Getting Personal: How Early Childhood Teacher Education Troubles Students' and Teacher Educators' Identities regarding Subjectivity and Feminism

Abstract

This article constitutes an attempt to investigate how student teachers and teacher educators in the context of Swedish early childhood teacher education are invented and reinvented by practices that are inspired by feminist and post-structural thinking. I give examples of practice that explicitly make use of different aspects of the personal, such as subjectivities, voice and experience. These are theorized, problematized and troubled in relation to concepts of power, resistance and emancipation. The article questions the possibility of ‘getting outside’ of the regulatory regimes of power production through practices of ‘getting personal’, and asks just how much freedom is possible, even given overtly ‘emancipist’ teaching.