ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the shepherding of the soul as the object of urban and rural education. It also explores schooling as a practice of making kinds of people and difference. The chapter focuses on the alchemy of school subjects, with curriculum as a translation tool analogous with the alchemy of medieval practices. Contemporary research on teaching and teacher education has emphasized "practices" in research to think about the problem of change and school improvement through changing teachers. This brings into focus a complementary but different notion of productive power. Embodied in the images and narratives of the nutrition table are social and political practices that come together to make up or fabricate the healthy person. The alchemy of school subjects is a strategy to consider the translation practices of curriculum practices as they relate to making teachers, and cultural principles that order difference: for example, the distinctions of urban and rural schools as different.
