Mindfulness: The Making of Teachers’ Full Awareness and Metaphysical Competencies to Correct Onto-Epistemic Violence

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

Abstract

The making of the effective teacher occurs as part of the SMBH-TE (embodying particular parts of the SMBH’s anatomy). If we think about the density and intensities within education policies, guidelines, reforms, and national and international reports, these create enough matter to collapse in an infinitely dense region to conform a SMBH. Reasoning with this, the effective teacher—as an ideal amalgamated by salvation themes, dominant narratives, hopes and fears— is thought of as more than a human; able to develop, I would say, full awareness and metaphysical competencies for correcting the wrongs generated by historical practices that gave shape to modern society and conform the “backstage” of teacher education and practice.
The mindfulness state is promoted by transnational aspirations taking shape in research, for example with “noticing” as a desired competence teachers should develop either in teacher training or in practice. This vision neglects aspects of teachers when policies and research give to teacher’s full responsibility of students’ performance in the classroom. Teachers are expected to solve, in practice, every gap that preclude students’ for achieving the promises of success and wellbeing. Effective teachers are thought as taking careful decisions to implement policies effectively; at the same time, they should be accountable.
Careful attention has been placed on the exacerbated inequalities produced when trying to promote inclusive practices (i.e., UNESCO), thus achieving social justice and equity has become contingent. However, the promises of equity and inclusion vanish within a SMBH-TE structured by discourses about effectiveness, competitiveness, and meritocracy. The intentions of correcting onto-epistemic violence, for example, mutate into paradoxes of good intentions in the search for securing social order. Teacher education becomes a bifurcation of promoting inclusive practices in classrooms alongside with the fabrication of the active, global citizen, from which both moralities collied.
There is the need of troubling teacher education by examining how teacher training programs prompt particular identities of teachers. From here, building on Judith Butler’s work, questioning the ways in which teacher education is shaped by capitalist aspirations and the kinds of teachers that accommodate such desires: the effective teacher. The paper questions the way in which teachers are supposed to become, according to educational policies and ideas about effective education, and the possibilities they have while shaping their identities (a sort of interplay between the actual and the virtual, despite of the optimism put in policies and reforms). The SMBH-TE enables to map how educational policies and national guidelines become so dense that teacher practices cannot move away from the densities and intensities (for example, promote competitiveness, develop selected competencies and abilities, fit their teaching to international templates, neglect aspects related to certain values such as solidarity, ethical responsibility, follow national guidelines, and so on). And even if teachers would like to frame their teaching in other directions, their students will still be assessed, sorted, normalized, and segregated according to international standards, and teachers will still be evaluated according to the notions of effective teacher.

Author

• Melissa Andrade-Molina, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso