Taking seriously the productive nature of pedagogic relations in preservice teacher education: a poststructuralist contribution

New understandings of how students learn engender new interpretations of what it means to prepare competent and generative teaching professionals for challenging futures. For example, poststructuralist notions of professional competence and identity as produced in interactive pedagogic encounters challenge prior notions of inherent personal competence and skill. These new understandings force teacher educators to attend closely to the productive quality of teaching/learning relationships with students. In this paper I use poststructuralist notions of the constitution or production of professional identity and agency to (a) analyse some common aspects of current pedagogic practice in preservice teacher education, and (b) provoke debate on practical imperatives for the future