Fiachra Long

Novice teachers as ‘invisible’ learners

The present study focuses on the way novice teachers, who are part of a one-year postgraduate diploma in post-primary teaching, have opted to negotiate their status as school teachers. In particular, it asks why novice teachers prefer to hide as they scramble to learn how to teach. On the basis of three separate interviews spaced out though the teaching year 2009 (January, March, May), a team of university-based tutors probed for student reactions to competence-based issues. Adopting a sociocultural perspective, this study drew upon roughly 10% of the pre-service student cohort (n = 17), each in a different placement location. The study looked, in particular, at their negotiating power, particularly the effect of school supports for their reality as learners. Findings suggest that without quality mentoring support, our pre-service teachers prefer to become ‘invisible’ as learners. Three pre-professional stances are identified: fragile, robust and competitive. The key finding is that none of these pre-professional stances mitigate pre-service students’ lack of negotiating power. On the other hand, informal school-based supports can help students considerably.

Authoring oneself and being authored as a competent teacher

What kind of self is being made available and denied to student teachers as they participate in life in their teaching practice schools? In addressing this question empirically, the article seeks to show the forms of meaning being made and experienced by student teachers and the identities that are authored, authorised and constrained. A sociocultural perspective on professional learning, with its emphasis on participation agency and identity, illuminates aspects of the process of becoming a teacher and highlights the tension that is there for students within available meanings. Having to opt to be a teacher at the expense of a learner identity constrains what is available to be appropriated in professional settings with potential consequences for how beginner teachers frame themselves, their learners and their colleagues.

Protocols of Silence in Educational Discourse.

For the past number of years, experienced teachers have sometimes come to visit my office with a sense that they are working outside the official educational system. In many ways these teachers see themselves as subversives, acting on behalf of their students to deliver a better educational experience, but in many cases they feel that they are working outside the norm of the educational system. This raises the question about the impact of educational discourse on the public and the degree of freedom such public discourses allow to teachers or other professionals who find themselves dedicated to norms of practice that they suspect are not endorsed by all. This article considers what Foucault meant when he wrote that discourse points to regularities, ‘discursive regularities’, rules and norms that belong to the discourse itself but not necessarily to those who use it or try to break free from it. It examines further Foucaults notion of a discursive regularity and suggests that in Ireland three protocols of speech govern both what is sayable and what is unsayable. These are analysed in terms of rubric, paradigm and noise. A brief description of these ideas is given before attempting to see how each of these protocols (if valid) might contribute to the muting of educational debate generally and the subsequent sense of being marginalised that some teachers have expressed.

Research as living knowledge

ABSTRACT This paper proposes that research is a function of living knowledge. Research makes tacit assumptions about the meaning of life, despite its supposed metaphysical neutrality. Even though research may focus on a particular area, its elastic nature suggests that it is fundamentally a self-reflective and therefore an educational practice. The history of modern educational thought since Bacon reveals a tension between knowledge as personal (and thus educational) and knowledge as impersonal. The result is that today we do not know whether to think of knowledge as impersonal data or as a feature of human experience. This paper argues that it is time to reconsider the humanist tradition by viewing knowledge as a form of learning and research as a form of living knowledge. The research which is so highly appreciated in scientific laboratories as well as the research in libraries would then be seen to have a common living source.

Knowing how to feel about the Other? Student teachers, and the contingent role of embodiments in educational inequalities

This paper explores affective dimensions to the positioning of teachers within persistent educational inequalities. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of ‘affective economies’, we argue that inequalities are not maintained through how teachers and student teachers ‘feel about’ ‘different’ students per se. Rather, the very possibility of becoming a particular subject and object of feeling is itself already part of the production of learner differences and inequalities. We examine how affects circulate to shape particular objects (e.g. a teacher’s physical body) and collective attachments to particular signs (e.g. ‘the national teaching body’). We argue that contemporary changes to Irish and European teacher education policy reinforce rather than question educational inequalities. They produce and align ‘shock’ at student underachievement with teachers’ physical and collective bodies, while ‘sympathetically’ responsibilising teachers to professionalise in order to cope with or compensate for persistently ‘different’ and/or underachieving students. To explain how this process is lived and resisted, an analysis of interviews with our own student teachers explores how the affective economy which constitutes teacher education may become contingently directed in socially just or unjust ways.

Transhuman Education? Sloterdijk's Reading of Heidegger's Letter on Humanism

Peter Sloterdijk presented a reading of Heideggers Letter on Humanism at a conference held at Elmau in 1999. Reinterpreting the meaning of humanism in the light of Heideggers Letter, Sloterdijk focused his presentation on the need to redefine education as a form of genetic ‘taming’ and proposed what seemed to be support for positive eugenics. Although Sloterdijk claimed that he only wanted to open a debate on the issue, he could not have been surprised at the level of opposition this suggestion aroused. In the weeks following, he blamed Habermas for raising this opposition and for refusing to engage with him openly. Although Luis Arenas has chronicled the aftermath of Sloterdijks paper, it may be of interest to educators to examine how Heideggers text is presented. What is this new humanism? If Heideggers new humanism was based on a mystical attitude towards Being, so Sloterdijks new humanism was to be based on the materialist principles of a biotechnological age. Unlike Heidegger who rejected technology as yet one further example of the forgetfulness of Being, Sloterdijk seems to embrace technology and the enhancement of the human body and mind as the next great step forward in educational theory. Could he possibly be right? Is education in these times a partner or an opponent of the technological enhancement of the human being? This article tries to identify Sloterdijks disagreements with Heidegger on the question of the human.

Book Reviews: The Science of Life: Maurice Blondel: Philosophy of Action and the Scientific Method. By Michael A Conway. Frankfurt / New York / Oxford: Peter Lang (European University Studies, Vol 616), 2000. Pp. ix+485. ISBN 3-631-37133-0; US ISBN 0-8204-4823-0

ous background in science. This thesis is plausible enough. Indeed, the subtitle of Blondel’s 1893 work entitled L’Action promised to present a ’science of life’, and the concern of Conway’s work is to analyse the meaning of this project by paying a more literal respect to Blondel’s scientific method which stemmed particularly from mathematics and the very clear influences of Leibniz. The author fleshes out this contact not only in Leibniz’s controversial view of the vinculum substantiale, whereby Leibniz sought to provide a theoretical explanation of eucharistic transubstantiation, but also in Leibniz’s discovery of the calculus. Conway concludes that Blondel used this critical thought of limit in developing his philosophy of action. The context for examining this calculus-modelled method is the evidence linking Blondel’s thought in its genesis to a reaction against, or a sympathy with, the various positivisms of nineteenth-century French philosophy. This is the context which has been the subject of much recent debate. It is generally acknowledged that Blondel developed his philosophy of action in a vortex of competing discourses about science and scientific method. On the one hand, there was the positivism of Comte, developed largely as a reaction to the relativism of speculative systems, then the secularist positivism of Taine and Renan, while, on the other side, the side most sympathetic to Blondel’s own sensibilities, one can find writers like Ravaisson, Lachelier and Emile Boutroux. The basic problem is the same as the one faced by Plato: relativism and the reaction to relativism, how to link the spiritual to the material, mind to matter, consciousness to action. To have a science of something is to be able to present a necessary discourse on something, a discourse that is far removed from relativism or subjectivism, the promise is to say something general but valid at any time and in any circumstance. When such a method is

Living with the Accuser

Beyond the rusting doorways exposed to the wind and rain of conscious thought, recessed even further than those corridors where profound thoughts wind their inward way towards the cobwebbed chambers of the mind, hidden behind every area illuminated by consciousness, stands a door. It is the door of the unconscious mind, a door that is often in use while we sleep or lapse into daydreaming, often opening and closing when we know least about it. This door opens onto a room whose contents cannot be viewed by the conscious mind and since the light of consciousness cannot penetrate beyond the doorway, the contents of this room are a matter of guesswork. The normal bearings of daylight do not apply. To discover anything about this room and its contents, the faculty of perception must learn to work without the guide of the senses. Eyes must learn to see without seeing; ears must learn to hear without hearing; the understanding must learn to operate without clarity. From this room messengers, angeloi, are sent out into the light of day so that by a process of working back some idea of the contents of this room can be deduced. But great care must be taken in case these messengers from the unconscious be sidetracked by consciously structured prejudices and their messages distorted. This is an all too common occurrence. If we ever wanted to enter the room and survey the furniture, assuming that it has furniture, we would have to accustom ourselves to not seeing in the normal way. Under these circumstances there is always the tendency to switch on a light. But there is no light. Not even shadows give us an idea as to what the room contains. No amount of guesswork can be verified. Maupassant was perhaps right to suggest that in this room the furniture is not still but moving and that even if, through some inexplicable miracle, we were able to spot the location of everything just for an instant,

The Inculturation of Brother Vicente Cañas

Vicente Canas, Jesuit brother, born in Spain, raised in Europe as a Catholic and formed as a Jesuit Brother, died in Brazil as an honorary stone age Indian. He was murdered in the Amazon jungle probably on Aprl 6, 1987 after giving his life to the service of the Indians of the Mato Grosso region. At one time he had been adopted by the Myky people as a relative and brother but he lived the last ten years of his life among the Enawen8-nawe. His chronicler, Alberto Casalegno, S.J. had this to report: