Inhabiting a teaching body: Portraits of teaching

Abstract

How does someone who has not previously ‘taught’ in a formal sense become habituated to the forms of bodily disposition that characterize them as a teacher? What discourses and practices frame the production of a recognizably well-prepared teaching body as a product of pre-service teacher education? Working from the premise that teacher education is ‘a practice producing subjects’, concerned with the initial and continuing formation of ‘teaching subjects’, that is, teachers as ‘knowledgeable and capable educational agents’, this chapter builds on concepts of practice, the body, and the teaching ‘self’ as increasingly expert in its field. Informed by theories of practice, subjectivity and performance, the chapter focuses on exploring and understanding the materiality of the body in the practices that supporting the preparation of beginning teachers and the development of expertise in continuing teachers in classroom settings. Two representations of practice here are provided here – one of an expert practitioner, one of a novice – within a consideration of how the idea of an appropriate and standardized teaching body is taken for granted as ‘naturally’ conforming to normative discourses of the (good) teacher formulated in the language of professional standards which seek to frame and (re)produce professional practice for pre-service and in-service teachers.