The Institutional Silencing of Care and Teachers As Care Receivers.

This presentation reports on the findings of an institutional ethnography (Smith 2005) of a primary school in the north of England during a period of regulatory scrutiny when the school was judged by government inspectors as ‘performing less well than it might in all the circumstances reasonably be expected to perform’. Consideration is given to use of a narrative method, the Listening Guide including ‘I’ poems, and how these were utilised in revealing and analysing the co-ordination of social relations. Findings reveal complex, relational, ethical and political context in which the teachers’ work is organized by powerful texts and intertextual processes. Specifically teachers are scrutinized by inspectors as needing to care about targets and desired outcomes and are silenced as care receivers. Consequently inspection work influences the process whereby social differences become anchored in the teachers bodies and they talk of stress, anxiety and depression. The presentation involves a reading of data, an 'I' poem through which attendees can gain insight into the everyday, embodied experience of teachers in a performative system of education. We will also attend to our own emotional and embodied responses to the poem and reflect on the potential of poems and performance for explicating the discipline of emotions.