For this special issue on Navigating in a Measurable Epistemic Landscape we invited contributions from scholars with various disciplinary backgrounds to debate the measurable epistemic values, logics and practices of educational institutions such as school and university. Hence, we further the discussion of Confero’s first issue Managing by Measuring: Academic Knowledge Production under the Ranks (Nylander et al., 2013) by highlighting the measurable epistemic landscape of the broader educational system.
Vocational training programmes in higher education encompass, as learning objectives, the development of relational skills and professional judgement, especially in welfare professions such as policing, teaching and healthcare, where know-how about managing close contact with people is a prerequisite. Based on a cross-professional analysis, the current article explores how students from three different professional education programmes – teacher education, police training and medical education – construct professional judgement in group discussions and interviews. The results show that participants construct professional judgement as relationships between three different dimensions: personal ethics, educational standards, and professional practice. When discussing professional dilemmas, students utilise these three different dimensions to argue for the moral or ethical soundness of their choices. The results of the study shed light on the importance of providing students with opportunities to reflect openly on professional judgement in different ways, even though such reflections may not always be formally assessed. Furthermore, the analysis demonstrates similarities between the three programmes that we analysed, as well as similarities in students’ reflections regarding essential aspects of the professions.
In this paper I use a feminist corpomaterial lens to examine how students are shaped by and shape their education. The analysis, based on individual and group interviews with twelve student teachers, shows how intersectional somatic norms in teacher education produce situations where students feel forced to educate, inform and take responsibility for others learning when it comes to knowledge concerning their own identities and/or social justice issues. The educational assemblages examined impact both the education and participants. I discuss how the created concept of becoming carving-bodies might enhance the understanding of student experiences. Becoming carving-bodies entails, for example, acts of caring for oneself and for others. However, it can also drain students energy and limit students chances of developing and learning. Furthermore, students may need to avoid appearing too emotional in order to be taken seriously.
Vad händer om det som traditionellt kodats som feminint: kroppen, känslor, långsamhet och irrationalitet, är utgångspunkten för vår pedagogik? Är det ens möjligt? Den här texten handlar om hur kroppsmateriella intersektionella perspektiv kan bidra till den normkritiska pedagogiken. Texten visar också hur en normkritisk pedagogik som inte tar hänsyn till kropp och materialitet riskerar att återskapa in idé om klassrummet som ett förnuftstyrt, maskulint och rationellt rum.
In this thesis, teacher education is examined with the aim to develop knowledge on teacher education and how it affects student teachers that are regularly marginalised in society by intersectional power structures. The aim is also to develop knowledge on how these student teachers affect teacher education. This is examined through reflexive interviews with student teachers, who either self-identified as having experiences of breaking norms related to an intersectional power dynamic, or had an interest in talking about such norms. The aims of the thesis are pursued through examining student teachers’ narrations of their experiences of how discomfort, comfort, exclusion, welcoming, and violations related to societal power structures in their teacher education programmes are produced. This is done by utilising an approach of affirmative critique, drawing on intersectional corpomaterial theoretical frameworks. The study shows how student teachers are becoming bodily archives of societal power dynamics; how they become angry through racialised and gendered assemblages; how they become students through materialities like notebooks; and how they, through the assemblages of emergency-remote education, become directed closer to or further away from their teacher programmes. Becoming a student teacher might also be connected to assemblages containing certain ideas of teachers as role models. Moreover, student teachers become carving-bodies, a concept created in the thesis to capture the complexities of how educational assemblages push participants to inform, educate, and speak up during their education. The concept furthermore captures how these processes lead to internal negotiations, energy loss, adjustments, and potentially fewer possibilities to engage with their education. The study shows how teacher education is becoming multiple through assemblages where student teachers’ bodily archives are active actors, and how the education, at the same time, is becoming less, for example when participants’ voices are drowned out. Teacher education is also becoming through student teachers’ longings and desires, in the sense of how their expressed dissatisfaction with teacher education might be affirmative in producing another kind of education. Another kind of education is also produced through student teachers becoming carving-bodies. Teacher education is, in this sense, becoming different through student teacher bodies, and in momentary junctures of particular elements connecting and coming together. Finally, the present thesis shows student-bodies’ potentiality to produce teacher education elsewhere and as elsewheres through for example anger and transformative care.
Teoretisk tematisk analys är en form av analys där teoretisk begrepp och idéer vägleder den tematiska kodningen av ett empiriskt material. Denna metod för databearbetning passar bra när det finns en förutbestämd teoretisk ansats, eller särskilda teoretiska begrepp som man vill pröva i relation till ett empiriskt material.
This paper examines teacher education, with a focus on student experiences of comfort, discomfort, and sense of belonging or not belonging in the educational setting. The analysis is conducted with an intersectional corpomaterial perspective and based on 12 individual and two group interviews with student teachers, who identify as breaching norms within an intersectional power dynamic, or as interested in discussing such norms. The participants describe situations where they felt excluded and where they adjusted to try to fit their educational spaces. In contrast, some talk about a desirable, but rare, state of comfort, belonging or ?just being?. This state is intertwined with the spatiality and embodiment of class, racialisation, dis/ability and gender. The analysis challenges a dualistic understanding of comfort and discomfort in education, and shows how the participants? critique of teacher education could be formulated as a longing for, and a simultaneous production of, another kind of education.
This paper contributes knowledge on the effects of materiality and space on teaching and equal access to teacher education. Through an intersectional analysis, with a specific focus on orientations, bodies and materiality, we show how student-bodies orientate closer to or further from various parts of teacher education as an effect of the materiality of emergency remote vs. on-campus education. We elaborate on three different student-body orientating processes that take place during teacher education. These are all related to the emergency remote education implemented as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. We call these processes ‘remote education as relief’, ‘the embodiedness of raising the hand on Zoom’ and ‘energy-draining pre-recorded lectures’. We show how the materiality of emergency-remote education orientates the participants situated within the bodily horizons of intersectional positions of being deaf, female, racialized as non-white and not having Swedish as a first language, both closer to and further away from various parts of their teacher education. The analysis is based on both individual and group interviews with twelve teacher students. The paper contributes insights to emergency-remote education, remote education and on-campus educating.