This article makes a case for bringing in the body from the margins of research
on teacher education. In doing so, it considers the personal and socio cultural
issues reported by seventeen pre-service teachers (PSTs), who are part of a oneyear
post graduate diploma in post-primary teaching, when learning to embody
and fashion teacher identity. The article focuses on embodiment drawing on
qualitative interview data from a large-scale government-funded study on initial
teacher education. Drawing on Foucault’s general theory of dressage, at the center
of which reigns the notion of disciplining and applying the methodology of
critical discourse analysis, this article presents three themes tethered to the analysable
and manipulable teacher body, namely dressage as compliance, dressage
as discipline and dressage as performance. For PSTs, ‘looking like a teacher’
and dressage as a practice of power is a significant part of the fabric of their
professional school life.