"Achieving the Impossible" or "Sticking Plasters on a Gunshot Wound"? A Socially Critical Analysis of TeachFirst

• In Event: 68.015 - Pathways to Improving Opportunity for Marginalized Children in International Contexts

Abstract

This paper examines how TeachFirst both supports and challenges equity for children from low-income households. After Bailey (2015) and Scott et al. (2016), it uses a socially-critical conceptual framework grounded in Foucault's governmentality and Bourdieu's capital.

The methodology incorporates a systematic literature review; critical discourse analysis of TeachFirst material, and analytic auto-ethnography, based upon the authors' ten-year experience of university-TeachFirst partnerships.

It finds TeachFirst has partially overcome the pedagogy-related criticisms leveled at Teach for America, by requiring recruits to achieve identical teacher-accreditation as other routes. However, the more ideologically-based criticisms remain just as salient, because, like Teach for America, TeachFirst promotes managerial leadership and neoliberal reform as antidotes to educational disadvantage, whilst ignoring the influence of structural inequality and racism.

Authors

• Ruth McGinity, The University of Manchester

• Justine Mercer, University of Warwick