Poststructural Perspectives on Teacher-Researchers’ “Experiences” in Neoliberal Times

• In Event: Is Emancipatory Action Research in Schools Possible? Continuing the Conversation

Abstract

Current versions of a majority of U.S. educational policies not only focus on, but also now mandate what “counts” as curricular knowledges, teachers’ “effective” pedagogies and students’ supposed resultant learnings. Such policies and their standardizing manifestations drain away possibilities of teachers-researchers examining the complexities of inter-relational, contextualized, messy, unpredictable and never-fully knowable or measureable lives. Instead, pre-determined and standardized versions of and decisions about “what and whose knowledges and pedagogical approaches are of the most worth” are contributing both to the proliferation and the seemingly insatiable desire for standardized and thus sanitized accounts of educational lives.
To engage in conceptualizing possibilities and difficulties of refusing such forms of teacher-research that result from current U.S. education neo-liberally infused policy mandates, I will interrogate, from feminist poststructural perspectives, my assumptions over time that have infused my participation with eight other teacher-researchers for ten years. Our main teacher-research collaborative endeavors have focused on scrutinizing versions of our own classroom-based research that highlight disjunctures, ruptures, break-ups, and fractures in normative versions of the already-determined and therefore supposedly measureable versions of the “good” student and teacher.
Here, I will explore possibilities that, throughout my interpretations of our collaborative teacher-research group, I have engaged in what feminist poststructural qualitative research theorist Elizabeth St. Pierre cautions against: “the pulling together of temporally distributed, disparate events and supposedly intentional actors into the coherent comfort of narrative (St. Pierre, 2008, pp. 324-325).
I thus too will draw on some aspects of feminist poststructuralist historian Joan Scott’s work (1991) to question how, even within our supposedly anti-neoliberal goals for our research collaborative, I have struggled to disrupt normative accounts of my own “experiences” within our research collaborative. Scott points to ways that conceptions and versions of “experience” already are interpretations that are deeply influenced by dominant social and cultural norms and discourses that frame “how one’s vision is structured” (Scott, 1991, p. 82). Thus, she argues, ‘experience’ already is an interpretation and always is in need of further interpretation.
Further, I will draw on Scott’s work to explore how I may have been conceptualizing and enacting versions of teacher-research that ironically still may function as examples of the “methodological will to certainty and clarity of vision” (Scott, p. 4). Indeed, even as I urge versions of my own and of our collaborative’s teacher-research that challenge neo-liberal education policies and practices, how might I have ignored ways that I ironically have enacted Scott’s insight that “[...] every attempt to pin down meaning releases something indefinable that returns to haunt that particular fantasy of possession” (p. 72).

Author

• Janet L. Miller, Teachers College, Columbia University