ABSTRACT
In linking content knowledge with the body in time and space, this book provides educators with a different way of thinking about pedagogy and its effects. The presentation of real classroom literacy practices invites comparison and reflection. Using the tools Foucault provides for thinking about training enables one to focus attention on the presences and absences in everyday classroom management and regulation. Because many of these techniques are invisible, and experienced teachers use them intuitively, we do not always see them. Making them explicit is a way of directing attention to how they work and the ensuing consequences. This is far more helpful than thinking about the consequences of practice in a broad, undefined sense. When practices and techniques are often invisible, paying attention to the body gives us a focal point at which to direct our gaze. What the bodies do, where they go, and how they react provide a way of working backwards. So, in focusing on the body and its actions, that is, on embodied actions, we can interrogate practice. We can identify which disciplinary technique or techniques were engaged and evaluate the efficacy of them. And we can also work in the other direction – applying a particular disciplinary technique can be analysed in relation to children’s responses and actions. But, the techniques are not meant to be used in a list-like, reductionist way. This provides no insight into how disciplinary knowledge affects the utilization of techniques. For example, organizing children together in space and teaching them through morning ring times and group work, and using communal resources in the preschool, presuppose that learning happens in a particular way. Sitting at desks in silent rows with individually owned resources presents another understanding of learning. Disciplinary techniques are filtered through our understandings of disciplinary knowledge and vice versa.
