Re‐deploying techniques of pastoral power by telling tales on student teachers

This paper draws on interviews undertaken with second year student teachers. They describe their motivations for wishing to enter the profession and imagine the type of teacher they wish to become. These student teachers express a desire to make a difference as strong motivation for wanting to enter the profession. This is not uncharacteristic. Here we explore this motivation as possibly illustrative of an uncritical adoption of teacher subjectivities underpinned by notions of pastoral power. The argument is made that current debates that reinscribe the binary between teacher as ‘moral’ and teacher as ‘market‐orientated’ may make teacher subjectivities premised on pastoral power a more intuitive and attractive choice. The desire to make a difference can be worthwhile. However, if read as a non‐reflexive expression of pastoral power, it can also risk consolidating teachers as knowing what is best for students and students as disempowered. In this context, these interviews are used as a means of telling tales on student teachers in order to reflect on our own practices as teacher educators. What do their words tell us about the ways the profession is being imagined in the current social context? How do students’ tales reflect the messages transferred through our own classes? And finally, how can retelling these tales help to create practices that are more responsive to students’ motivations and imaginings and the current professional contexts? We argue that it is important to explore techniques of pastoral power and the potential for these to delimit rather than expand multiple subjectivities within teacher education. Telling tales on student teachers, in this context, is a means of reflecting on our own practices as teacher educators and is an apt beginning and integral part of this redeployment of techniques of pastoral power.

© 2007 School of Education, University of Queensland