Teacher Education and the Political ─ The power of negative thinking

This book seeks to revitalize conversations about the nature and purpose of teacher education in a global context characterized by economic and political anxieties around declining productivity and social inclusion. These anxieties are manifested in such recent, and often contradictory, policy developments as the promotion of teacher professional standards that seek to map and regulate the work of teachers, the deregulation and marketization of teacher education, and the imposition of performance-related pay regimes that tie teacher remuneration to outcomes in high-stakes testing. Together, these and related policy moves can be read as depoliticizing and de-intellectualizing teacher education.

Against this background, this book illustrates how contemporary theory can provide a language for critiquing recent developments and imagining new trajectories for policy and practice. Specifically, the book draws on ideas of antagonism and dissensus from the work of political theorists Jacques Rancière and Chantal Mouffe to argue against the hegemony of consensus in teacher education; on notions of lack, loss and fantasy from Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to gain insights into the politics of crises in teacher education; on ideas of impotentiality and desacralization from philosopher Giorgio Agamben to highlight the importance of maintaining a degree of openness in relation to what and who the figure of the teacher can be and; on the notion of undecidability from the work of Jacques Derrida in order to draw attention to the need to maintain space for genuine decision making as a critical dimension of the ethico-political work of teachers.

Together these ideas provide examples of ‘the power of negative thinking’, illustrating its capacity to unsettle comfortable truths and foreground the always already political nature of teacher education.

Matthew Clarke is Professor of Education at York St John University, UK.

Anne Phelan is Professor of Education in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, The University of British Columbia, Canada.