Utilizing action research and other ethnographic methods and appealing to critical and post-structural theories on subjectivity and education, this study focuses on a pre-service, pre-collegiate teacher education classroom, called "The Teacher Academy" in a mid-western high school. The central research question asks how are teacher subjects made and remade and how can we construct educational experiences for pre-service, pre-collegiate teacher education students that highlight and challenge what Michel Foucault (1977) has termed “disciplinary power,” or that which seeks to produce docile subjects. The data indicate that teacher subjectivities are produced through various discursive practices and that the curriculum and pedagogy of the Little Turtle High School (pseudonym) Teacher Academy is one that simultaneously reproduces available teacher subjectivities while encouraging students to analyze the complicated ways in which subjects come to think of and experience themselves and others as "teachers."
The data in this study include student work, classroom observations, curriculum documents, teacher-researcher narratives, and interviews with student-participants as well as archival data from the first year of the Teacher Academy program.
In addition, this inquiry pays special attention to the complicated relationship between gender and the production of teacher subjects in and around the Teacher Academy site and employs feminist research practices and theories.