Governmentality and reflective practice of EFL teachers through CBAR in a remote school in Indonesia

This paper draws on Foucault's concept of governmentality to explore the use of reflective practice within Classroom Based Action Research (CBAR). The study reported here explored English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers' reflective practice as they adopted CBAR as a professional learning model. Qualitative data were gathered from eight EFL teachers working in one public senior secondary school in a remote region in Indonesia. Foucault's notions of power relations, governmentality, self-writing, technology of the self, and/or care of the self informed the analysis of the data from reflective journals in order to develop an understanding of how discourses of reflective practice were socially constructed in this particular context, and how these impacted on the implementation of CBAR. Findings related to the discourse of reflective practice are discussed in terms of the interactions among attitudes, behaviors, and language used by teachers, and power relations that acted to limit reflective practice.