Showtime: Biopolitics and Becoming an Effective Beginning Science Teacher

• In Event: 44.084 - Roundtable Session 18
  In Roundtable Session: 44.084-22 - Intersections of Teachers/Teaching With Culture and Curriculum

Abstract

Neoliberal educational reform is dedicated to reforming teacher effectiveness. However, through standardized definitions of ‘teacher effectiveness’ certain ontologies and epistemologies prevail within the educative environment. Drawing on Foucault’s concepts of biopolitics and disciplinary power this paper examines how one beginning science teacher (and other implicated subjects) enacts a ‘highly effective’ practice. To depict and explore the depths to which fixed definitions of ‘effectiveness’ function, ethnographic practices and post-qualitative modes of inquiry are utilized. While co-reading micro and macro discourses of ‘teacher effectiveness’ the inquiry follows generative lines of flight for (re)considering what teacher ‘effectiveness’ might be: (a) Whose ontology is being employed?; (b) Where is the teacher in ‘teacher effectiveness’?; and (c) What is the right epistemology?

Author

• Maria Ferris Greene Wallace, University of Southern Mississippi