Teaching with the Flesh: Examining Discourses of the Body and their Implication in Teachers' Professional and Personal Lives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines how teachers understand and use their own bodies in their everyday practice of teaching. Using a poststructural theoretical framework and an ethnographic and arts-based research methodology, I demonstrate how discourses of the body shape experiences of teaching and teachers’ lives. This work is significant not only because it has direct implications for teachers but also because teachers’ bodies are rich and complex sites for theorizing and thinking critically about contemporary practices and discursive understandings that shape our lives. I call the research methodology that I used in this study “embedded performed ethnography”. This methodology involved in-depth ethnographic interviews, creative writing, and dramatic performance with twelve teachers in Ontario. By drawing on three distinct but interrelated fields: critical physical education, feminist and queer curriculum theory and Fat Studies, my research demonstrates the richness and complexity of teachers’ professional lives and the impact that dominant discourses of the body have on educational spaces. I use three key concepts to analyze the experiences and writing of the research participants. First, I use the concept of ‘biopedagogy’ to examine the ways in which teachers’ bodies are subject to regulation and policing in schools. Next, I use the concept of ‘performance’ to examine how participants use their bodies to construct and reproduce dominant notions of health in the classroom. Lastly, I use ‘affect’ as a concept to address the complex and complicated moments that occur on and through a teacher’s body in the classroom. I work with the everyday experiences of teachers in the classroom to explore how particular teaching moments illustrate and connect to the broader discourses and practices of the body that shape our lives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".