Foucault’s work Discipline and Punish, describes ‘a history of the modern soul and a new power to judge’ (Prado, 2000, p59). The modern soul is the mind ‘reconceived as a surface inscription for power’ (Foucault, 1979, p23). In other words, control of the mind (mental slavery) through technologies of power is realised as an efficient way of ensuring the submission of bodies. All schools have their own disciplinary
regimes and systems of punishment (for example, classroom rules and behaviour policies) with sanctions deployed to offset resistance. Discipline in schools is generally applied to control conduct in order to help improve pupils’ performance, and thereby their usefulness to society. I am not suggesting that exercising discipline is either good or bad, because there is always the power (or not) for the teacher to guide how pupils conduct themselves. The distinction made here is that whereas disciplinary punishment is fundamentally corrective, the new power takes the form of normalising judgements. Processes of normalisation operate by binary divisions for example, labelling learners as disaffected/engaged and characterising learners’ values, beliefs or dispositions as culturally deficient/enriched. Teachers, as agents of change are thus empowered to make judgements about pupils and disciplinary power is administered through surveillance as efficient means of social regulation. There is the implicit agreement that learners are mindful of their own and others’ behaviour. Foucault theorised that disciplinary power is not a personal attribute received or given but rather ‘it is a set of strategic correlations that produce social functions as well as collective and individual subjects’ (Foucault, 1975, p31). Disciplinary power is a form of technology aimed at regulating the body; it concerns techniques that consider ‘how to keep someone under surveillance, how to control his [sic] conduct, his behaviour, his aptitudes, how to improve his performance, multiply his capacities, how to put him where he is most useful’ (Foucault, 1981, cited in O’Farrell, 2005, p102).
The purpose of disciplinary techniques is individuation, since the effectiveness of discipline is dependent on the imposition of notions of singularity. I interpret this objective to mean directing one’s thoughts inwards towards actions that demonstrate obedience and subjugation to certain understandings about what constitutes appropriate beliefs or thinking. In this way, self-knowledge and the experiences attached engenders a re-definition of one’s subjectivity (Prado, 2000). Disciplinary power efficiently makes human beings internalise ideas about normal behaviour patterns to the point where each is continually self-monitoring. Foucault deploys the metaphor of the Bentham panopticon to develop the idea that ‘surveillance can turn submission to directives to conformity with norms’ (Prado, 2000, p61). The effect of surveillance is such that the need for human gaze diminishes as ‘occupants come to internalise its presence’ (Prado, 2000, p61). Although monitoring and the constant
threat of the ‘gaze’ subjugate teachers and learners to vigilant self-auditing, there is alongside this, resistance (or variation) to any given ‘norm’. Habitual compliance to normative ideals (for example, white middle class values and culture) or their reification is not always possible. In this thesis, disciplinary power allows me to theorise about B.E.M. teachers’ construal of their bodies as representatives of their culture, or as ‘visible markers’ within their schools.
Disciplinary power acts on the general economy of school social spaces (staffrooms, corridors and so on). Here I conceptualise disciplinary power to understand how the body is inter-related to material arrangements, to show where power is both extended and enmeshed (Hook, 2007). The management of access to designated spaces operates by excluding entry and/or controlling movement within social spaces. The utilisation of these spaces denotes the level of restriction imposed and/or the expected modes of interaction between human beings while contained within the space. Different modes of compliance have legitimacy in various education settings for teachers and pupils. For example, there are distinctions made between talk permissible by pupils in the playground, on the sports field or at after- school clubs. While formal and informal spaces are, of course, not mutually exclusive, B.E.M. teachers’ construal of the utility of these spaces (for example, for confessional talk between teacher and pupil) can, I suggest, be interpreted as effects of disciplinary power. The interest in this thesis concerns what B.E.M. teachers do when they cross this divide. The intention is to ‘describe the way in which resistance operates as a part of power, not to seek or promote or oppose it’ (Kendall & Wickham, 1998, p51). Disciplinary power governs B.E.M. teachers’ conformity in a variety of ways, but one cannot assume mental slavery, nor that compliance with expected norms or beliefs about pupils is uncontested. Thus a theoretical frame acknowledging the role of disciplinary power allows me to examine B.E.M. teachers’ personal spaces in school, how they are deployed, the forms of social interaction possible and the extent to which such agendas can be construed as empowering pupils.
So far, I have suggested the use of a theoretical frame that draws upon poststructural ideas that acknowledge the dynamics of B.E.M. teachers’ positioning in school. The functioning of disciplinary power gives context to the complexity of B.E.M. teachers’ discursive work. In the final section, I argue for the introduction of another layer of
contextualisation relevant to understanding role modelling since this locates the B.E.M. teacher within the wider social issues that permeate their work. Here I consider Foucault’s notion of bio-power with specific reference to the effects of racism and sexism, because it is arguably a critical factor determining the quality of social interactions in all pedagogical relations in schools.