Balancing the Reality and the Ideal: How Neoliberal Accountability Shaped One Critical Educator's Pedagogical Sense-Making

• In Event: Raciolinguistic Issues in Teaching and Learning

Abstract

This analysis focuses on how neoliberalism shapes the sense-making of one critical educator in a school deemed “low-performing” by state accountability metrics. Drawing on critical theorizing of neoliberalism, it discursively analyzes the teacher’s narratives of neoliberal accountability to illustrate how neoliberal modes of fantasy and enclosure shaped the teacher’s daily classroom practice: first, in constructing neoliberalism as equivalent to reality, and second, in (re)directing her attention towards meeting accountability demands. By making visible how these mechanisms operated within the sense-making of one critical educator, this analysis illustrates how neoliberalism is enacted in the classroom and provides considerations for developing new approaches to resisting neoliberal accountability.

Author

• Laura A Taylor, Rhodes College