Unpacking Discourses of Normalizing Taiwanese Teachers in the Era of Globalization

• In Event: Educational Reform and the Problem of Subjectification: Deglobalizing the Global

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate how global discourses on educational policy are intertwined with and adapted to the local specificity to (re)define and govern the constitution of the teachers’ knowledge, identities and practice in contemporary Taiwan. Teacher education was condemned as a centralized mechanism of producing ossified education and a troop of teachers as guardians of national solidarity (Wang, 1997, Fwu & Wang, 2002). Since 1990s, Taiwan has encountered serial educational reforms which aim to decentralize, depoliticize, and liberalize educational system and teacher training. Moreover, in order to meet global competition, the formation of the modern teacher relates to the notion of “competence.” These new orders of the educational policies which identify particular characteristics of the teacher are said to improve educational quality. However, modern discourses on educational reform in Taiwan do not come naturally, but are (re)shaped by particular social, cultural, political and global trajectories.
Using Foucault's notions of governmentality and technologies of self, this study explores the multiple power effects of the epistemological discourses of the past and present, teachers' subjectivity, and the problems of the governance. By extension, it investigates the production of particular norms of the “modern/ professional teacher” internalized and self-disciplined through technologies of self which are deployed through new teacher programs. The new training programs look seemingly unrelated to political ideologies, but (re)inscribe certain peculiarities considered as essential to global competitiveness and cultural inheritance. The critical interrogation of the teacher is bounded by the normative capabilities and dispositions that dictate thoughts and action according to the hybrid discourses of the global and the local. It attempts to problematize how current Taiwanese teacher education produces specific “truth” as a discursive imperative to govern the self and nation, which is usually regarded as reasonable and unquestionable. This specific fabrication of the teacher embodying the regularities of present and future imaginaries (re)defines the teacher's capabilities and agency, and simultaneously casts out those who do not fit into this construction.
Discourse analysis is the main method of this study. However, it does not mean any pre-set rules, but this analysis of the narratives of the Taiwanese teacher is based on Foucaultian concepts of power and discourse. Through Foucault’s genealogical method, this study presents how Taiwanese teachers have come to be the way they are. The majority of the data will be derived from official and unofficial documents including educational policies and publications, perspectives of governmental officers and experts, and statements of public media related to teacher education and the role of modern teacher, which I consider them as “discursive practices” that continuously and invisibly constitute who the teacher should be and to become in current Taiwanese society (Foucault, 1977).
Exposing the power relations and principles that govern what are viewed as “modern” and “professional” teacher in schooling enables us to avoid the problems of epistemological inflexibility and reconsider the construction of the teacher education.

Author

• Yi-Chen Lee, University of Wisconsin - Madison