Session Information
99 ERC SES 04 F, Sociologies of Education
Paper Session
Contribution
The following paper uses an autoethnographic method to investigate current teacher practice in schools. It narrativises my experience as a high school teacher and illuminates the fragmentary and diminishing spaces for teacher- produced professionalism in education.
The work of teachers in schools has suffered from “the rise of top-down prescription of both the content and form of education” (Biesta, 2020a, p. 72) restricting our professional autonomy - our daily practices defined by measurement of externally-imposed outcomes. The impact of technicist measurement regimes has led to a degradation of the important role of teachers, catalysing a crisis in attracting people to teaching, and misguided descriptions of ‘teacher burnout’ (Santoro, 2019). I discuss Ball’s description of “exteriorisation” (Ball, 2003, p. 226, see Lyotard, 1984 : 4) to external pressures, resulting in a palpable intensification in teachers’ working lives. The intention of this paper is to exemplify and interrogate the daily work of teachers and draw attention to the concomitant problem of retaining teachers in our ‘profession’ (in Australia our professions remains defined by others through externally-imposed standards). I draw on three decades of work as a practising English teacher in secondary schools in New South Wales, Australia to explore the paradigm that reduces individual teacher judgement and professionalism and encourages a sense of ‘demoralisation’ (Santoro, 2019) about my/our work.
Common narratives exist of ‘teachers do a wonderful job’, but… ‘they also need to prepare students for an unknown future, improve standardised testing results, focus on student-centred learning, teach online for ‘asynchronous learning’, teach to demonstrate ‘competency’ in achieving outcomes, track student data for school improvement…’. The list goes on and on, highlighting a confusing and disturbing melange of disparate and externally-imposed purposes.
In this paper, I tell a story about the tensions between externally-imposed factors and teacher professionalism and artistry. ‘Artistry’ should be endemic to teaching practice and involves making situational, pedagogical decisions in response to uncertain or unexpected moments in the classroom. This differs substantially to the current discourse of teacher ‘competency’ or ‘proficiency’, which reduces teacher artistry/practice to the fulfilment and measurement of outcomes and often stifles artistry/creativity in drawing out ‘subjectifying’ experiences. I draw on Gert Biesta’s writing, as his work focuses on the rediscovering the importance of teaching, particularly in the subjectification domain of educational purpose. Subjectification relates to the “subjectivity or subject-ness of those we educate”, (Biesta, 2013, p. 4) becoming “subjects of action and responsibility”, (Biesta, 2013, p.18), which orientates them towards questions about problems in relation to freedom and emancipation. The other purposes of education, qualification and socialisation, (Biesta, 2013), are overly emphasised in current schooling systems in Australia and other parts of the Anglosphere and the Global North, resulting in a reduction in the importance of teacher virtuosity (Biesta, 2103) and teacher-led professional action. Teaching in the subjectification domain requires freedom in teacher practice to maintain the integrity of education as an educational field, not one colonised by multiple external incursions.
Schools should be places of ‘freedom’ for students, providing ‘free time’ and the “space to leave their own known environment, rise above themselves and renew (and thus change in unpredictable ways) the world” (Masschelein & Simons, 2013, p. 9-10). Without this ‘renewal’, Biesta (2013) argues that education and democracy are at risk.
My paper highlights the extent to which teacher professionalism has been hindered as our practices are inflected by discourses of accountability and performativity, the antithesis to Biesta’s ideas about education. Referring to Biesta’s more recent work, I further consider how I navigate the contemporary classroom and varied school systems and attempt to maintain a sense of purpose in my work.
Method
I draw on an autoethnographic methodology to present a “unique and multifaceted window into individual experiences” (Restler, 2019, p. 621) of my teaching in schools. Autoethnography allows for “non-traditional forms of inquiry and expression” (Wall, 2006, p.146) and makes “room for other ways of knowing” (p.148), unsettling assumptions of traditional understandings of what constitutes research and knowledge. My research (I am in my first six months of a PhD) combines a ‘cumulative knowledge’ (Leavy, 2020, p. 2) of teaching experience and research. I draw on the arts-based research practice of Leavy (2020) in challenging existing methods of qualitative research, allowing for alternative ways of exploring “voice, authority, representation and reflexivity” (Leavy, 2020, p. 10). Leavy investigates the congruence between subject matter and method through the “capability of the arts to capture process”, mirroring the nature of “the unfolding nature of social life” (Leavy, 2020, p. 22). My chosen ‘arts’, in this case, are the genre of creative non-fiction and autoethnographic reflection. I present a small fragment (Mendel, 2019) of this work in this paper. For the first section of this paper, I offer an autoethnographic account in third person that is constructed to reveal an immediacy through the deployment of the present tense. It aims to be a tangible representation of a teacher’s daily life and provokes wider thinking and a critical awareness of the on-the-ground experience that science-based research may struggle to articulately as a/effectively. Teachers are increasingly objectified in our work; we have become objects of ‘educational intervention’ (Biesta, 2020b, p. 89) rather than subjects of initiative and responsibility and as such are marginalised voices, whose disagreements are often expressed only through leaving the profession. Through the interior dialogue of my experiences, I offer what I hope will be a visceral reflection of how school improvement agendas and performativity play out in a school. My paper provides a hybrid collection of narrative, analysis and personal reflection: a narrative of a ‘typical’ day of a high school teacher; an analysis of that teacher’s day focusing on the three areas of performativity, intensification and ‘future-proofing’; and a self-reflexive account of a search for schooling and an education that is ‘educational’. In sum my teacher practice, examined through autoethnography, may hold “emancipatory promise” (Wall, 2006, p. 148) and help me (and others perhaps) avoid the ‘extinguishment of my sense of agency’ (Ruti, 2014).
Expected Outcomes
In needing to be accountable to external pressures in education, what has been lost in the classroom are moments of risk, dissonance and unpredictability, all vital for the domain of subjectification to be possible. Without emphasis away from qualification and socialisation, teachers are restricted in their judgement and their virtuosity. In spite of the fact that multiple educators have expressed concern about performativity and accountability for decades, the conditions that foster this kind of work have become intensified. In an eternal search to ‘improve education’, evidence-based research, predicated on causality, has dominated debates. What is clear from this research is that education, and particularly schooling, cannot be predicated on simplistic cause and effect relationships. Biesta (2020a) states that we need a “wider range of possibilities for action, based on a wider range of understandings” (p. 21) in order to validate the “open, semiotic and recursive” (Biesta, 2020a, p. 39) nature of education. This paper is an attempt to produce a narrative of (my) teacher experience about the realities of education from the margins of discourse to a more central place, authorising the importance of individual teacher judgement. This research invites others to reimagine teaching as virtuosity (Biesta, 2103) and listen to the often-silenced voices that are suppressed in attempts to discover “secure scientific knowledge about ‘what works’” (Biesta, 2020a, p.109). Narrative or autoethnographic research, produced by practising teachers in the field offers authentic, experiential and reflexive knowledge about the importance of teacher freedom and the need to reduce the instrumentalisation of education. For education to remain ‘educational’, we must hold fast to notions of autonomy and freedom in teacher practice.
References
Ball, S. J. (2003). The teacher's soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), 215–228. Biesta, G. J. J. (2013). The Beautiful Risk of Education, Paradigm Publishers, 5589 Arapahoe Avenue, Boulder, CO 80303 USA. Biesta, G.J. J. (2015). An Appetite for Transcendence: A Response to Doris Santoro’s and Samuel Rocha’s Review of The Beautiful Risk of Education. Stud Philos Educ 34, 419–422 (2015). Biesta, G. J. J. (2017). The Rediscovery of Teaching. Taylor & Francis Group. Biesta, G. (2020a). Educational research: An unorthodox introduction. Bloomsbury Publishing. Biesta, G. (2020b). Risking ourselves in education: Qualification, socialization, and subjectification revisited. Educational Theory, 70(1), 89-104. June Biesta, G.J.J. (2022). World-centred education: a view for the present. Routledge. Biesta, G. J. J. (2023). On being a teacher: How to respond to the global construction of teachers and their teaching. In Making of a Teacher in the Age of Migration. London/New York: Bloomsbury. Biesta, G. J. J. & Säfström, C. A. (2011). A manifesto for education. Policy futures in education, 9(5), 540-547. Heimans, S. & Biesta, G. J. J. (2020). Rediscovering the beauty and risk of education research and teaching: an interview with Gert Biesta by Stephen Heimans, Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 48:2, 101-111. Leavy, P. (2020). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice. Guilford publications. Masschelein, J., Simons, M. (2013). In Defence of the School. A Public Issue, Education, Culture & Society Publishers; Leuven, 2013-01 Mendel, M. (2019). The spatial ways democracy works: On the pedagogy of common places. Why, why now? Research in Education (Manchester), 103(1), 5–18. Restler, V. (2019). Countervisualities of care: re-visualizing teacher labor, Gender and Education, 31:5, 643-654. Ruti, M. (2014). In search of defiant subjects: Resistance, rebellion, and political agency in Lacan and Marcuse. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 19, 297-314. Santoro, D. (2019). The problem with stories about teacher “burnout” Phi Delta Kappan, 101(4), 26–33. Wall, S. (2006). An Autoethnography on Learning About Autoethnography. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 5(2), 146–160.
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