Internationally, recent decades have witnessed the hegemony of neoliberal policies in education, characterized by emphases on choice, accountability and marketization/privatization (Ball, 2008; Rancière, 2010), and governed by logics of competition, instrumentalism and atomization/individuation (Clarke, 2012). This global neoliberal policyscape (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010), with its universalizing vision and hegemonic hyper-narrative of ‘standards’, ‘quality’ and ‘effectiveness’ (Stronach, 2010), treats the idiosyncratic and the contingent as if they simply did not exist, either in terms of such ‘material’ matters as the lived experiences and expectations of teachers and students, the highly varied resources and facilities commanded by schools, or more ‘philosophical’ and ‘ethical’ matters, such as what values and aspirations resonate and what knowledge and learning might mean to different people in different places at different times.

This neoliberal policy environment has radically altered teachers’ work, undermining their knowledge, authority and autonomy (Furlong, 2000) and subjecting them to the ‘terrors of performativity’ (Ball, 2003; see also Giroux, 2004; Portfilio & Malott, 2008). As suggested by the word ‘terror’, this process has presented a significant emotional challenge to teachers’ identities, often forcing them to confront fundamental antagonisms between the assumptions and implications of policy mandates and their own educational values and beliefs. Yet despite these challenges, affect and emotionality in the context of neoliberal policies remains one of teacher education’s ‘provoking absences’ (Phelan & Surmison, 2008). This symposium draws on research by theoretically-oriented international researchers from the UK and Australia, utilizing psychoanalytic (and other) theories in order to generate insights into how policy simultaneously relies on and delegitimizes affect (Moore, 2006), how teachers rationalize their responses to policies affecting their work, and the ways in which teachers manage the emotional strains and tensions this generates, particularly when resistance and opposition to policy have to be managed.

References

Ball, S. (2003). The teacher's soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), 215-228.

Ball, S. (2008). The education debate. Bristol: The Policy Press.

Clarke, M. (2012). Talkin' 'bout a revolution: The social, political and fantasmatic logics of education policy. Journal of Education Policy, 27(2), 173-191.

Furlong, J. (2000). Intuition and the crisis in teacher professionalism. In T. Atkinson & G. Claxton (Eds.), The intuitive practitioner: On the value of not always knowing what one is doing. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Giroux, H. (2004). The terror of neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the eclipse of democracy. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

Moore, A. (2006). Recognising desire: A psychosocial approach to understanding education policy implementation and effect. Oxford Review of Education, 32(4), 487-503.

Phelan, A., & Surmison, J. (Eds.). (2008). Critical readings in teacher education: Provoking absences Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Portfilio, B., & Malott, C. (2008). The Destructive Path of Neoliberalsim: An international examination of urban education. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Rancière, J. (2010). On ignorant schoolmasters. In C. Bingham & G. Biesta (Eds.), Jacques Rancière: Education, truth, emancipation. London: Continuum.

Rizvi, F., & Lingard, B. (2010). Globalizing education policy. New York: Routledge.

Stronach, I. (2010). Globalizing education, educating the local: How method made us mad. Abingdon: Routledge.