Open Collections

Mendonça dos Santos, Rodrigo

University of British Columbia

The development of neoliberal educational reforms has repeatedly shown its target to be teachers and teaching (Ball, 2000, 2003; Ball & Olmedo, 2013; Biesta, 2017; Buchanan, 2015). Educational accountability in neoliberal terms has turned into a managerial tool of surveillance (Biesta, 2017) that deprofessionalized and then reprofessionalized teachers into new ethics where performance substitutes professional judgment (Ball 2003, p. 218). Giroux (2018) argued that it is urgent for educators and researchers to develop a discourse of educated hope against the neoliberal imposition in education. A language of critique and possibility that exposes and challenges the unchallenged neoliberal narrative of our time (Giroux, 2019). In this study, I used narrative inquiry to address the following research questions: (i) how do teachers narrate the deprofessionalization of teaching imposed by accountability mandates / neoliberalization processes through their everyday practices? (ii) how does resistance manifest in teachers’ narratives of themselves as professionals? (iii) how can/do stories function as a language of resistance that fosters further acts of resistance? Findings show that teachers reclaim their authority using different types of tactics (de Certeau, 1984) and insurgent pedagogies. This study identified tactics of resistance such as: (i) the Madagascar Penguin tactic; (ii) the sabotage of public documents; (iii) a dog and pony show; and (iv) the reappropriation of neoliberal places. Teachers go through deprofessionalization processes that include: (i) a psychological war about how to behave; (ii) the commodification of teacher practices; (iii) the bureaucratization of teaching; and (iv) the precarization of teachers’ work. The findings also indicate that stories connected to grand narratives about teaching can serve as political resources for teachers to reimagine possibilities to engage in critical pedagogy practices under situations of oppression.

Text

2024-01-31

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87396

Curriculum Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/