Pedagogical Pleasures: Augustine in the Feminist Classroom

Many feminist philosophers of education have argued that the teacher's pleasure plays an important role in the classroom. However, accessing such pleasure is often easier said than done. Given our current academic climate, how might teachers develop pedagogical practices that cultivate these delights? This article investigates the (rather surprising) response to this question offered in Augustine's De catechizandis rudibus. Despite his reputation as a pleasure‐hater, Augustine spends the majority of his text defending the delights of teaching. In particular, Augustine argues that if teachers wish to find pleasure in teaching, they would do well to study the pleasures of mothers. To this end, I analyse the nature of Augustine's maternal appeal. What insight does Augustine find in the experiences of mothers? In what way does he hope his colleagues will allow these experiences to shape their pedagogies? I conclude by exploring the benefits and the risks of Augustine's claim for those who teach in the contemporary feminist classroom. Augustine's defence of pedagogical pleasure suggests that he shares a common interest with feminist philosophers. But, the social/political limits of his account highlight the value of submitting such pleasures to the terms of feminist critique.     

Preparing Community-Engaged Teachers

The goals of teacher education must evolve beyond the teaching of strategies and methods toward a process for beginning teachers' critical interrogation of their social locations and the ways they engage with the realities of teaching and learning. One way that this is accomplished is by incorporating opportunities for community engagement beyond classroom walls in ways that employ teaching practicum experiences in K–12 classrooms. This article describes one teacher educator's experiences preparing secondary English and literacy preservice teachers enrolled in a Teaching Writing Course where students participate in the coordination and facilitation of a community writing event for local middle and high school students. Preservice teachers witnessed writing instruction and youth writing practices that thrived in an educational partnership among multiple stakeholders, including students, parents, teachers, administrators, university professors, and community youth liaisons. Then I share examples of students' reflections post-Writing Our Lives experiences to demonstrate their emerging understanding of the role of community engagement in their development of teacher identities.     

Engaging difference: towards a pedagogy of interbeing

In this article, I discuss how by engaging difference teachers and students can go beyond the binary of “self” and “other” towards “interbeing”. I first discuss how postcolonial and feminist perspectives can inform multicultural discourse by rethinking self and other in terms of hybrid identities and cultures. Then, I draw on Thich Nhat Hanh's (1991) concepts of mindfulness, contemplation, and interbeing; bell hooks' (1994) concept of an engaged pedagogy; and my reflections on my own practice of teaching multicultural education courses. I argue that a self-reflexive pedagogy of interbeing is transformative, enabling both students and teachers to “see with the eyes of interbeing” (Hanh, 1991, p. 98) and heal from the wounds of oppression.     

The challenge of establishing a professional practice within practical education

Clinical teachers in the discipline of nursing in Denmark undergo additional education in addition to their registered nursing education to establish their teaching skill qualifications practicum. This ethnographic study examines some of the pedagogical initiatives clinical teachers are practicing as working professionals attempting to gain a foothold in their own jurisdiction. This study demonstrates that teaching practices contain implicit norms of what counts as knowledge among clinical teachers. Consequently, the classic knowledge hierarchy is continuously reproduced, and the intrinsic qualities of practice that are characterised as opaque, fluctuating, concrete and highly personal are overlooked and downplayed in the clinical teacher's teaching practices. Instead, bringing abstract, academic knowledge into play seems to be a strong marker that emerges when distinguishing the actual practice of nursing from clinical teaching. Organisational imperatives strongly disrupt the pedagogical agenda. When clinical teachers struggle to demarcate jurisdictions, their professional identities are at risk of being blurred and becoming unclear.     

Challenging and Appropriating Discourses of Power: Listening to and Learning from Early Career Early Childhood Teachers of Color

ABSTRACT

The racial mismatch between teachers and students has become a salient issue in efforts to counter the historical failure of children of Color in American (pre)schools. To address this mismatch, scholars have argued for the critical need to recruit and retain teachers of Color. In this article, we propose that to successfully prepare teachers of Color so that they remain committed to the profession, we must learn from their experiences during their preservice preparation and their first years of teaching. Against the backdrop of normative institutional discourses shaping teachers and teaching, we sought to learn from the ways in which six early career early childhood teachers of Color reconciled their preservice teacher education experiences, identities, and beliefs about education with the construction of their identities as teachers. To do so, we asked: How do the discursive spaces of early childhood teaching and teacher education shape the practices, beliefs, and identities of early childhood teachers of Color during their teacher education programs and within their three first years of teaching? Through Critical Narrative Analysis of in-depth interviews, we sought to unveil the discourses that shape and are shaped by the experiences of early career early childhood teachers of Color. Findings indicate that instead of being colonized by institutional discourses and oppressed by others' perceptions, to remain in the profession, these early career early childhood teachers challenged and appropriated institutional discourses, reauthoring them agentively. Implications underscore the responsibility of teacher education programs in preparing teachers of Color to negotiate the ever-so-normative discursive space of early childhood teaching and teacher education, if they are to enter and remain in the profession.     

Apple Jumper,Teacher Babe,and Bland Uniformer Teachers: Fashioning Feminine Teacher Bodies

A student teacher group's conversation about teacher clothing as reflective of certain kinds of reprehensible or desirable teacher identities provoked the writing of this article. I use a feminist poststructuralist analysis to explore the three categories of women teachers' dress suggested by the student teachers as signifiers of women teachers' subjectivities discursively produced within the contexts of schooling. The article also challenges the three categories as constructions produced by this student teacher group in their positionality as young, White, middle-class, heterosexual female novice teachers in the Southeast region of the United States. This inquiry highlights the limitations and constrictions of women teachers' institutionalized subjectivities and suggests ways in which these limitations and constrictions offer sites for resistance, specifically in relation to clothing choices that shape and reflect a feminine teacher body.     

National identity and its relationship with teachers' historical knowledge and pedagogy: the case of Taiwan

National identity is one of the most important forms of ideology that affects human behaviours. Yet, the issue of whether it influences history teachers' subject matter knowledge or teaching practice is overlooked most of the time. With regime change in Taiwan, history curriculum and textbooks are no longer dominated by a China-centred narrative; more Taiwanese history is included in the curriculum. Given the fact that the Taiwanese are split on the issue of national identity, it is important to understand if and how teachers vary in their historical knowledge and instruction. This study examines the issue by investigating the relationships between Taiwanese junior high school history teachers' national identities, their subject matter knowledge and teaching practices. The result indicates that teachers' national identities significantly relate to their historical knowledge and conceptions about history, but bear no relationship to their teaching approaches. Pro-independence teachers have significantly more knowledge in both Taiwanese and Chinese histories and have better conceptions about the nature of history, but they do not necessarily choose to provide students multiple perspectives and interpretations. The implications for democratic citizenship education and teacher education are discussed.     

Teachers of Chinese Ancestry: Interaction of identities and professional roles

The research presented in this paper, based on ethnographic interviews with 19 female and 6 male Canadian teachers of Chinese ancestry, is part of a larger study examining perceptions of careers in teaching by secondary school and university students as well as practising teachers, all of minority Chinese or Punjabi Sikh ancestry (Beynon, Toohey & Kishor, 1992; Beynon & Toohey, 1995; Beynon & Toohey, 1998; Hirji & Beynon, 2000). Drawing on Britzman's (1992) theoretical distinction between teachers' roles and identities, the thesis of our research is that "role", which Britzman describes as impermeable and prescribed by normative institutional practices and ideologies, is, rather, potentially porous. We see that teachers of minority ancestry infuse their roles with new dimensions that draw on their identities. Hall's (1996) materialist theorizing helps us to see how identity, multifaceted and fluid, can be a source for negotiating roles. We recommend changes in teacher education and schools that would help to authorize transformation so that these settings which presently privilege the values, practices and discourses of the dominant Anglo-European Canadian society can become more inclusive of the identities and experiences of minority teachers.     

Integrating the ontological,epistemological, and sociocultural aspects: a holistic view of teacher education

The three aspects of teacher change – ontological, epistemological, and sociocultural – are traditionally regarded as independent. Usually only the epistemological aspect is highlighted in formal teacher education. In this paper, I argue that a holistic and interdependent view of these aspects is needed. Thus, this paper aims to explore the process of teacher learning from a holistic perspective. Through deliberative discussions and selection, 13 ‘good’ teachers were interviewed in this study. The findings indicate that there may be a two-stage pattern (the II-VA model) that describes two different sorts of teachers. The first sort refers to those teachers who developed strong identities before beginning their teaching service and who tended to have a clearer educational vision which had a direct impact on their practices and professional development. As for the second sort, the teachers’ identities were vague in their first years of teaching, but their professional identities gradually developed within the referential community with affective and professional functions. These stages imply that we should replace ‘abstract theory’ with ‘subject reflection’ in the center of teacher education. Three kinds of reflection (theory-rationale, identity-integration and vision-accomplishment) are thus identified from a holistic view of teacher change.     

OPERATIONALIZING IDENTITY IN ACTION: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF DIRECT VERSUS PROBABILISTIC MEASURES OF CURRICULAR ROLE IDENTITY FOR INQUIRY-BASED SCIENCE TEACHING

Teachers’ curricular role identities are those dimensions of their professional identities concerned with the use of curriculum materials. In a previous study, we developed and tested a survey instrument designed to measure preservice elementary teachers’ development of curricular role identity for science teaching through their use of science curriculum materials. In this follow-up study, a revised version of the survey was administered to a second group of preservice elementary teachers in the same science methods course, and data were analyzed within and across years. Results from this study suggest that preservice teachers articulated important similarities and differences between the curricular role identities for science teaching they attributed to themselves and to more experienced elementary teachers. Over time, they were often able to begin to appropriate the curricular role identities for science teaching that they attributed to more experienced elementary teachers. However, findings from the second survey administration also suggest that preservice teachers’ curricular role identities for science teaching are more stable when characterized by their actual curriculum design practices than when characterized by comparative, probabilistic means. These findings have important implications for science teacher education and curriculum development, as well as the operationalization of curricular role identity in education research.     

From teachers to educators: homogenising tendencies in contemporary South African educational reforms

This paper argues that the sociological literature concerning teachers' identities and their social locations have tended to concentrate primarily on only two aspects of teachers: teachers as workers; and, teachers as professionals. Whilst these are still relevant in considering the forces impacting upon teachers they are by no means sufficient. Teachers are more than just workers and professionals. They are raced, gendered, with different sexual orientations, religious beliefs, and so on, and their identities and consequently their daily, lived experiences on these levels also need attention. Locating the discussion within contemporary South African education and noting the shift in nomenclature from `the teacher' to `the educator', I point out that there is a consistent tendency in discursively projecting teachers in homogenised and generalised ways which cannot `speak' analytically to the situated realities of teachers. In this regard, I use two case examples of teachers in different contexts to point to the importance of incorporating theoretically a more complex and nuanced understanding of the constitutive elements that make up `the teacher/educator'.     

A narrative examination of early childhood teachers’ shared identities in teamwork

This study examines the two kindergarten teachers’ shared professional identities in teamwork in an effort to clarify what constitutes their shared identities and how these identities affect the teachers’ professional practices and beliefs. The relational nature of identity maintains that individuals are not the only constructors of their identity, and the literature on teacher education emphasizes the importance of identity in teacher development. The in-depth analysis of the two kindergarten teachers’ narrative interviews revealed how the educators constructed their professional identities by intertwining the features of their context, feedback, and teaching. The findings indicate that the shared professional identities of the two early childhood teachers are developed and negotiated through four shared features: commitment, feedback, educational tasks, and professional agency. Together these four shared features shape the teachers’ professional roles and pedagogical practices—either by giving support to professional growth and empowerment or by having a decreasing effect on the teachers’ professional identity and agency in early childhood contexts.     

Paying Attention to Bodies in Education: theoretical resources and practical suggestions

This article theorizes and exemplifies reconceptualized teaching practices, both in early childhood education (ECE) and in a couple of programs within the new Swedish Teacher Education (since 2001). These programs are tightly knit to the last 12 years of reconceptualized early childhood education practices in and around Stockholm, built on deconstructive, co‐constructive, and re‐constructive principles, inspired by poststructural and feminist poststructural theories. The aim is foremost to work towards a dissolution and/or transgression of the modernist theory‐practice binary that dominates ECE and teacher education practices, where theory is meant to be applied to practice. Student teachers, as well as pre‐school teachers, use what I have conceptualized as deconstructive talks, as a possibility of making visible the dominant discourses of childhood, identity, learning, play, and gender in the performed and documented teaching practices. In teacher education, students’ narratives are also deconstructed. The aim is to transgress teaching‐as‐usual; i.e. dominant and normative ways of thinking and acting in teaching and learning situations. I will suggest an ethics of ‘resistance’, affirmation and becoming, inspired by Derridean deconstructionist thinking, as a professional attitude and reflexive mode for teachers, teacher students and teacher educators.     

Contexts which shape and reshape new teachers’ identities: A multi-perspective study

This paper presents the major findings of a longitudinal study of teachers’ professional identities in the early years of teaching. It analyzes key influences upon the ways in which new teachers’ identities are shaped and reshaped over time. Through their own perceptions, analyses of the school cultures in which they work and their pupils’ views it reveals how the interplay between contextual, cultural and biographical factors affects their teaching practices. Teachers’ personal and professional histories and pre-service training, alongside issues of school culture and leadership, emerge as stronger mediating influences (than previous literature suggests) in determining the kinds and relative stability and instability of professional identities which teachers develop in the early years of teaching and thus the kinds of teachers they become and their effectiveness.     

Identity Politics and the Queering of Art Education: Inclusion and the Confessional Route to Salvation

In this article I discuss the relationship between theories of identity and making practices in secondary art and design. Of particular interest is the way students are invited to explore identities in relation to a sense of self and the extent to which this is informed by schools' concern to make diversity visible through multicultural celebration, thus framing and possibly limiting exploration. It is notable that non‐heternormative sexual identities remain largely invisible in the official curriculum and I examine the disjunction between this absence and their hypervisibilty in the mass media and its culture of confession/exposure. I revisit Michel Foucault's discussion of the history of sexuality as a way to understand the development of confessional discourses in modern culture and to provide an alternative and ambivalent reading of the power relations implicit in work exploring identities by art and design students. Specifically, I look at the position of gay and lesbian students and teachers, and ask whether their sexuality can figure within the injunction ‘explore your identity’. Given the heteronormative culture of schooling, I end by recommending that individuals should be wary of outing themselves in the name of self‐expression but that art teachers could use strategies of distancing to engage students with issues of sexuality and join with others to counter homophobia by queering the curriculum.     

Within and beyond a grow-your-own-teacher program: Documenting the contextualized preparation and professional development experiences of critically conscious Latina teachers

ABSTRACT

This study provides an account of seven Latina teachers’ select educational, professional, and personal experiences over the past 10 years as they completed a grow-your-own-teacher program, became licensed teachers, and established themselves in Latinx minority–majority public schools within their rural, mid-western community. More specifically, as a Latina researcher and participant observer, I sought to better understand the culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) Latina teachers’ process-oriented engagement and conscientization over time. Far from being ‘ready-made’ conscientized teachers, in this work I discuss the ways CLD Latina teachers’ multiple and developing identities as bilingual learners, mothers, racialized minorities in schools, and educated professionals serve as both burdens and gifts in their engagement and processes of conscientization for teaching CLD students. Through the use of critical literatures, and life and professional story methodologies informed by Chicana feminist epistemologies, I sought to privilege Latina teachers’ narratives as well as uncover the mechanisms and experiences that proved most impactful for their development and sustainment within white normative educational spaces. Findings illustrate an emergence of racialized, identitarian resources among Latinas and implicate a nuanced, culturally contextualized, pedagogical approach to pre-/in-service CLD teacher professional development that engages participants in reflective storying, critical inquiry, and restorative community building.     

A Shared Place of Discovery and Creativity: Practices of Contemporary Art and Design Pedagogy

This article is based on a project that explored the practices of art and design beginning teachers (BTs) working with learners in a post‐age‐16 context. The aim of the project was to: explore contemporary art and design practices; explore the concept of artist teacher learner researcher; enable beginning teachers to collaborate with post‐age‐16 pupils and develop new approaches and strategies to art and design pedagogy. Through practices that blurred learner‐teacher identities a dialectical pedagogy emerged and a collaborative community of practice developed, all enabled through a renegotiation and reconceptualising of places of learning. The beginning teachers also started to construct their artist teacher identities, understand what it means to practise as an artist teacher in the classroom, understand the impact of these practices on teaching and learning and develop new learning and teaching methods. This project demonstrates the possibilities of these practices for contemporary art and design pedagogy and also how these practices can endure and be sustainable for this community of beginning teachers in the current cultural, social and political contexts of education.     

Hope as Work--Student Teachers Constructing Their Narrative Identities

This article examines how student teachers construct their teacher identities by using (auto)biographical stories. Teacher identity is seen as a narrative process and teaching as a certain kind of practice, in which hope is a significant part. The inquiry is based on 35 essays written by students. The analysis includes five different stages of reading. The students are aware of the moral roots of teachers' work, its joys and predicaments, and struggle to make sense of the different narratives they hear about teachers' work. Although student teachers consider hope as an important part of teaching, they at the same time 'apologise' for having such an 'unrealistic view'. The results prove that (auto)biographical stories are a powerful tool for making the moral dimensions of teachers' identities visible. The results also challenge teacher educators and administrators of education to support student teachers to keep up their prospects of hope.     

Framing Controversial Identity Issues in Schools: The Case of HB2, Bathroom Equity,and Transgender Students

This article explores how teachers might address controversial identity issues in their classrooms, using the 2016 North Carolina House Bill 2 that raised the issue of transgender bathroom rights to the forefront of societal discourse as an example. I analyze the issue using the three most commonly cited criteria for determining the openness of controversial issues: epistemic, political, and politically authentic. I then discuss the challenges teachers face when confronted with issues that are epistemically settled but publicly open and implicate students' identities. I conclude by arguing that in those cases in which there exists a clear empirical justification for teaching a controversial identity issue as settled, doing so may be prudent even if it limits democratic discourse or presents an inherent risk for teachers.