Uncomfortable Thoughts on Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Beginning Teacher Mentorship

• In Event: Roundtable Session 50
  In Roundtable Session: Neoliberal Policy Effects on Teachers' Work and Teacher Unions

Abstract

This paper contributes to the conceptualization of beginning teacher mentorship within the prevailing neoliberal policy context of North American public education systems. Drawing upon commonplace characterizations embedded in mentorship research, I consider the various ways mentorship is invoked as a malleable tool for addressing professional and pedagogical ‘problems’ new teachers encounter in their first years of practice. Rather than serving as a politically innocuous form of support, mentorship both reinforces—and may serve to disrupt—neoliberal discourses of professionalism and teaching practice. Drawing on Foucault’s conception of ‘governmentality’, and Furlong’s (2005) ‘new professionalism,’ I offer tentative thoughts on the interplay of commonsense mentorship discourse and beginning teachers’ potential roles as public intellectuals and critical pedagogues.

Author

• Anne Catherine Hales, The University of British Columbia