Session Information
10 SES 11 C, Research on Values, Beliefs and Understandings in Teacher Education
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper highlights how the ideal school pupils are constructed within teacher education policy in Sweden and scrutinizes and problematizes how student teachers, within an examination practice in the teacher education, present their vision of the ideal pupils. The theoretical and methodological approaches used are mainly drawn from Michel Foucault (1977, 1980. I use theoretical notions such as policy, discourse, power and governmentality. A set of student-teacher examination tasks are at the centre of the analysis.
The student teacher's examination texts are regarded as a local discursive policy practice (Foucault 1980; Ball 1994) and thus both as a text and discursive practice (Ball 1994). This implies that they are studied as a text practice, but also as a producing, normalizing and disciplining practice that designs and fabricates 'truths' about both school and society and also positions the pupils into various subject positions (Foucault 1977, 1980; Rose 1999). The construction, regulation and positioning of the ideal pupils are also analyzed through Foucault's notion of governmentality, which implies that the study also focuses on the practices of governing and regulation (Foucault 1991).
The empirical material is brought from an examination practice at one of the teacher education departments in Sweden. The reason for choosing this special kind of policy practice depends on its special form and scope. The studied examination tasks are called 'My personal educational credo'. In the examination task the student teachers are told to present their vision of their future educational practice.
The task is designed in a 'open' way to give students freedom to describe their ideal future teaching practices and activities. The aspect of openness and freedom within the examination task should in itself be problematized. On the basis of the consistent picture given in the examination texts, one can question how 'free' the individual student has felt while representing their ideal picture of education. I believe that the intended freedom lies more in line with a new form of advanced liberal governing practice, in which individuals feel free to govern themselves (Rose 1996, 1999; Foucault 1991).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Ball, Stephen, J. (1994). Education reform. A critical and post-structural approach. Buckingham: Open University Press. Ball, Stephen, J. (2008). The education debate. Bristol: The Policy Press. Carabine, Jean. (2001). Unmarried Motherhood 1830-1990: A Genealogical Analysis. I M Wetherell, S Taylor & S Yates. Discourse as data. A guide for analysis (ss 267-310). London: Sage. Fejes, Andreas. (2008). European Citizens under Construction: The Bologna Process Analysed from a Governmentality Perspective. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 40(4), 515-530. Foucault, Michel. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Allan Lane. Foucault, Michel. (1980). Power and knowledge: selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, Michel. (1991). Governmentality. I G Burchell, C Gordon & P Miller (Red.). The Foucault effect: studies in governmentality: with two lectures by and an interview with Michel Foucault (ss 87-104). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rose, Nikolas. (1996). Governing “advanced” liberal democracies. I A Barry, T Osborne & N Rose (Red.). Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, neo-liberalism and rationalities of government (ss 37-64). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Rose, Nikolas. (1999). Powers of freedom. Reframing political thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simons, Maarten & Masschelein, Jan. (2008). The Governmentalization of Learning and the Assemblage of a Learning Apparatus. Educational Theory, 58(4), 391-415. Sjöberg, Lena. (2009). Skolan och den ’goda’ utbildningen – för ett konkurrenskraftigt Europa. Utbildning & Demokrati, 18(1), 33-58.
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