Louise Vincent is a DPhil in Education candidate researching how teachers become who they are.
Louise’s work situates the schoolteacher as a particular type of subject, that is both made and makes itself from within a network of power relations. Her study combines Foucauldian theory, Critical Discourse Analysis and Narrative analysis to provide an account of schoolteachers’ ethical agency in the context of top-down policy practices.
In March 2023 she presented her study’s philosophical premises at the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (PESGB)’s annual conference. By forefronting teacher’s perspectives, Louise hopes to contribute to practical questions of education policy given the UK’s “teacher shortages.” By interrogating how individuals experience becoming teachers, she believes, we can develop better models for the teaching profession.
Prior to her studies at Oxford, Louise was awarded a first class honours BA in Human, Social, and Political Sciences and a MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History, both of which she completed at the University of Cambridge. She then pursued a Postgraduate Diploma in Education (PGDE) at University College London’s Institute of Education, which informed her practice as a secondary school English teacher.
