Becoming Teacher: Teacher Identity Formation in the Turkish Educational Reform Movement

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

Abstract

Two qualities of the last Turkish Educational Reform are unique in the history of Turkish educational reform: It presents the most structured and competence-based principles of a “desired teacher” among reforms, and it gives one of the biggest promises of the reforms which is to “give the deserved teacher status back” to teachers if they apply the “scientific” principles of a desired teacher developed by the reform’s “expertise knowledge” (Turkish Ministry of Education, 2008, p. iii). This knowledge, which generates new principles of governing the teacher, also functions as norms that create new modes of existence for teacher/child.

These new modes, I argue, are juxtaposed to and justified by the redefinitions of salvation themes of Turkish state and Turkish nation, which are not merely related to the Turkish Republic but has historical, contextual, and cultural ties with the late Ottoman Empire period. The continuities/discontinuties in the salvation themes of the nation-state and the empire embed themselves in the very practices of becoming-teacher and becoming-child. Salvation narratives such as once saving the empire and the nation-state from falling behind the Western modernity, and now saving the nation-state from falling behind in the race of globalization of imagined contemporaries operate as the “governmentality mechanisms” (Foucault, 1991) which construct new subjectivities of teaching/learning, teacher/child, and nation/state.

Reform’s promise as an ingredient of these governmentality mechanisms implies a nostalgia of teaching in which teachers were believed to have their deserved status as the sacred agents of empire and nation-state. However, the traveling discourses in the reform presented to give this nostalgic status back such as “learning to learn”, “lifelong learning”, “innovating” or “collaborating” were not the signatures of the implied sacred notions of teachers. Then, how does it become possible to enable reform’s promise through competencies for teachers such as “calling the child by name” or for students such as “asking critical questions during the learning process” that were once not qualifications of a “sacred” teacher/ child?

This study is an attempt to understand the “systems of reasoning” (Popkewitz, 1998) embedded in the last Turkish Educational Reform by using Deleuzian and Foucauldian methodologies to historically analyze the shifting subjectivities of teacher identity formation in Turkey with its assemblies/reassemblies to Turkish modernity and its three basic subjects: Turkish child, Turkish nation and Turkish state. The study treats teacher identity as “an event” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) rather than an essential quality of teacher. Teacher identity in this study is a Deleuzian “becoming” under construction that mutually constructs “who the child is and who is not the child” (Popkewitz, 2008)

Drawing on the notion of “multiple modernities” to analyze the “traveling discourses”(Popkewitz, 2005) of modernity in Turkish educational context, this study historicizes the last educational reform movement which makes it significant as the majority of the reform studies in Turkey tend to ignore the historical context of reform and consist of implementation evaluations which result them to end up circling around the same assumptions and consequences.

Author

• Aysegul Mester, University of Wisconsin - Madison