Subject to Accountability: Target Practice and Teacher Subjectivities

• In Event: Roundtable Session 28
  In Roundtable Session: Teacher Subjects, the Teacher Self, and Investigations Into Teacher Positioning

Abstract

This paper will revisit selected findings from a qualitative study in which teachers described an ensemble of accountability testing practices enacted at their respective schools that was identified as “target practice.” This paper will examine target practice and three teacher subjectivities suggested in the data as discursive practices through which troubling moral, meritocratic, and deficit discourses reinscribe social and structural inequities to which most school curricula conform. The “view from the trenches” perspective offered here traces how these discursive influences and ideologies rationalize both the formation of strategic target practice and the teacher subjectivities that maintain it. The goal is to throw a light on these interweaving discourses in order to render them visible and available for critique and redress.

Author

• Becky M. Atkinson, The University of Alabama - Tuscaloosa