Articles written by

Simone Galea

Volume 3-Issue 1: June 2005

Teachers as Mothers – Practices of Subversion

This paper explores the possibilities for women teachers to use their maternal connotations to their teaching in differently conceptualizing themselves as mothers and teachers. The paper draws on Irigaray's theories of mimesis and Foucaultian notions of power and the care of the self to understand women teachers' use of their maternal teaching positions to go beyond the limiting social expectations of themselves as teachers as mothers. The theoretical explanations of practices of subversion are used in combination with the articulations of three women teachers' understandings of themselves as women and mothers and their ethics of care in particular. Their accounts of their caring selves are considered to be both practices of the care of the self and practices that subvert the usual discourses of the maternal and teaching.
56 min read
Volume 7-Issue 2: December 2013

Educating the Migrant Girl. A Politics of Difference

This paper problematises discourses about integration, their claims for accommodating difference and their implications in conceptualising the education of young migrant women. In thinking about the ethics and politics of integration and particularly those that are promoted through discursive frameworks generated by EU institutional mechanisms I argue that they reflect a politics of assimilation that does not allow educational processes of becoming different. A politics of difference, in spite of the possibilities of generating conflict within schools and classes would better inform our thinking about an education that democratically attends to student differences. I shall draw on situations and examples related to the education of young migrant women to suggest that processes of migration, rather than those of integration, can be important sources in conceptualising education as processes of transformation where becoming different women is possible.