Abstract

After a brief review of the literature on Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET), I employ a Foucauldian analysis to argue that student evaluations are forms of power that involve aspects of both discipline and governmentality. After examining how SETs are used to improve teaching, I identify some techniques that instructors use to respond to SET that undermine the legitimate interests of students or the educational institution. I endorse a hybrid model where a single global teaching question is used for summative purposes and fifteen or twenty additional questions are used for formative purposes. Finally, I argue that to resist the normalizing pressure of SET, instructors might, as Foucault suggested, return to the Hellenistic concept of the care of self. Through techniques of the care of self, it is my hope that instructors could cultivate a more robust subjectivity, a subjectivity less vulnerable to the normative power of student evaluations.