Abstract
In an anxious world increasingly perceived in terms of risk management, strategies for mapping, articulating and organizing knowledge provide a bulwark against uncertainty. For teacher education, one consequence has been a drive for fullness in relation to knowledge about what teachers should know and be able to do, usually conceived in instrumental terms. Indeed, teacher education, like education more broadly, has been captured by a ‘discursive duopoly’ of
The most beautiful day lacks something; its dark side. Only to a near-sighted god could light by itself appear beautiful. Beside any
should also be said. We don’t arrive at necessary night by omission only. (Juarozz, Vertical Poetry, pp.18)
Education and the retreat to modernity
As we were working on this article, an article was published on the front page of
From the perspective of the current article, this news article is symptomatic of the contemporary moment in teacher education in many global contexts, including North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Specifically, the article reflects neo-liberal emphases on economics and productivity, which encourage us to see education as a form of input, providing human capital to meet the needs of the economy. As such, teacher education, and indeed education more broadly, has become subject to the same managerial norms as those that dominate in the business sector, involving susceptibility to evaluation through the specification and measurement of quantifiable data in the form of impact, output, standards and targets.
The news article, and the policy shift in relation to the preparation of teachers it announces, is also symptomatic of contemporary discourses circulating around teacher education insofar as it is premised on the identification of a deficit (or ‘lack’ to foreshadow our subsequent discussion) – hence the need for a ‘tougher stance’ – that threatens to become a crisis unless addressed. For just as capitalism is characterized by recurring crises (Harvey, 2010; Mirowski, 2013; Valodas, 2012), teaching and teacher education have been subjected to an ongoing series of manufactured crises involving persistent questioning on the part of policymakers and the media, often driven by political timetables, about whether teachers are meeting (or undermining) the nation’s expectations in relation to such criteria as the adequate preparation of a globally competitive workforce, the achievement of sufficiently high academic standards, the transmission of appropriate curricular content and the instillation of sufficient moral fibre in students (Adey and Dillon, 2012; Furlong et al., 2000; Smyth, 2006; Whitty, 2002).
One response to education’s induced sense of crisis has been an increasing degree of policy hyperactivism (Levin, 1998; Vidovich, 2009), reflecting a belief that the creation of policy in and of itself suggests order, authority and expertise (Colebatch, 2009). A further response on the part of governments, seeking to alleviate social anxieties and enhance political legitimacy, has been to depoliticize particular policy domains, reframing them as matters of merely technical concern (Clarke and Newman, 1997). Such depoliticization, by ‘removing a political phenomenon from comprehension of its
In the case of education, depoliticization has been achieved through the deployment of a ‘discursive duopoly’ of instrumentalism and consensualism (Clarke, 2012). Instrumentalism involves the pervasive view that the main purpose of education is to serve the needs of the economy, while consensualism, which works hand in hand with instrumentalism, involves the demonization of disagreement and dissensus and the valorization of agreement and consensus in relation to the instrumentalist view regarding the economic purposes of education. Disagreement thus becomes limited to varying views as to the best means by which instrumental goals can be achieved; dissent regarding the
Meanwhile, determined to argue that teaching is a profession with a complete, impartial and defensible knowledge base, researchers have been drawn into arguments about justification and legitimation, providing compilations of research to make the case for the professional relevance of knowledge and skills to be provided in teacher education (Crocker and Dibbon, 2008; Darling-Hammond, 2006; Darling-Hammond and Bransford, 2005). Yet, ironically, such work only fuels the anxieties of teacher educators and teacher candidates, with the need to meet certification requirements outlined in the teaching standards supplanting concern with the political situatedness and ethical thought processes of teaching. In these and other ways, an impoverishing instrumentalism and a comforting consensualism haunt teacher education and teaching, representing an unwitting retreat into the unequivocal, systematic, yet amnestic world of modernity (Hartley, 2000).
The haunting of teacher education
In the current policy climate, teacher education, as both a field of study or programmatic structure, has been severely impacted, as ‘governments around the world [are] intent on systemic reform of education to improve their country’s global competitiveness … [and] see the reform and progressive management of teacher education as a key component in that systemic reform process’ (Furlong, 2013: 46). In this section, we identify four particular ‘phantoms’ that have haunted teacher education in recent decades, each linked to this systemic reform process. These phantoms include: (a) the continual conjuring of crises that serve to stoke social anxiety about the effectiveness and efficiency of teacher education; (b) the imposition of a false consensus that deadens debate about the practice and purpose of teacher education; (c) the increasing standardization of curriculum and teaching that undermines the cultivation of teachers’ intellectual autonomy; and (d) the reduction of teaching to the application of policies and protocols tailored to producing predetermined ends, thereby sidelining teachers’ moral judgement and disavowing the ethico-political dimension of teaching. Below, we examine each of these four phantoms in greater detail.
Teacher education has long been a site of social anxiety. In recent decades, wider economic anxieties about competitiveness (Connell, 2009), combined with, particularly in the post-9/11 world, political anxieties about the fabric of the nation and the perceived threat to its integrity from alien forces or ‘strangers’ lurking outside or within (Apple, 2011; Kostogriz, 2006), ‘have induced educators to embrace the language and business practices associated with neoliberalism’ (Taubman, 2009: 98), where the latter, while not a unified doctrine, is understood as ‘the pursuit of the disenchantment of politics by economics’ (Davies, 2014: 4). As a consequence of the neo-liberal embrace, it has be argued that ‘there has been a subordination of teacher education as intellectual, moral and ethical endeavor to the production of locally relevant job skills’ (Mayer et al., 2008: 80). Specifically, in the face of various forms of social anxiety and the resulting doubts as to whether teacher education is up to the challenges of the 21st century (e.g. Levine, 2006), policymakers and teacher educators alike have tended to reach out for what Deborah Britzman (2011) refers to as ‘a manual’. Such a manual can be seen as ‘signifying a profession’s unconscious wish for absolute knowledge, and as a defense against crisis. Demands for a manual seem to be one solution to a profession’s anxiety’ (Britzman, 2011: 81).
Conveniently, crises demand efficient management. The quest for efficiency begets standardization, ‘curbing variety so as to facilitate the generation of objective measures of performance’ (Hartley, 2000: 119). In teacher education policy and practice, stabilizing the social and operational meaning of both ‘teacher’ and ‘professional’ thus becomes desirable. As a result, and with the active involvement of professional bodies, teachers have consented to what amounts to impoverishments in practice, such as the elevation of the pseudo-scientificity of standards at the expense of subsequently devalued factors such as affect and intuition, as the price for purportedly accruing greater regard from politicians, policymakers, the media and society in terms of perceived improvements in standing and status. In this sense, increased teacher professionalization has been something of a Faustian pact, with teacher professionalism harnessed to government education reform agendas (Furlong, 2013), and with teachers being positioned ‘on the frontline of national economic defense and in the centre of educational reform, thus justifying the detailed mapping and scrutiny of their work’ (Clarke and Moore, 2013: 488). To this end, teaching standards are offered as
Reimagining teacher education as a site of dissensus is immensely challenging in light of discourses of standardized teacher identities. Strewn across the teacher’s lifespan, otherwise known as ‘the teacher development continuum’, professional learning is justified as a highly positive disposition for all teachers. Quality teachers want to achieve their ‘full potential through relentless and never-ending self-development, out of which [they] can self-regulate in the interests of students and colleagues’ (McWilliam, 2008: 33). Potential takes the form of a stylized identity, ever keen on developing itself as an excellent classroom manager, team builder, literacy instructor or emotionally intelligent leader. The proliferation of webinars, workshops, seminars and graduate programmes attests to this preoccupation, as lifelong learning becomes a life sentence for teachers (Falk, 1999). Much of this talk of professional learning, however, is less about expanding the subjectivity of the teacher and more about delimiting it (Falk, 1999). And even though there has been a growing interest in non-formal professional learning and sharing through social media outlets, much of this material remains tied to, rather than challenging, existing imaginaries of teaching as the implementation of ‘best practice’. As with more formal professional development, ‘teacher profiles’ as statements of teacher competencies and performance standards lurk beneath the surface (OECD, 2005: 10), including the usual array of subject matter knowledge and pedagogical skills, but, significantly, ‘the capacity to continue developing’ (OECD, 2005: 7).
The turn to teaching standards and the articulation of a knowledge base for teaching constitutes a retreat, in our view, into a firmly modernist world view. This is a world in which knowledge is power, in which scientific research evidence is able to provide a basis for policy and practice, and in which experts hold out the promise, by submitting them to rational analysis, of rendering complex and semi-opaque processes like curriculum, teaching and learning visible and hence more controllable (e.g. Hattie, 2009). It is a world in which the intolerable and uncontrollable are redeemed by being made palatable and predictable, in order to provide ‘the specious clarity demanded and enforced by audit cultures’ (MacLure, 2010: 278); the cost of such assimilation is that we enter ‘the regime of the cliché’ (MacLure, 2010: 278). In such a world, it is all too easy for research to be positioned as an exact science, capable of making clear and unambivalent predictions about practice, ignoring the key notion ‘that in the design, enactment and justification of education we have to engage with normative questions’ (Biesta, 2015: 80). Such instrumentalism sidelines the teacher, disembeds knowledge from the idiosyncrasy of particular teaching situations and from the experience and knowledge of teachers, and ignores the moral complexities of teaching (Dunne and Pendlebury, 2002).
The issues and questions that we identify do not deny that important decisions about the nature and content of teachers’ knowledge, skills or dispositions must be made. To think solely in these terms, however, is to neglect teaching and teacher education as forms of praxis, where means and ends are always entangled (Biesta, 2015), where ethical action is the central concern, and where human relationships are particular and fragile. It is to limit ourselves to bloodless categories, narrow notions of the visible and the empirical, professional standards of indifference, institutional rules of distance and control, barely speakable fears of losing the footing that enables us to speak authoritatively and with greater value than anyone else who might. (Gordon, 2007: 21)
Unsettling phantoms: the role of contemporary theorizing in teacher education
In what follows, we illustrate how contemporary theory can provide a language for critiquing recent developments and imagining new trajectories for policy and practice. Importantly, we write from the position of educational researchers and teacher educators who actively and enthusiastically engage with theory in our own work, though we are aware of alternative perspectives that question the value of theory for education (e.g. Kitching, 2008) or see it as an essentially conservative force (e.g. Thomas, 2007). In this respect, our view is closer to that of Ball (1995) and Dimitriadis and Kamberelis (2006), for whom theory comprises concepts and tools for understanding and explaining experiences and processes in critical and creative ways, potentially providing an alternative language to that inscribed in the dominant discourses of current policy and practice. Specifically, in the following discussion, we draw on notions of lack, loss and fantasy from Lacanian psychoanalytic theory (Glynos and Stavrakakis, 2008; Lacan, 1977; McGowan, 2013) to gain insights into the politics of crises in teacher education; on ideas of antagonism and dissensus from the work of political theorist Chantal Mouffe (2000, 2005, 2013) to argue against the hegemony of consensus in teacher education; on the idea of impotentiality from the philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1999) 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 (1988, 1992) to draw attention to the need to maintain space for genuine decision-making as a critical dimension of the ethico-political work of teachers.
Lack and fantasy: beyond neo-liberal anxiety
Anxiety is viewed not just as one of the consequences of neo-liberal economic policies, but also as something more deep-seated and fundamental to human existence. In trying to understand anxiety, a useful contrast can be drawn with fear insofar as whilst the latter has a specific object, which can be either avoided or confronted, anxiety is more akin to an ontological condition or existential state, and is therefore at once both more nebulous and more pervasive. Heidegger linked such existential anxiety to an awareness or intimation of the absence of any secure foundation to our existence (McGowan, 2013: 112). Similarly, drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis and its uptake in critical political theory (Dean, 2009; Glynos and Howarth, 2007; Glynos and Stavrakakis, 2008; Stavrakakis, 1999, 2005; Vighi, 2010), we can read recognition of the fundamental role of ‘lack’ and ‘loss’ in human existence. Such loss is consequent on our emergence as subjects of language and desire insofar as ‘in order to gain the symbolic world we have to sacrifice the essence of what we are seeking in it, in order to gain the signifier we have to sacrifice the signified’ (Stavrakakis, 1999: 39). A pervasive response to such loss is the deployment of fantasies of knowledge and control as strategies for obscuring our disempowerment in the face of lack and resisting the anxieties it provokes: ‘the constant seeking of an impossible absoluteness of knowledge to provide, or at least give the illusion of, certainty towards a safe tomorrow’ (Gunder and Hillier, 2009: 59). Furthermore, our ‘loss’ is something of a paradox, since, not being subjects prior to our entry into the symbolic, we never really had what we subsequently perceive as lost, despite the fact that we build our projects around its recovery (McGowan, 2013; Ruti, 2012). This reading enables us to see how repeated manufactured ‘crises’ around teacher education serve to mobilize, manage and yet keep at bay pervasive social anxieties. Here we might think of Shulman’s (2005) lament with regard to teacher education’s lack of a ‘signature pedagogy’, or the oft-cited comparisons between education and medicine, which highlight the former’s lack of a cumulative, foundational body of evidence-based knowledge. In this reading, awareness of teacher education’s lack of secure foundations contributes to a sense of anxiety in the profession. The remedy in the face of this anxiety is to develop and deploy codified and certified forms of professional knowledge as a protective buttress to ward off doubt, absence and lack.
However, another reading of anxiety is possible, emphasizing not so much its genesis in perceptions of lack in relation to professional knowledge or the absence of social authority, but the latter’s intrusive presence as one of the key sources of anxiety among teachers and teacher educators. According to this perspective, we experience anxiety not as a result of the absence of authority, but when ‘social authority appears nonlacking and ubiquitous, never allowing the subject space to desire’ (McGowan, 2013: 113). In this reading, the policy pandemic to which teacher education has been subjected can be seen as a cause, as well as a consequence, of anxiety. Regardless, however, of whether we focus on absence itself or its consequence in the form of the overwhelming and intrusive presence of authority-as-policy, the critical issue is how we respond to absence or loss.
Here we would argue that, in contrast to the (non-)politics of perpetual crisis management, recognition of loss offers the starting point for a politics that acknowledges, and even enjoys, what we do not have (McGowan, 2013), in the sense that it resists the call to embrace utopian reform. Recognition of loss also provides the basis for an ethics of singularity that sees the infusion of desire and passion as offering potential openings to the sublime and singular, as opposed to the standard and routine, in teaching (Clarke and Moore, 2013). Such an ethics is inherently and necessarily open-ended; it is ‘an ethics that is not dictated by the instrumentalist imperatives of utility, but rather assesses the value of things … on the basis of their proximity (or loyalty) to the Thing’ (Ruti, 2012: 152), where the latter is understood as a sovereign but always inaccessible good, a locus of indeterminacy associated with ‘the power of language to articulate a pure potentiality-for-meaning’ (Boothby, 1991: 241).
Teacher education that embraces an open-ended ethics makes more productive use of anxiety by nurturing resistance to consensually driven reforms and a willingness to entertain ‘real’ educational options.
Antagonism and consensus: legitimizing dissent
In order to confront the contemporary depoliticizing policy consensus and advocate for a properly political view of education based on genuine alternatives, teacher education might turn to Chantal Mouffe’s (2000, 2005, 2013) reconsideration of the political as agonistic pluralism. Mouffe (2013) argues for the recognition of the ‘hegemonic’ nature of every kind of social order – neo-liberal or otherwise – and for envisioning society as the product of ‘hegemonic practices’ directed at the articulation of social institutions and the establishment of order ‘in a context of contingency’ (2). As such, every order (and every attempt at consensus) is the expression of a particular configuration of power relations; things could be otherwise and ‘every order is predicated on the exclusion of other possibilities’ (2). The possibility of challenge by counter-hegemonic forces is ever present. This suggests that antagonism is inherent to all societies. The political, according to Mouffe, refers to this aspect of antagonism that can take various forms and cannot be eliminated or overcome. ‘Proper political questions’, she writes, ‘always involve decisions that require making a choice between conflicting alternatives’ (3).
While the political reveals a society’s difference to itself (Rancière, 2010), politics is that ‘ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions that seeks to establish a certain order and to organize human coexistence in conditions which are always potentially conflicting, since they are affected by the dimension of the political’ (Mouffe, 2013: 2–3). The challenge is how to establish an us/them distinction, which for Mouffe is constitutive of politics, in a way that is compatible with the recognition of pluralism. The aim of democratic politics is to transform antagonism (struggle between enemies) into agonism (struggle among adversaries) (7). Agonistic politics asserts that all ideas deserve to be heard and defended. So, while adversaries may disagree vehemently about what constitutes a good education or the good of education, both agree on the importance of ‘the agonistic struggle’ as the very condition of a living democracy within and beyond the profession.
The education of teachers as political adversaries, in Mouffe’s (2013) terms, involves a recognition of teacher education as a form of critical educational practice that keeps agonism alive, fomenting dissensus and bringing to the fore alternatives repressed by the hegemony. The preparation of teachers as ‘teacher citizens’ (Grumet, 2010: 71), capable and legitimate participants in public discussion about education and policy, involves revitalizing an understanding of the political, the difference between moral and political disputes, and power as constitutive of society, educational purpose and teacher identities; cultivating political emotions, such as anger at injustice, as well as an appreciation of the cultural politics of emotion; and, finally, developing an awareness of the historical and contemporary political projects of the ‘left’ and ‘right’ as they have played out in the field of education and in a range of historical contexts (Ruitenberg, 2009).
The intent here is not to dictate specific political identities for teachers: agonism does not take place between actors with already established identities, but constitutes teachers’ identities. The hope is that teachers, as individuals and in a range of collectives, may learn to exchange ideas, opinions and arguments; form strategic alliances (e.g. with other professions); engage in the play of antagonism; and exercise dissent both within and beyond the profession, when they see fit. There are limits to agonism, however. It is not enough merely to unsettle things; there comes a moment when new institutions and forms of power need to be established – ‘the necessary moment of closure’ (Mouffe, 2013: 15). While ethical discourse (within the field of education) might be able to avoid this moment, political discourse cannot. Acknowledging the constitutive character of social division, Mouffe (2013) argues against the possibility of a final reconciliation between adversaries. The multiplicity that is the people, or indeed the profession, must remain divided rather than just simply multiple.
Teacher education characterized by antagonism and consensus increases opportunities for teachers to build and refine their own arts of existence in a climate of ‘open potentiality’ (Colebrook, 2008: 111).
(Im)potentiality: reconsidering ‘teacher development’
The imperative that teachers ‘reach their potential’ and yet maintain ‘the capacity to continue developing’ in the direction outlined by policy constitutes a condition of unfreedom for teachers. Teachers’ professional development becomes the realization of some predetermined object of policy – the teacher (profile) – that must be actualized. What is lost in this increasing normalization is ‘the open potentiality from which the speaking, self-constituting [subject] will emerge’ (Colebrook, 2008: 111). Teachers have little say in what teaching means in public discourse because that has already been decided: instrumentally cast, as we have noted above, as epiphenomenal to the economy and co-opted in the promotion of social discipline and national identity. Caught in both a politics and an ontology of substance – what (already) is – teachers and teaching are denied ‘a politics of potentiality: a future of open, unimpeded becoming’ (Colebrook, 2008: 112).
Georgio Agamben’s (1999: 179) theorization of ‘existing potentiality’ allows us to understand what is at stake in the politics of contemporary policy. ‘Existing potentiality’ refers to the potential of someone who has knowledge or ability of some kind; as such, she or he does not have to undergo some change in order to fulfil her or his potential. The teacher already has knowledge and ability, ‘on the basis of which he can also not bring his knowledge into actuality’, by not instructing, for example (179). The mode of existence of potentiality is therefore the potential to not do, the potential not to pass into actuality, which Agamben terms ‘impotentiality’ (183). He concludes that human faculty is ‘the presence of an absence’ and potentiality is the mode of existence of this privation (179).
In order ‘to become potential’, therefore, teachers must be in relation to their own incapacity; they must be capable of their own impotentiality (Agamben, 1999: 182). For teachers, the experience of (im)potentiality might constitute a period of sustained study. Study is, for Agamben, interminable. Each book leads onto another, each new reference begins a trail to another, and as the student pursues meaning associated with other meanings, the end seems far in the distance. Those who study have to lose their stubborn attachment to particular lines of inquiry and comforting ideas such as best practice. Paradoxically, it is through studying that the teacher is rendered stupid, melancholic and yet free. Freedom as the rhythm of study is experienced as a shuttling between bewilderment and lucidity, discovery and loss, agent and patient (Lewis, 2011). In study, the close relation between potential and (im)potential is maintained; the impotent is included alongside the potent; the law (of quality teaching or professional development) is not abolished nor is it left operative; nothing changes and yet everything changes. The result is what Agamben (1999) terms ‘a whatever being’ – a singularity that remains indistinct and unrepresentable, free from any imperative or determination to be set in advance. Potentiality, in this view, is a means without end, and without measure (Lewis, 2011).
Despite the rhetoric of potential, contemporary policy severs the relation between potentiality and impotentiality. It does so by its efforts to determine, define and represent the actuality of ‘teacher’ and ‘teaching’ via standardization. Teachers’ potential is, in this view, a means to a predetermined end; and it can be measured. Moreover, stylized neo-liberal subjects believe themselves to be capable of everything (‘I can!’); they have been rendered blind not to their capacities but to their incapacities, not to what they can do but to what they cannot, or can not, do. There is no realization that they have been subjected to forces and processes over which they have lost control. Here we witness the dehumanizing tendencies of contemporary policy. While other living beings are capable of their specific potentiality, they can do this or that; only human beings are capable of their own impotentiality – that is, the capacity to not be (Agamben, 1999). The root of freedom, for Agamben, is found in ‘the abyss of potentiality’: To be free is not simply to have the power to do this or that thing, nor is it simply to have the power to refuse to do this or that thing. To be free is …
Teacher education premised on choice and impotentiality cultivates an appreciation of the significant role of indecision in teachers’ educational judgement.
Undecidability and ethics: professing judgement
In a world where the uncontrollable are redeemed by being rendered predictable, it is all too easy for research to be positioned as an exact science, capable of making clear and unambivalent predictions about practice. Indeed, it is not uncommon to hear teachers, as well as researchers and policymakers, making easy assertions along the lines of ‘research tells us’ or ‘research clearly shows’, in order to justify a particular decision or line of reasoning about practice. Such expressions betray a sense that a single unbroken line exists between research issues, questions, data, evidence and implications, when the relationships among these entities are more akin to a tangled web of partial connections. Pre-service and novice teachers, prone to ‘this incredible need to believe’ (Phelan, 2013), are particularly vulnerable in this regard, as they seek secure and reliable knowledge which might provide the basis for predictable outcomes as a consequence of their pedagogical and professional decisions. Hence, ‘it is important that students preparing for teaching learn about the research process and how easily it leads to error rather than truth. They need to respect research but be acutely aware of its limitations’ (Snook et al., 2009: 105). Like teaching, research is as much about art as it is about science.
This quest for certitude is further fomented by the combined forces of neo-liberal policy proliferation and audit culture’s risk management strategies, which both serve to undermine and work against the critically informed yet creative judgement of teachers by ring-fencing decision-making within policies, protocols, rules and guidelines. To take just two examples, we will briefly discuss prescriptive curricula and professional teacher standards, both of which reflect neo-liberalism’s deep-seated distrust of professionalism in general and of teachers in particular (Connell, 2009: 217).
Increasingly the norm across a range of international jurisdictions, national and state curricula are intended to delineate and define a linear progression through various domains of knowledge that students will plot over the school years. They are also designed to be ‘teacher-proof’ in a misguided belief that this will ensure that learning is uniform for all students and that central curriculum writers know better than teachers what it is that students should learn. Yet, in so doing, they remove teachers’ professional autonomy and undermine their exercise of judgement through this act of prescription. Teaching is thus reduced to a technical rather than an ethical, critical or creative act.
Meanwhile, teachers’ professional autonomy and agency, including their scope for exercising ethical professional judgement, has been further eroded by professional standards that seek to map and enumerate the work of teachers, define effective teaching and articulate precisely what constitutes teacher quality. To quote from the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership’s (AITSL’s) The National Professional Standards for Teachers are a public statement of what constitutes teacher quality. They define the work of teachers and make explicit the elements of high-quality, effective teaching in 21st century schools that will improve educational outcomes for students. The Standards do this by providing a framework which makes clear the knowledge, practice and professional engagement required across teachers’ careers. They present a common understanding and language for discourse between teachers, teacher educators, teacher organisations, professional associations and the public. (AITSL, 2011: 2)
In resisting the urge to certitude, Derrida’s notion of the aporia offers a useful counterpoint. Derived from the Greek term referring to a situation ‘without’ (
Theorizing with Lacan, Mouffe, Agamben or Derrida carries no guarantees. We believe, however, that by acknowledging the complexities, ambiguities, contradictions and aporias of social reality, such theorizing can fuel conversation, contemplation and critique, thereby unsettling the phantoms of modernity in teacher education. Loosening the hegemonic grip of the instrumental–consensual discursive duopoly and preserving the possibility of newness in teacher education require the kind of negative thinking that such theorizing can offer.
New directions for teacher education: the power of negative thinking
We have argued that the depoliticization of teacher education constitutes a retreat to modernity and its penchant for (epistemic) certainty, (ahistorical) predictability and (centralized) control. We have advocated for the reanimating of teaching and teacher education as political and ethical activities, and for an intellectually autonomous teaching subject, via the work of several contemporary theorists. Underlying our argument is the recognition that teacher education may have reached a point where symbols such as standards, indicators and outcomes no longer represent the object – education – but have
Yet, in talking about negativity, we inevitably run the risk of reifying and positivizing it – that is, of turning it into another form of the positive – rather than seeing it as essentially