Teachers-in-and-as-Discourse: A Foucauldian Analysis of Dominant Teaching Discourses in Student Agency Informed Primary School Classrooms

Student agency is a concept that has been implemented in primary schools globally, and here in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Student agency ideas position students as “having” agency, giving students a say in their experience of learning and being at school (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2001). Student agency is often associated with 21st-century skills and competencies that originated in global educational reform discussions that positioned the ideas around student agency as innovative, transformative and as a means of disrupting the traditional roles of the teacher in control of the classroom. However, student agency ideas appear to sit within existing educational and learning infrastructure including concepts of traditional timetables, compulsion and obedience, and particular types of knowledge and learning (e.g., literacy) that continue to be privileged over others. Some scholars question the possibilities for student agency ideas within an educational system structured around compulsion, obedience and obvious differential power relations.

This study explores the way teachers discuss what they do in their day-to-day teaching practice with their students in relation to student agency ideas. Michel Foucault’s concepts of discourse, subjectivities and disciplinary practices are used to analyse how teachers are formed through discourse into particular kinds of teacher subjectivities and how these subjectivities influence the ways teachers can speak, act and teach as they interact with the ideas of student agency. Nine teachers from Auckland primary schools who had engaged in student agency professional development discussed their day-to-day practices and the way they implemented student agency within their various roles and responsibilities. The way teachers talk about their micro-practices of timetabling, meetings, expectations and workload provide interesting insight into the day-to-day life of the primary teacher. Findings include evidence of three teacher subjectivities formed in discourse: the above-and-beyond teacher; the teacher as performer; and the accountable teacher. These three subjectivities were analysed alongside the findings on how teachers discuss student agency ideas. Two insights emerge from the interaction between these teacher subjectivities and student agency ideas. First, teacher subjectivities are amplified alongside student agency. Student agency ideas do not transform or disrupt teacher subjectivities—they amplify them. Second, student agency ideas have been detached from their original educational purpose and assimilated into market-oriented, neoliberal ideas about producing future workers. There was little evidence of resistance to this and little evidence of any of the kind of system change that student agency ideas were originally designed to provoke.