'Destroying' the pedagogical imaginary: implications of sexual difference for educational philosophy

This chapter discusses teacher identity from a historical view, tracing the complexities of the gendering of teacher identities in western societies. It also investigates some of the antecedent conditions underlying the imputation of autonomy within conceptions of ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’. The chapter links the history of those concepts with the separate roles and functions assigned to males and females in specific instances of educational practice. ‘Teaching’ and ‘learning’ are psychoanalysed as images and symbols that have frequently been used in a neutral, asexuate sense. Dorothy Gardiner recounts the work of Margaret Vernon, a nun and educational administrator in sixteenth-century England. The images we hold of nuns as celibate serve phallic purposes as easily as do those of ‘whores’ as repositories of phallic desire. So long as female teachers were nuns, a semblance of sex-neutrality had been relatively easy to maintain, owing to the associations available between the clergy and chastity, celibacy, and so forth.