"Like a Form of Violence Toward the Teacher": A Gendered Raciolinguistic Analysis of Teacher Work

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 73
  In Roundtable Session: Teacher Knowledge, Teacher Labor, and Teacher Resistance in Neoliberal Times

Abstract

In this presentation, I utilize multimodal research methods to make visual and palpable the institutional violence enacted by neoliberal education policies such as high-stakes testing and value-added teacher evaluation. Focusing in on a single teacher’s photograph of her invisible labor, my paper seeks to map the complex carework of teaching in urban public schools. I argue that carework here is a form of social justice both because it is linked with broader dynamics of structural oppression, and also because caring for Black and Brown bodies—selves and others—is a form of “healing justice” (Ginwright 2016) and as Audre Lorde (1988) famously declared, “an act of political warfare.”

Author

• Victoria G Restler, Rhode Island College