What does a teacher look like?

The paper examines the construction of verbal and visual images of teachers and teaching in English-language manuals of pedagogy from 1850 to the present. It arises from poststructuralist interests in reworking Cartesian dualism, and in the implications of dualism for teaching. It examines manuals of teaching in light of the notion that pedagogy is corporeal and performative, a concept which focuses attention on the reiterative (bodily) enactment of what have come to be meaningful gestures, postures and actions. It argues that for the most part the verbal constructions of teachers and teaching in these texts offer a disembodied, mentalistic account of teachers and teaching, but that in their margins they also provide materials from which a more corporealised, performative account might be construed. Finally, it considers visual illustrations of teachers, and the extent to which they might offer a more thoroughly performative view of teaching. It concludes that this possibility is, in fact, contained by the pervasiveness of the dualist discourses in which they are framed. \ud \u