Being a Teaching Testing Body in Neoliberal Times

• In Event: Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: The Complexity and Multiple Spaces of Social Justice in Action

Abstract

This paper explores accountability discourses to theorize the nature of teacher work under mandated testing. Drawing upon personal teaching experiences and recent policy events, I construct a theoretical understanding of testing as the performance of doing harm. Theories of subject formation and performativity are employed to explore how neoliberal forces shape teacher work in the educational industrial complex. Through this work I hope to contribute to the reconstruction of our ethical duty as educators so that soon we might consume published data on schools and interpret “failure” as the failure of the state to enact the right forms of protection, rather than the persistent failure of teachers to educate or the failure of children to be educated.

Author

• Martha K. Donovan, Georgia State University