Kinds of Teachers: Pursuing a Posthuman Engagement With(in) Ideas About "Good Teaching"

• In Event: 45.093 - MTCC Roundtable Session 18
  In Roundtable Session: 45.093-3 - To Be Good, Ethical, and True: Conceptualizing Teaching

Abstract

We offer a more complex engagement with prevailing assumptions actively shaping the nature of teacher education and induction. By examining the production of ‘good teacher’ within a posthumanist (Braidotti, 2013) and new material feminist lens (Barad, 2007), we offer a non-linear and dynamic trajectory for re-thinking the ‘good’ teacher that responds to the question: How do kinds of teachers get produced? By specifically attending to non-human entities, our diffractive analysis illuminates how two beginning teachers are un/intentionally mediated in relation to the idea of ‘good teaching’. The study depicts how ideas about good teaching, in interaction with human and material elements, has its own agency that shapes particular types of teacher-subjects and teaching practices.

Authors

• Maria Ferris Greene Wallace, University of Southern Mississippi

• Kathryn J. Strom, California State University - East Bay