Tradition and Discipline: The Evolution of the Caring Teacher Subjectivity in the Poiesis of the Saskatchewan Educational System

Abstract

This thesis began as an exploration in to the nature of teacher subjectivity and the ‘truths’ that make up our individual reality. It is the interplay of knowledge/power in the social that generates the discourses that shape the nature of the subjectivities we chose to perform as teachers. These discourses also shape the ‘truths’ that shape our present. To achieve this I have chosen to focus on the school inspectors’ reports to the Ministry of Education during the first twenty years of the Saskatchewan education system. In my analysis of these documents I utilize a Foucauldian lens coupled with Butler’s (2006) theory of performativity in an attempt to uncover subjectivities made available to teachers during this unstable, formative time. One such subjectivity made available was the ‘caring teacher.’ By 1916, 83 percent of the teachers in the province of Saskatchewan were women and the discourses that regulated the ‘proper’ expression of womanhood and the feminine in society were inevitably linked with this subjectivity and its performance. The effect of the migration of so many young women into teaching shaped the profession significantly. Nowhere was that more true than in Saskatchewan and the prairie provinces where this migration lead to a profusion of small one room school houses managed by one teacher, predominantly female, teaching the entire elementary curriculum. The First World War and the fight by women for the franchise would provide a destabilizing effect on these discourses, straining their previous morphology. However, the historicity of the ‘caring teacher’ was also built upon earlier attempts at social engineering utilized by the government of Great Britain. The concept of care was employed by middle-class women to discipline the working-class in Britain in order to inculcate middle-class values. This same social engineering was brought to bear through the educational system in Saskatchewan to bring together dissonant communities while simultaneously turning each little school into a center of calculation through which governmental intervention could influence the population. Foucault has referred to this as ‘conduct of conduct’ or governmentality. Moreover, the ‘caring teacher’ subjectivity became a powerful interface for the articulation of the discourses of race and class, emerging as it did during a period when the province was moving out of its settler/pioneering phase. This ‘dispositif’ of truths and practices built on what had come before; care, for the self and others marked the boundaries of middle-class white respectability within the colonial context. Accordingly, middle-class values became an integral part of the educational experience, held in place as they were by a cadre of female teachers, practicing care. These discourses, shaped as they were by war, white hegemony, and suffrage, reveal how the women of the province expressed the ‘truths’ that shaped their perceptions of their reality. These perceptions reveal an essence that is not always in-line with the absolute essence of the historical narrative. As Prado (2000) insists, Foucault’s (1926-84) analytical approach rejects this absolute essence; it is the “antithesis of [such] essences,” and is in direct contrast to these narratives (p. 62). As such, this thesis is an examination of the contested histories that are often covered up and overrun by these traditional accounts. In the post-modern era, however, care has been deevolved by accountability; middle-class values and white respectability have been displaced by corporate panopticism. What is the future of this subjectivity? Should teachers care for their students anymore, or should they adopt a more ‘business-like’ stance? It is only through a careful examination of the historicity of this subjectivity and a thorough problematizing of our present that we can rediscover this collective past.