Therapeutic discourse in teacher professional discourse: on multidimensionality and elasticity of psychology-based reasoning

ABSTRACT

Educational discourses have embraced therapeutic discourse, a psychology-based system of assumptions about the self, its boundaries, development and social relations. While scholars have debated the virtues of this therapeutic turn, there has been little empirical study of therapeutic discourse in teacher pedagogical discourse. This article, using theoretical frameworks of teacher learning and the sociology of therapeutic discourse and employing linguistic ethnographic methods, features close analysis of therapeutic discourse in teacher workplace conversations. The focal case, in which a teacher consults with her colleagues regarding a non-compliant student, features four episodes of therapeutic reasoning (ETRs) in which various therapeutic logics are employed. Analysis uncovered three central manifestations of therapeutic discourse especially pertinent to education: the role of emotions; perceptions of the self; and temporality. Attending to these manifestations in each ETR reveals conditions under which they may enhance or impede potential for teacher learning and pedagogic action. When therapeutic modes of reasoning are deployed by teachers to discuss their problems of practice, they are found to be multifaceted, elastic, and to bear potential for agentive teacher action under certain conditions. This article calls for a more nuanced, temporally-sensitive perspective on therapeutic discourse in education, and addresses implications for theory and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Therapeutic Discourse
• Ethnography
• Teacher Learning
• Discourse Analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We refer here to a Foucauldian critical analysis of discourse as primary historical formation, that is, the form of representation and set of conditions which enable and constrain socially productive imagination about different objects in each historical period. (Foucault 1972). Thus, Foucault asks how a particular discourse (a therapeutic discourse, in our case) ‘finds a way of limiting its domain, of defining what it is talking about, of giving it the status of an object – and therefore of making it manifest, nameable, and describable’ (p.41).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aliza Segal

Aliza Segal, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. Her research focuses on knowledge, culture, and identity in classroom discourse and teacher professional discourse.

Galia Plotkin Amrami

Galia Plotkin Amrami, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Her anthropological-historical research focuses on the therapy discourse in the areas of education, immigration, and resilience-building; medicalization and experience of stigma within school and family setting. She also explores interactions between professional knowledge of mental health experts, cultural narratives, and national ethos, and investigates social factors influencing the appearance of new categories of mental disorders and new professional practices.