Pedagogy and subjectivity: Creating our own students.

Abstract

Education students often expect that teacher education will teach them how to 'manage' their students. This expectation is founded upon a notion that the subjectivities of teacher and students are fixed and that it is, therefore, possible to 'know' what the students are like. Using Louis Althusser's notion of 'interpellation' this paper discusses how various theories of learning position teachers and students and can create different kinds of students (and teachers). If teachers can learn to manage their own thinking about the nature of their students, perhaps by learning a wide range of conceptual systems, they can in fact call different kinds of student into being.