Rope, or, Accountability: Educational Policy and the Fantasy of Teaching

• In Event: Roundtable Session 18
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Perspectives on Policy and Practice

Abstract

Recent high-stakes teaching accountability measures suggest policymakers’ misunderstanding of the relationship between teaching and learning and, perhaps more importantly, a willful ignorance on the part of legislators to own up to the conditions under which teaching and learning commonly take place. In this paper, we view the demand implied by policies of accountability – that students perform what teachers teach – as a form of fantasy, bound up in the Imaginary and uncritical commitments commonly held regarding teaching. We analyze Hitchcock’s Rope as an example of Zizek’s (2007) claim that the (teaching) fantasy made real produces a nightmare, and use this counterpoint to suggest an alternate view of educational outcomes as an unknown, tied to but undetermined by the past.

Authors

• David F. Jelinek, The Collegiate School

• James Stillwaggon, Iona College