Neoliberal Diversity in Crisis: Rethinking Episteme and Ethos in Teacher Education

• In Event: Difference and Dissidence: Im(Possibilities) Within the Neoliberal and Imperial Educational Complex

Abstract

Purpose: This paper illuminates the ways diversity discourses in the neoliberal teacher preparation program averts crisis to protect regulatory ideals of white colonial subjectivity (Wynter 2003), multicultural happiness (Ahmed 2004), and the good life (Berlant 2011). I argue the administrative ethos of the neoliberal teacher preparation program is based on strategic disavowal (Hong 2015), where opportunities to confront the fraught histories and intensities of difference are either forestalled or depoliticized. This paper is guided by the questions: (1) What do discourses and practices of diversity in the neoliberal teacher preparation program invoke? (2) How can a teacher education program facilitate conditions that apprehend crisis for alternative engagements with difference?

Perspectives: Diversity rhetoric in higher education is often construed as the management of human difference, which often invokes overly feel good sentiments and static caricatures of people and culture (Ahmed 2012, Kẏra 2015; McKenzie, 2014). Diversity in this way necessarily performs a calculated and strategic politics of inclusion on the part of the neoliberal institution to avoid crises, or confrontational impasses, that invite critical scrutiny of the disciplinary modes of power, state, and capital (Ferguson 2012). Teacher preparation often produces such politics that strip the content and character of diversity (Allen et al 2017). Insights into more expansive conceptions of crisis are necessary to forge creative possibilities to reckon with difference and to work robustly towards social justice.

Methods: This paper draws on a methodological bricolage of archival research and critical auto/ethnographies during a yearlong compulsory social foundations/human relations teacher preparation course. The bricolage is a “emancipatory research construct” that uses multiple tools to unveil the taken for granted, and pushes for eclectic, critical and transformative knowledge production (Kincheloe, McLaren, Steinberg, & Monzó, 2017).

Sources: Data sources include (1) individual reflections (fieldnotes, memos, journaling); (2) semi-structured interviews with teacher educators, teacher candidates and administrators; (3) direct observation of course (both plenary and recitation section); and (4) document reviews of course materials, teacher candidate assignments, and archival research materials on diversity curriculum in teacher education.

Findings: Through constant comparative analysis, multiple data sources reveal the following themes: (1) diversity is decontextualized from structural domains of power, histories, intensities, and vulnerabilities; (2) diversity is intelligible through technical proceduralisms, where teacher candidates quickly consume methods on how to effectively and efficiently “manage” diverse groups of people; (3) an ethic of commensurability and fungibility pervades engagements stripping difference of its creative and transformative potential; (4) diversity and anti-racist sentiments are deployed to protect the syntax of progress, innocence, multicultural happiness, and hegemonic whiteness. These themes offer insights to the complexities of diversity work in the neoliberal teacher education program that consists of predominately white teacher candidates and ways to work with/in crisis.

Significance: This study will contribute to knowledge about the performatives of diversity work and the transformative potential of embracing crisis. It highlights nuanced understandings of the relationship among whiteness, difference, and knowledge production.

Author

• Justin Phillip Jimenez, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities