Cultivating Disruptive Subjectivities: Interrupting the New Professionalism

• In Event: 61.052 - Reengineering Teachers' Identities: Can We Resist, Appropriate, or Reverse the "New Professionalism"?

Abstract

Objective: This paper explores the tensions and contradictions between graduate students’ experiences in an action research class and the larger goals of an educational leadership certification program designed to prepare teachers who can seamlessly enter schools reflective of the audit culture of the new public management. We document the ongoing struggle to hold curricular space that problematizes “the ends questions” in education and pushes back against the current common sense in education (Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 2009). While ultimately the action research class was seen by program administrators as “disturbing” to students, that is, cultivating subjectivities at odds with this new professionalism, student data indicated that the class could serve as a space where resistance and struggles over subjectivities were possible (Ball and Olmedo, 2013).
Theoretical framework: The promotion of new professional subjectivities is seen by many as the real threat of the new public management (Thomas and Davies, 2002). Citing work by du Gay (1996) Thomas and Davies (2002) argue that NPM is “an identity project;” shifts in the workplace serve as mechanisms for reforming teachers, scholars and researchers, changing what it means to be a teacher and producing new kinds of teacher subjects (Ball, 2003). As Ball (2003) points out, current reforms do not simply change what we as educators do, it changes who we are.
Practitioner action research can potentially push back on current trends, disrupting narrow conceptions of teaching and learning (Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 2009) or it can be seen as simply a means to an end, helping teachers and administrators “better” carry out the current accountability regime of education via its handling of data. We set ourselves toward cultivating emancipatory action research that questions the social assumptions on which practical action is based (Tripp, 1990).
Inquiry approach: Begun as an action research study of our teaching and our action research classes, we gradually expanded our lens to document our ongoing experience of trying to preserve the tenets of action research and the class itself within increasingly constrictive programmatic space.
Data sources: This paper draws on multiple qualitative sources of data gathered over a period of three years: student reflections and projects; narratives of multiple instructors of the course; researchers’ journals and ongoing dialogue. A hybrid course, much of the interaction of the class happened online, leaving a cyber-trail that offered another source of data.
Conclusions: 1) Cultivating emancipatory practitioner researchers is one means of interrupting a seemingly totalizing conception of the new educational professional but, 2) it also poses a threat to programmatic aims aligned with these conceptions of teachers and administrators; 3) ongoing strategizing to preserve programmatic space is a necessary constant.
Scholarly significance: The creation of new teacher identities is part of the enterprise of neoliberalism, yet as this paper demonstrates, it is possible to create spaces of resistance that interrupt these subjectivities. But, as the paper also shows, the sustaining and preserving of these spaces cannot be taken for granted.

Author

• Kathryn G. Herr, Montclair State University