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This paper explores affective dimensions to the positioning of teachers within persistent educational inequalities. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's concept of "affective economies", we argue that inequalities are not maintained through how teachers and student teachers "feel about" "different" students per se. Rather, the very possibility of becoming a particular subject and object of feeling is itself already part of the production of learner differences and inequalities. We examine how affects circulate to shape particular objects (e.g. a teacher's physical body) and collective attachments to particular signs (e.g. "the national teaching body"). We argue that contemporary changes to Irish and European teacher education policy reinforce rather than question educational inequalities. They produce and align "shock" at student underachievement with teachers' physical and collective bodies, while "sympathetically" responsibilising teachers to professionalise in order to cope with or compensate for persistently "different" and/or underachieving students. To explain how this process is lived and resisted, an analysis of interviews with our own student teachers explores how the affective economy which constitutes teacher education may become contingently directed in socially just or unjust ways.

What kind of self is being made available and denied to student teachers as they participate in life in their teaching practice schools? In addressing this question empirically, the article seeks to show the forms of meaning being made and experienced by student teachers and the identities that are authored, authorised and constrained. A sociocultural perspective on professional learning, with its emphasis on participation agency and identity, illuminates aspects of the process of becoming a teacher and highlights the tension that is there for students within available meanings. Having to opt to be a teacher at the expense of a learner identity constrains what is available to be appropriated in professional settings with potential consequences for how beginner teachers frame themselves, their learners and their colleagues.

Reexamined Fuller's concerns-based model of teacher development, investigating teacher development during a two-semester teaching internship program by examining patterns of evolving concerns and aspirations. Results supported and extended Fuller's developmental model. Interns' concerns shifted outward from self, to tasks, to students, as well as inward, from those about personal capacity to manage their classrooms to concerns about their personal capacity to grow as teachers and people. (Contains references.) (SM)

This article makes a case for bringing in the body from the margins of research on teacher education. In doing so, it considers the personal and socio cultural issues reported by seventeen pre-service teachers (PSTs), who are part of a one-year post graduate diploma in post-primary teaching, when learning to embody and fashion teacher identity. The article focuses on embodiment drawing on qualitative interview data from a large-scale government-funded study on initial teacher education. Drawing on Foucault’s general theory ofdressage, at the center of which reigns the notion of disciplining and applying the methodology of critical discourse analysis, this article presents three themes tethered to the analysable and manipulable teacher body, namelydressageas compliance,dressageas discipline anddressageas performance. For PSTs, ‘looking like a teacher’ anddressageas a practice of power is a significant part of the fabric of their professional school life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores affective dimensions to the positioning of teachers within persistent educational inequalities. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of ‘affective economies’, we argue that inequalities are not maintained through how teachers and student teachers ‘feel about’ ‘different’ students per se. Rather, the very possibility of becoming a particular subject and object of feeling is itself already part of the production of learner differences and inequalities. We examine how affects circulate to shape particular objects (e.g. a teacher’s physical body) and collective attachments to particular signs (e.g. ‘the national teaching body’). We argue that contemporary changes to Irish and European teacher education policy reinforce rather than question educational inequalities. They produce and align ‘shock’ at student underachievement with teachers’ physical and collective bodies, while ‘sympathetically’ responsibilising teachers to professionalise in order to cope with or compensate for persistently ‘different’ and/or underachieving students. To explain how this process is lived and resisted, an analysis of interviews with our own student teachers explores how the affective economy which constitutes teacher education may become contingently directed in socially just or unjust ways. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While recognising the fact that historically teacher education and adolescent literacy are two fields that have had limited intellectual contact, the development of reading literacy is increasingly now accepted internationally as a core responsibility of all teachers and teacher educators. Adopting a socio-cultural perspective, this paper, drawn from theLearning to Teach Study, focused on the beliefs, knowledge and experiences regarding reading literacy of Irish post-primary student teachers on one initial teacher education (ITE) programme. The data were collected through three interviews with each of 17 student teachers. Results suggest that the surveyed student teachers had some concerns about their own literacy, had narrow conceptions of literacy, tended not to see it as their responsibility, held a minimal threshold view of literacy and viewed new digital technologies as a resource and motivator for their students’ literacy learning. Results are discussed in terms of how student teachers’ knowledge of literacy in ITE programmes could be reframed, extended and deepened. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]