"How Does That Mean I Need to Change My Instruction?" Competing Discourses of Neoliberal Accountability

• In Event: Should I Stay or Should I Go? Perspectives on Staying and Leaving the Teaching Profession

Abstract

Responding to issues of teacher attrition in urban schools, I consider how teachers in those schools might be sustained in their work in part through the stories they tell. Drawing on theorizing of narrative as interactional positioning as well as critical theorizing of neoliberalism, I focus on the stories about testing and accountability told by three teachers in a “low-performing” urban public school. Multiple levels of positioning were analyzed
in 140 narratives told across 12 interviews, identifying three common storylines used by these teachers to interpret their school’s comparatively low test scores. I trace how teachers positioned themselves relative both to others in their school and to dominant discourses, and it considers the recurrent use of disalignment within these stories.

Author

• Laura A Taylor, Rhodes College