1

Thinking Otherwise Through Theory in Teacher Education

Johanna Sitomaniemi-San, University of Oulu, Finland
johanna.san@oulu.fi


Paper presented in progress report session at

Theorising Education 2012: The Second Biennial International Theorising Education Conference
The Future of Theory in Education: Traditions, Trends, Trajectories
University of Stirling, UK
7
th
9
th
June 2012



2

Teaching and learning have multiple and conflicting meanings that shift with our lived
lives, with the theories produced and encountered, with the deep convictions and
desires brought to and created in education, with the practices we negotiate, and with
the identities we construct. This is not the problem. Rather, when such multiplicity is
suppressed, so too is our power to imagine how things could be otherwise. (Britzman,
2003, p. 32)
The overall focus of my doctoral research project is on Finnish academic, or research-based, teacher
education: That is, how discursive social and cultural practices have come to produce certain ideas
and understandings of what it is to be(come) a teacher, what is considered as relevant pedagogical
knowledge, and what are to be considered as problems or questions for education.
The research problem stems from an acknowledgement of the complexities, uncertainties,
inequalities and plurality of globalisation on the one hand (Todd, 2009), and of educational
questions on the other (Biesta, 2006). In terms of teacher education curriculum and pedagogy,
addressing these complexities potentially involves a double crisis: to be a student in teacher
education could imply being exposed to open-ended, difficult questions about being in the world
with others in uncoercive ways (Andreotti, 2010; Todd, 2009), as well as having ones
predetermined notions of the predictability and stability of teaching challenged (Britzman, 2003,
2007). However, teacher education, for the most part, has remained a modernist project with an
emphasis on producing and sustaining predictable, stable, and normative identities and curricula
(Phelan, 2011, p. 214). The focus on individual learning processes, or the dissociation of
individual experience from broader political issues (Skattebol, 2009, p. 77), keeps intact
ethnocentric, depoliticized, and ahistorical accounts of what the important questions are in and for
teacher education.
In Finland, the education of primary and secondary school teachers has taken place in universities
since the end of the 1970s, and a masters degree has been required for teacher qualifications since
then. With over 30 years since its transferral from teacher seminaries to universities, prominent
attributes of Finnish teacher education in current discourses are academic and research-based.
Herein lies the nexus of the study: the production of meaning about academic knowledge, theory,
research, practice and experience, and the tensions and contradictions between these significations
are examined as social, discursive practices that open up certain possibilities and simultaneously
foreclose other alternatives for constructing teacher subjectivities.
My study takes on a discursive approach to working with theory and data together (MacLure, 2003;
Popkewitz, 1998, 2009; Youdell, 2011). This is carried out with an intention of providing a
(situated) social analysis of current discursive spaces and tensions of Finnish academic teacher
education. Analysing the effects of power (Foucault, 1980) is to examine how different sets of
ideas, institutions and authority relations are connected to order the principles of conduct
(Popkewitz, 2009, p. 5), and to focus on the political, economic, institutional regime of the
production of truth (Foucault, 1980, p. 133).
In the following, I provide outlines of two emerging issues in this on-going study. First, I discuss
some possible implications of working with theory in teacher education. I then put forward a
tentative outline of analysis on the alchemy of academic knowledge in Finnish teacher education.
In Search of Spaces for Theory
For William Pinar (2009), engaging with academic knowledge and working on the self are
inseparable movements in efforts that aim to open up and wrestle with questions of inequality and
plurality in teacher education:
Rather than forever playing the preacher pronouncing the values we wish the world
held, rather than concocting activities we calculate will change students hearts and
3

minds, why not focus on the academic knowledge we deem important for students to
study so that they can see for themselves the horrific legacies of our racist history?
Why not spend our time studying scholarship in the humanities and social sciences as
well as popular culture, summarizing and juxtaposing these in synopses prospective
and practicing teachers might find informative? (Pinar, 2009, 41-42)
Maarten Simons and Jan Masschelein (2009) similarly point towards academic engagement with
worldly questionsthat is, questions about human co-existencein ways that imply working on
the self in order to think something other and different from that which we previously thought
(Foucault, 1984, as cited in Simons & Masschelein, 2009, p. 10). The specific academic attitude
that Simons and Masschelein suggest is required also resonates with the idea put forward by Sharon
Todd (2009) about the possibilities of lively social and intellectual communities (p. 75) in which
the difficulties of plurality are lived with and responsibly responded to.
These poststructural perspectives on being exposed to the world, wrestling with questions of co-
existence in a world of plurality, inequality and complexity, and thinking with academic knowledge
pose several questions and challenges for teacher education. The arguments that teacher education
is decontextualized (Simola, 1998b) and teaching and educational studies depoliticized (Ball, 2006);
that moral, intellectual and institutional parochialism confines research in teacher education
(Phelan, 2011, p. 207); that teacher education and educational sciences are intellectually isolated
(Ball, 2006; Phelan, 2011) are extremely relevant given the relatively weak incentive for internal
critiques within current Finnish teacher education due to both its conservative tradition as well as
the successful PISA results in recent years. These arguments point towards questions concerning
epistemic reflexivity raised to the fore in this conference: What theories are drawn upon in teacher
education, and how are they engaged? What are the traditions of theorising in teacher education?
How doesor couldtheory and theorising make a difference in teacher education research,
practice and curriculum?
Working with theory may lead to a rethinking of educational questions; that is, engaging in
theoretical debates may diversify the ways in which educational questions and problems are framed
or posed. Theory can be thought of as a tool for thinking (Braidotti, 2001), and as a means to being
exposed to that which challenges taken-for-granted thought (Ball, 2006). To the extent that
theorising might point us to the larger political and social meanings of what occurs in educational
institutions and systems (Anyon 2009, p. 3), it could provide spaces for more complex social
analyses in order to bring the (local, global, cultural, political, social, historical) contexts of
schooling under examination, with implications for the professional thinking of teachers.
Pedagogical thinking, reflection and research-based education as governing practices in
Finnish teacher education
I turn now to the second section of my paper in which I present a summary of an analysis of the
Finnish academic discourse on research-based teacher education.
One of the main arguments concerning the benefits of research-based teacher education in Finland
is the potential it has to bring together theory and practice (see e.g. Maaranen & Krokfors, 2008).
The idea of the teacher as researcher, or the researching teacher, in the academic discourse on
Finnish research-based teacher education most frequently refers to student teachers carrying out
research on their own work as practitioners, thus integrating theory and practice. The researching
teacher not only acquires expertise in research methodology in order to carry out research in
pedagogically meaningful situations (Toom et al., 2010, p. 338) but also in order to become a
pedagogically-thinking, reflective and inquiry-oriented teacher (Toom et al., 2010, p. 233). What
seems to be taking place is an obscuring of distinctions between theorising, research, reflection and
inquiry-based learning. The emphasis on research methodology and self-reflection, is coupled with
what educational sociologist Hannu Simola has identified as a tendency towards pure didactics, a
4

kind of abstract, non-historical and decontextualized science of teaching (Simola, 1998b, p. 325).
The discourse of research-based teacher education is based on notions of rationality, certainty and
agency, as is evident in the following example: As teachers are educated to become autonomous
actors, with the ability to make rational, theory-based decisions and to consume as well as produce
research, they are able to meet the challenges of the future (Toom et al, 2010, p. 339; this
orientation is related to notions of evidence-based practice [see Biesta, 2007, 2010]).
The attempt to make sense of this current context has led me to Thomas Popkewitzs (1998) notion
of alchemy as I have examined how the Finnish teacher is made through academic and pedagogical
knowledge, research, and reflection. For Popkewitz (2002), the alchemy of school subjects relates
to how academic disciplines in modern institutional schooling are transformed into social and
psychological concepts that administrate the dispositions, sensitivities, and awareness of the child
and teacher (p. 262).
What I suggest is that it is through an alchemy of academic knowledge, particularly through an
emphasis on research methodology and reflective practices through which procedures of
thought (Popkewitz, 2009, p. 4) in Finnish teacher education are calculated and administered.
The emphasis on formal research skills (Krokfors et al, 2011) that is tied to notions of the
researching, and consequently self-reflective teacher, can be perceived as a set of governing
practices that regulates the development of what is called teachers pedagogical thinking (Toom et
al, 2010) according to pre-defined, fixed categories. Pedagogy, as alchemic disciplinary knowledge
in teacher education, works to develop students pedagogical thinking and pedagogical
knowledge in ways that come to govern what the student teacher thinks and feels; what she
perceives as problems in the classroom; and what she does not perceive as problems at all.
The peculiarity of the alchemy of pedagogy is how it transforms complex, continuously debatable
academic questions into pedagogical knowledge that is static and void of previously unthought
questions. The self-sufficiency of pedagogy in the alchemic sense produces a truth of pedagogy
that forecloses the asking of questions other than those that pedagogy itself has already provided
answers to. The unquestioning stems from the notion that the relevant educational questions and
problems are already known and fixed, as are their solutions. This unquestioning can be perceived
as resistance to other, different questions raised in cognate academic disciplines, or as gatekeeping
in the sense of a denial of relevant questions elsewhere. In this sense, carrying out research in
teacher education serves the purpose of simply finding better (that is, more informed or refined)
ways of getting to the solutions that are already known and do not require further questioningas
opposed to entering into research and scholarship in order to open up questions that involve an
engagement with complexity. Therefore, gaining academic status through working with received
methodologies works well in this direction, as new questions will not easily arise in the frameworks
for scientific thinking that are currently prescribed and produced in teacher education. This
engagement with methodologically oriented research, I suggest, is a mechanism through which
Finnish teacher education is able to claim its academic status and relevance despite its alchemic
workings.
My tentative arguments are that the alchemy of academic knowledge works as a technology for
regulating the autonomous teacher, points to a system of gatekeeping in regard to rigorous
theoretical engagement, and provides an explanation for what appears as an infantalisation of
students in academic settings. The effects of this alchemy include: avoidance of difficult and
complex educational questions; preference of content knowledge over intellectual engagement and
questioning; and an obsession with mastering the world instead of responding responsibly to the
world (see Biesta, 2005). The discourse of research-based teacher education, while building its
academic status, works in a way that keeps its members detached from academic knowledge and
debates, all the while producing graduates with academic degrees and research identities.
5

Conclusion
At the edges of teacher education, there are other forms of knowledge, creating contradictory spaces
at the borders of the alchemy of pedagogy. It is in these contested spaces that theory (in the rigorous
sense of the world) enters, lingers or departs; perhaps to leave with indignation at the scene of anti-
intellectualism, to create a space for unanticipated intellectual engagement or encounters with
difficult knowledge, oras it meets with or bumps up against practice (or experience) in these
spaces less occupied by researchto be charged against dwelling in an ivory tower.
As Popkewitz (2002) puts it: One can think of an important part of science as strategies to make
the familiar strange, to think about the mysterious and unfamiliar, and to raise questions precisely
about that which is taken for granted (p. 265). In order for students in teacher education to move
beyond individual, parochial and ahistorical understandings of problems and questions in
classrooms, it would be important to think about other ways of engaging with research and
academic knowledge. This approach would require a disenchantment with current ways of knowing
so that new possibilities can emerge: As soon as one can no longer think things as one formerly
thought them, transformation becomes both very urgent, very difficult and quite possible
(Foucault, 1988, as cited in Ball, 2006, p. 63). Academia as a public space for divergent, critical,
and creative thinking around questions of the Self and Other needs to be kept open in order to
engage in a complicated, open-ended conversation about curriculum, teaching, and being together
in the world.

References
Andreotti, V. (2010). Postcolonial and post-critical global citizenship education. In G. Elliott, C.
Fourali & S. Issler (eds), Education and social change: Connecting local and global
perspectives (pp. 238250). London: Continuum.
Andreotti, V., Faafoi, A., Sitomaniemi-San, J. & Ahenakew, C. (2012). Shifting conceptualizations
of culture and identity: experiences of affect in a course on multiculturalism in
primary teacher education in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Manuscript submitted for
publication.
Anyon, J. (2009). Introduction: Critical social theory, educational research, and intellectual agency.
In J. Anyon (with M. J. Dumas, D. Linville, K. Nolan, M. Prez, E. Tuck & J. Weiss),
Theory and educational research: Toward critical social explanation (pp. 123). New
York & London: Routledge.
Ball, S. (2006). Educational studies, policy entrepreneurship and social theory. In S.J. Ball,
Education policy and social class: The selected works of Stephen J. Ball (pp. 54-66).
New York: Routledge. (Originally published in R. Slee & G. Weiner with S.
Tomlinson (eds), School effectiveness for whom? (pp. 7083). London: Falmer Press,
1998).
Barcan, R. (2002). Problems without solutions: teaching theory and the politics of hope.
Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 16(3): 343-356.
Biesta, G. (2005). Against learning: Reclaiming a language for education in an age of learning.
Nordisk Pedagogik 25: 5466.
Biesta, Gert J.J. (2006). Beyond learning: Democratic education for a human future. Boulder:
Paradigm Publishers.
Biesta, G. (2007). Why what works wont work: evidence-based practice and the democratic
deficit in educational research. Educational Theory 57(1): 122.
Biesta, G. J.J. (2010). Why what works still wont work: From evidence-based education to value-
based education. Studies in Philosophy & Education 29: 491503.
6

Biesta, G. (2011). Disciplines and theory in the academic study of education: A comparative
analysis of the Anglo-American and Continental construction of the field. Pedagogy,
Culture & Society, 19(2): 175-192.
Braidotti, R. (2002). Metamorphoses: Towards a materialist theory of becoming. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Britzman, D. (2003). Practice makes practice: A critical study of learning to teach (revised ed.).
Albany: State University of New York Press.
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews & other writings 1972-1977. (C.
Gordon, ed.). New York: Vintage Books.
Heikkinen, H.L.T. (1999). Opettajapersoonan uusi tuleminen [The re-emergence of teacher
personality]. In H. Niemi (ed), Opettajankoulutus modernin murroksessa (pp. 180-
191). Tampere: Tampereen yliopiston julkaisujen myynti.
Kinsella, E.A. & G.E. Whiteford. (2008). Knowledge generation and utilization in occupational
therapy: Towards epistemic reflexivity. Australian Occupational Therapy Journal 56:
49258.
Krokfors, L., H. Kynslahti, K. Stenberg, A. Toom, K. Maaranen, K., Jyrhm, R., R. Byman & P.
Kansanen. (2011). Investigating Finnish teacher educators views on research-based
teacher education. Teaching Education 22(1): 113.
Maaranen, K., & L. Krokfors. 2008. Researching pupils, schools and oneself. teachers as integrators
of theory and practice in initial teacher education. Journal of Education for Teaching
34(3): 207222.
MacLure, M. (2003). Discourse in educational and social research. Buckingham: Open University.
Pinar, William F. (2009). The worldliness of a cosmopolitan education: Passionate lives in public
service. New York: Routledge.
Phelan, A. 2011. Towards a complicated conversation: Teacher education and the curriculum turn.
Pedagogy, Culture & Society 19(2): 207220.
Popkewitz, T.S. (1998). Struggling for the soul: The politics of schooling and the construction of
the teacher. New York: Teachers College Press.
Popkewitz, Thomas S. (2002). How the alchemy makes inquiry, evidence, and exclusion. Journal of
Teacher Education, 53(3): 262267.
Popkewitz, T.S. (2009). Cosmopolitanism and the age of school reform: Science, education, and
making society by making the child. New York: Routledge.
Popkewitz, T.S. (2011). Curriculum history, schooling and the history of the present. History of
Education 40(1): 1-19.
Simola, H. (1998a). Constructing a school-free pedagogy: Decontextualization of Finnish state
educational discourse. Journal of Curriculum Studies 30(3): 339-356.
Simola, H. (1998b). Decontextualizing teachers knowledge: Finnish didactics and teacher
education curricula during the 1980s and 1990s. Scandinavian Journal of Educational
Research 42(4), 325338.
Simons, M. & J. Masschelein. (2009). Towards the idea of a world university. Interchange 40(1):
123.
Sitomaniemi-San, J. (2012). Cosmopolitanism as a limit-attitude in academic teacher education.
Manuscript submitted for publication.
Skattebol, J. (2010). Affect: a tool to support pedagogical change. Discourse: Studies in the
Cultural Politics of Education 31(1): 7591.
Taylor, Lisa. (2012). Beyond paternalism: Global education with preservice teachers as a practice of
implication. In V. de Oliveira Andreotti & L.M.T.M. de Souza (eds), Postcolonial
perspectives on global citizenship education, (pp. 177-199). New York: Routledge.
Todd, Sharon. (2009). Toward an imperfect education: Facing humanity, rethinking
cosmopolitanism. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.
7

Toom, A., H. Kynslahti, L. Krokfors, R. Jyrhm, R. Byman, K. Stenberg, K. Maaranen & P.
Kansanen. (2010). Experiences of a research-based approach to teacher education:
Suggestions for future policies. European Journal of Education 45(2): 331344.
Youdell, D. (2011). School trouble: Identity, power and politics in education. London: Routledge.