Stefano Bertone

And if L. Wittgenstein Helped Us to Think Differently About Teacher Education

This article outlines a broad research program (Lakatos 1987) in cultural anthropology that has been conducted over the past fifteen years in the field of teacher education. The core hypotheses of the program and their theoretical foundations, which are based on analytical philosophy (Wittgenstein in Philosophical investigations (PI). Blackwell, Oxford, 1968), are first reviewed: the immanence of the subject through and in the experience of language, the assumption of individuation and subsequent subjectivization, and subjectivization as the process of following rules and/or carrying out the actions governed by the rules. The theoretical advances in the study of subjectivization are then presented, along with the empirical research findings that show how the subjectivized individual in teacher education is constructed from and through learning rules. The article concludes with an explanation of why it is important to expand this research stream on subjectivization, which is defined as a process occurring in and through actions governed by rules.