Looking like a teacher: fashioning an embodied identity through dressage

Vanessa Rutherford, Paul F. Conway, Rosaleen Murphy

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

This article makes a case for bringing in the body from the margins of research on teacher education. In doing so, it considers the personal and socio cultural issues reported by seventeen pre-service teachers (PSTs), who are part of a one-year post graduate diploma in post-primary teaching, when learning to embody and fashion teacher identity. The article focuses on embodiment drawing on qualitative interview data from a large-scale government-funded study on initial teacher education. Drawing on Foucault’s general theory of dressage, at the center of which reigns the notion of disciplining and applying the methodology of critical discourse analysis, this article presents three themes tethered to the analysable and manipulable teacher body, namely dressage as compliance, dressage as discipline and dressage as performance. For PSTs, ‘looking like a teacher’ and dressage as a practice of power is a significant part of the fabric of their professional school life.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)325-339
Number of pages15
JournalTeaching Education
Volume26
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 3 Jul 2015
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Foucault
  • dressage
  • embodiment
  • pre-service teacher education
  • teacher identity

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