Speaking Back to the Neoliberal Discourse on Teaching: How U.S. Teachers Have Used Social Media to Redefine Teaching

• In Event: 33.054 - Promoting Democratic Citizenship Through a Critical Analysis of the Media's Relationship to the Privatization of Education

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which teachers have used social media to not only critique neoliberal definitions of teaching, but how they have used social media to present a counter-narrative of what teaching is. Through blogs, teachers presented counter-narratives of the experience of teaching, rejected neoliberal ideas of teaching, and put forth their own ideas of what should count as quality teaching. In so doing, they resist the neoliberal notions of performativity and used social media as a tool for advancing a “commons knowledge” of what teaching is. Through an analysis of teacher-authored blogs specifically, this paper uses virtual ethnographic and critical discourse methods to analyze how teachers have been able to challenge the dominant frames about the quality of their own profession and re-frame teacher quality to the public.
Perspective(s) or Theoretical Framework
The paper drawn upon theories of neoliberalism, and more specifically, Ball’s (2012) notion of performativity. Performativity is drawn from the notion of performance, a key tenet underlying neoliberalism that allows managers treat public sector employees, like teachers, as private sector ones. They can decide who is worthy of staying in their jobs and who gets rewarded, and, conversely who gets fired from their positions or gets sanctioned. Data points are used to ascertain the quality of a teacher. Following the collection of data points, decisions are made, including continued employment or incentive bonuses for teachers.
Methods and Data Sources
Virtual or online ethnography was used to analyze the counter narratives present in social media through teacher-authored blogs. Virtual or online ethnography is specifically tailored to research in digital media, although it borrows from traditional ethnography. This led to an initial internet search for teacher-authored blogs that talked about teacher quality. Once a few were found, “chain sampling” was used, a technique in which an initial group of cases are identified and then used to identify other cases. Through this process, twenty-two teacher-authored blogs were the basis of this study.
Substantiated Conclusions
Over 22 blogs reviewed reveal several important themes and strands of discourse around what teaching means to teachers themselves. While they did not use this word, teachers across the blogs critiqued the notion of “performativity” (Ball, 2012), thereby resisting and beginning to create a “commons knowledge” as an alternative to the neoliberal discourse around teaching.
Bloggers took on particular aspects of performativity like the measurement of teachers through test score data, countering a neoliberal logic which has put forth “discourses which constitute imaginary projections for new relations of structure and scale,” (Fairclough in Wodak &Meyer, 2009, p.176). The “imaginary” that neoliberals project is driven by the market, and uses notions of performativity to normalize and neutralize what is really a political move to insert the market into public education and to privatize it. The bloggers reject performativity and the power relations that it asserts. In their blogs, teachers are not only revealing what they believe to be a “social wrong” but aim to assert their power through the form of the blog.

Author

• Jessica Shiller, Towson University