Two new publications about discourses of teacher education.

Lanas, Maija: ”Giving up the lottery ticket: Finnish beginning teacher turnover as a question of discursive boundaries“

Teachers leaving the profession is an increasing trend also in Finland, which is interesting because many of the explanations found in other international contexts do not apply. The Finnish context, in which teachers are not controlled officially in any way, offers a unique context for investigating implicit control mechanisms and their relationship to teacher turnover. The research shows how intersecting discourses work in ways that may lead to self-exclusion of beginning teachers who cannot find a subject position within school. This happens unofficially and implicitly in a context that explicitly emphasizes teacher freedom, autonomy and societal appreciation. Teacher turnover provides tool for making visible the discursive boundaries that might otherwise stay hidden.

link: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1VgRs,Gtqvg5Ik

Maija Lanas & Tuija Huuki: ”Thinking beyond student resistance: a difficult assemblage in teacher education“.

This paper draws on feminist new materialist, poststructuralist and post-human theories to rethink discomforting moments when engaging with sensitive topics in teacher education. It is argued that the common approach to such events – as instances of student resistance or pedagogical failures – is both simplistic and problematic, and that a more holistic and in-depth approach is needed. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of assemblage and affect, our aim here is to re-theorise an instance of such an event in an attempt to make visible how place, space, objects, emotion, affect and history entangle in predictable and unpredictable ways in teacher education. The aims of the paper are to propose new ways of engaging with discomfort in teacher education and, secondly, to introduce post-human approaches in the field of teacher education, where they are underrepresented.

Link: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/2xRJXpIW8u6Gxsj474Kc/full