THE INTERSUBJECTIVE PRODUCTION of CHILEAN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATORS a Free Associative Group Exploration of the Unconscious Aspects of Professional Subjectivities
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THE INTERSUBJECTIVE PRODUCTION OF CHILEAN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATORS A free associative group exploration of the unconscious aspects of professional subjectivities María José Lagos Serrano UCL Institute of Education Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy November 2020 ̶ This page intentionally left blank ̶ I declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. María José Lagos Serrano 24 November 2020 This thesis, not including acknowledgements, bibliography and appendixes is 85, 230 words. ̶ This page intentionally left blank ̶ ABSTRACT This thesis examines the production of early childhood (EC) educator subjectivities in Chile from a psychoanalytic perspective. Existing literature on EC professionalism has described how educators negotiate conflicting professional discourses; complying with standardised understandings of professionalism to legitimise their practice, while embracing the care dimension of EC education. While it has been suggested by critical scholarship that the EC workforce responds to these tensions by developing a unified professional identity, it is critical to foreground that EC educators constitute a complex, multidetermined type of professional subjectivity, whose experience of the struggles of the profession cannot be completely anticipated. Acknowledging the ambivalent, paradoxical and contradictory aspects of educators’ singular engagement with their practice, opens the opportunity to explore some of its underlying dynamics and motives. Drawing on the psychoanalytic concepts of the unconscious and free association, as well as my own professional interest in the potentialities of working with groups, I developed an innovative method to explore the unconscious aspects of these dynamics. I conducted free-associative group interviews with two groups of four EC educators each, using EC-related prompts like words and artefacts to stimulate their free associations and group discussions around their experience of EC practice. Free association’s tracing of transitory elements of discourse does not so much encourage the production of coherent narratives as destabilises them, thus opening a contingent space for new articulations of subjectivity. In the analysis chapters I explore the different types of discourse that emerged from particular group configurations, using the concepts of projective identification and intersubjective thirdness to make sense of the group dynamics that elicited these discourses. The intensified intersubjectivity of groups seemed to stimulate the mobilisation of unconscious affect, thus allowing to explore deep aspects of subjectivity. My analysis suggests that educators engage in the relational production of idealised professional identities, in order to find purpose and strength to navigate an emotionally demanding practice. 1 ̶ This page intentionally left blank ̶ 2 IMPACT STATEMENT This research is a contribution to problematising the way we think about teachers and their professional practice in highly neoliberal contexts. Specifically, I contribute with an elaborate account of the multiple dynamics involved in the formation of the professional identities of early childhood (EC) educators. My main argument is that these professional identities are produced in the interplay of complex unconscious dynamics, as a response to an ethically challenging and emotionally demanding practice. EC educators seem to aim at developing particularly strong, coherent professional identities, producing and performing them at an intersubjective level. These substantive findings contribute to both the field of EC education studies and the growing field of psychosocial studies, given my foregrounding of the critical role of the unconscious in the negotiation of professional identities. Particularly, this research adds to the incipient body of literature on psychoanalytically informed empirical research by proposing a novel methodology to explore the unconscious aspects of teacher identities: free-associative group interviews. Free association offers an insightful data production method, whose effect of destabilising discourse allows to unveil new knowledge about the (free-associating) subject. At the same time, a group modality creates a lively context for data production, whose intensified intersubjectivity stimulates emotional expression. My theorisation of this intensifying effect is a concrete step towards identifying the distinctive way in which group functioning can optimise the expressive potential of free association as a research method. Overall, the methodological thinking I advance in my work has the potential to impact the way psychosocial research is conducted, highlighting the versatility of teacher groups as a research method for the exploration of professional identities. At a societal level, this research has the potential to expand narrow understandings of how the professional identities of EC educators are enacted in their practice, emphasising the latter’s high complexity and crucial impact on educational quality. For instance, by problematising societal views of what professionalism is in EC education and the ways in which EC educators are perceived by society and represented in educational policy. This research calls into question some of the assumptions that underlie canonical, hegemonic discourses of the EC profession that permeate civil society’s debate on EC education, which tend to oversimplify and prescribe particular understandings of the struggles of the profession and depict educators as having limited professional agency. Similarly, my emphasis on the psychosocially embedded 3 character of educators’ pedagogical relationships supports the imperative for educational policy to acknowledge the situatedness of EC practice; from curriculum, to professional development, to accountability. Regarding the latter, this study’s foregrounding of the unattainableness of normative educator identities informs the critique of universalising prescriptions of teaching standards that aim to regulate teacher performance. Lastly, my work underlines the often dismissed fact that EC educators are political subjects, whose deep knowledge about children and pedagogy transcends the classroom and thus should inform the societal debate on EC education. Raising awareness on the criticality of the educators’ role in this discussion may significantly impact the way we understand policy enactment in EC education. 4 CONTENTS ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................... 1 IMPACT STATEMENT ............................................................................................................. 3 CONTENTS .............................................................................................................................. 5 List of tables ........................................................................................................................ 8 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ......................................................................................................... 9 CHAPTER 1 Introduction to the thesis ............................................................................... 11 Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 11 1. When Chilean EC educators ‘do well’ .......................................................................... 12 1.1 The ‘Nobel Prize’ for teaching ............................................................................... 12 1.2 The National Prize for education sciences ........................................................... 13 1.3 Not just anyone can be an EC educator ................................................................ 14 2. When Chilean EC educators are not treated well (thus start to speak up) .............. 17 2.1 The Chilean legislative landscape and the perils of covert neoliberalization ... 17 2.2 Chile Woke Up ........................................................................................................ 20 CHAPTER 2 Literature review ............................................................................................. 25 Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 25 1. Critical approaches on the production of EC education’ subjectivities .................... 25 1.1 From a unique workforce to the EC educator subject ......................................... 26 1.2 The role of teacher groups ..................................................................................... 34 1.3 Deleuzoguattarian perspectives............................................................................ 36 1.4 The contribution of critical approaches ............................................................... 40 2. Psychoanalytic research on teacher subjectivity ....................................................... 41 3. Contribution of the thesis ............................................................................................ 47 CHAPTER 3 Theoretical framework ................................................................................... 51 Introduction .....................................................................................................................