Neoliberalism in Education: Teacher Experiences and Responses

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This session seeks to deepen contemporary understandings of the ways in which teachers are experiencing and contesting neoliberalism in education in the US and Canada. With attention to the Ontario, Pennsylvania, Illinois and California contexts, this session takes up questions of teachers’ work, resistance and professionalism in light of teacher understandings of neoliberalism in education (understandings which identity structural racism, increased standardization and various forms of de-professionalization). This session takes up teacher experiences of these phenomena and outlines various forms of active and passive resistance, inside and outside of traditional teacher professional associations.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Teachers Work/Teacher Unions

Chair

• Carol Caref, Chicago Teachers Union

Papers

• Learning, National Ideology, and Grassroots Organizing: Teacher Organizing Through Inquiry in Philadelphia - Rhiannon M. Maton, University of Pennsylvania

• Teacher Professionalism in Neoliberal Times: Discourses of Union-Active Teachers in Ontario - Pamela Janie Osmond-Johnson, University of Regina

• High-Stakes Standardized Testing and Teachers' Work in the United States and Canada: Teacher Experience and Resistance - Arlo Kempf, University of Toronto, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

Discussant

• Nina Bascia, University of Toronto - OISE