From disciplined to disciplinarian: the reproduction of symbolic violence in pre-service teacher education

ISSN： 1366-5839

Source： Journal of Curriculum Studies, Vol.42, Iss.2, 2010-04, pp. : 183-213

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Abstract

This study examines how pre-service teachers experience being disciplined by their training and trainers, and how that discipline is reproduced in their relationships with students. Using Foucauldian and Bourdieuian frameworks to explore pre-service teachers' disciplinary experiences in a US teacher-education programme, this study explores how participants recreate and resist in their teaching four mechanisms of discipline: surveillance, classification, examination, and initiation. With only nascent skills in instructional design and little opportunity to develop culturally responsive modes of interaction, these teachers often default to discipline as a way of coping with what they deem to be 'rude' and 'off-task' students. Increasingly obsessed with the necessity to maintain class control more than inspire achievement, participants often fixate on discouraging misbehaviour more than promoting learning, a practice that produces symbolic violence.