the process we can also gain better insights of the interrelationships between knowledge, truth, subjectivity, and otherness, as well as their configurations as shaped by different discourses (Clarke, 2019).

The current study is based on the course named Rethinking and Reimagining Education offered by a university in Hong Kong, starting from 2019. The course aims to help teacher candidates discover possibilities in mainstream education that are often masqueraded, through situating classroom learning creatively in the spatial settings of the university, school, community, and nature. We define the course as education experimentation since the course hopes to present provocations for critical reflection about the meaning of education. This experimentation, as Ball (2019) described, “is both negative (a disavowal of the contingently normal) and positive (thinking differently about ourselves) – a transgression, a struggle that produces us as ethical beings, a disposition towards and constant activity of changing, and an unending search for autonomy” (p. 141). Going through the journey of this course, teacher candidates engaged in an experiential process of ‘unlearning’ or deconstructing their own education experience and notion of ethical responsibility, as well as questioning the mainstream underlying assumptions of common pedagogical practice in schools. In the journey, the teacher candidates were introduced stimulating ideas/materials and exposed to different kinds of experiential elements, where they could visualize their thinking for the ‘dream school’ project in various creative forms (e.g., physical model, drawing, digital recording, textual description). At the end of the term, teacher candidates would have the chance to present their completed project to the class. In view of the research aims, ten teacher candidates of different majors from the course were invited for the current study. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, where teacher candidates discussed their lived experience in and beyond the course, their relevant reflections on the meaning of education, as well as their understanding of teaching as a profession. All the interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed for the coding process and analysis to be done in Nvivo. Two rounds of coding were done with the use of structural, descriptive, process and in-vivo coding. The codes and themes were constantly reviewed and cross-checked to ensure the consistency.

The data showed an interesting evolution in the thoughts and reflections of teacher candidates along with the progression of the course. All the teaching candidates showed some emerging changes in their understanding of education. Teacher candidates identified with discourse of the master and the university, which were exemplified by the acknowledgment of interviewed teacher candidates on their understanding of teacher’s roles in delivery curriculum and knowledge transmission, with outstanding academic results from students being the best testimony for a “good” teacher. They also considered this understanding was reinforced in their programme, where there was insufficient time and space to think “out-of-the-box” for alternative perspectives. Most teacher candidates mentioned their initial struggles in the course since it conflicted and disrupted with their original understanding of the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of education and teaching, corresponding to the discourse of hysteric. This is best demonstrated in the development around to the “dream school” project concept, which became an important negotiation process for teacher candidates to deliberate on their “own” education ideals. As a result, these struggles motivated them to take ownership of their practice as teachers, by critically rethinking “what I can be” against the overarching discourses in the society, instead of acquiescing to the existing ways of doing things in teaching (Phelan et al., 2006). This change is particularly needed in the current socio-political context in Hong Kong, when scrutiny significantly undermined the autonomy of teachers. Overall, this study provided a case showing the critical importance of the space for inquiring the meaning of education in teacher education, as well as the needed pedagogical innovations against the odds. More importantly, this study showed how the course prepared teacher candidates to teach in the current “miserable conditions” (Phelan & Janzen, 2024), when neoliberalism has distorted the professional integrity and ethical responsibility of teachers.

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