Phantasmagrams of Equitable Future That Exclude: The Impracticality of Teacher Education Research

• In Event: The Paradox of Inequality as Equality in Teaching/Teacher Education: “The Super-Massive Black Hole”

Abstract

The center of teacher education and its Black Hole is its didactics; what is taught as methods of courses of teaching. Spoken about in teaching, for example, as pedagogical knowledge, core practices, professional expertise, and teacher “mindsets”, the research is to provide the future teachers with the knowledge and skills to secure children’s future social and economic competence, well-being and serve commitments for a just and equitable societies. The black hole lies in the calculative strategies and tactics in the training of the teacher formed through, for example, social psychologies, learning sciences, and sociologies of classroom communications.
Teacher education research is the empirical object of the study. Specifically, the web of science and bibliometrics of English language peer-reviewed journals identifies four clusters related to didactics. The most referenced research in each cluster will be analyzed to identify its systems of reason; asking about the epistemic principles that order and classify the psychologies of the child, learning, and models of curriculum organizing the teaching and its methods for teacher education.
Theoretically and methodologically, research is considered as an actor that (re)presents and articulates modes of acting to guide teachers’ managing children as kinds of people (see, Popkewitz, 2020; Andrade-Molina, 2017; Bullock, 2018). The texts are studied as enunciations of different historical social practice, such as research theories and methods (probability theories, notions of mass observations) that are folds connected with theories about learning, development, and growth. The resulting calculations activate comparative principles that differentiate and distribute differences about the potentialities of the kinds of people the education is to activate.
Four concepts organize the analysis.
(1) The Alchemy: Teacher education entails translations of the knowledge systems developed in other spaces but redesigned to conform to notions of didactics or methods of teaching. The curriculum models are inscribed in research to select and organize mathematics and science as the content of teaching methods.
(2) Affective Economy: The research is anticipatory and not merely descriptive. This anticipatory quality is unnoticed. It is absorbed in the universal languages about benchmarks about learning, children’s well-being, and the moral/political languages of instruction.
(3) Double Gestures: While all research is comparative, the interest in this analysis is how contemporary teacher education research expresses and distributes differences. The paper investigates how the gestures of good intentions to create the successful adult simultaneously generate fears about the potentiality of the child who is not classified as an effective learner and the danger of not being a productive citizen in the future.
(4) Phantasmagrams. The indexical qualities of research function like the magic lanterns of the 18th century, as rear projections in which the lantern are out of sight as seen are the images of the phantasmagrams that appear as real and convincing about human potentialities.
The projected phantasmagrams of contemporary research are impractical. They mistake the elegance of methods about science as the assurances for securing the conditions to actualize its social commitments. The recognition of differences distributes differences as principles of equality.

Author

• Thomas S. Popkewitz, University of Wisconsin - Madison