Neoliberalism on the Ground: Teachers' Changing Roles and Relationships in an Alternative High School Equivalency Program

• In Event: Political Conversations in the Lives of Teachers

Abstract

The current educational reform movement in the United States and many industrialized nations has disrupted long-standing framings of teachers’ roles. As a result of constantly changing market-based ‘fixes’ to the deep inequities, teachers are positioned as flexible technicians who enact processes that can erase these inequities. This study serves to explore long-term teachers’ understandings of their shifting roles in one High School Equivalency program in a large urban center. Specifically, this narrative analysis study explores participating teachers’ meanings around relationships at the local level, and speaks to dominant perceptions amongst teachers of the ways in which current reforms have shifted their agency, autonomy, collaboration, and ability to form the relationships that they argue have been damaged by recent reforms.

Author

• Noah Asher Golden, Chapman University