Confronting Neoliberalism Within the Teacher-to-Teacher Online Marketplace of Ideas

• In Event: Educating Techno-Skeptics: Critical Approaches to Educational Technology in a Dystopian World

Abstract

On the teacher-to-teacher online marketplace of ideas (TOMI), including educational marketplaces, social media, subscription platforms, as well as educators’ personal websites (Author, 2020), teachers exchange classroom resources and ideas. The TOMI, framed as a product of neoliberal logic and practice, presents a new future in curriculum that centers teachers as creators and consumers. But is this a future we desire? Neoliberalism conceptualizes schools as businesses, held accountable for providing standardized student experiences that produce particular standardized student performances (Hursh, 2007). Learning has become increasingly standardized, funding has been funneled to for-profit curriculum providers, and teacher autonomy has been reduced (Diamond, 2007). The TOMI offers a means of pushing back against neoliberalism, even while reinforcing market-driven approaches. In this symposium, we discuss three core issues with the TOMI that we as teacher educators consider with our own pre-service and in-service students.

Identifying Quality Content within the TOMI

The TOMI offers content that is new and tailored to the moment, such as Twitter’s #DisruptTexts (Schwartz, 2020). With no gatekeepers, anyone can publish, posing an opportunity to historically marginalized voices (Hodge et al., 2019), and challenging neoliberal power structures that fund publishing companies over teachers. However, TOMI content can be inaccurate and superficial (e.g., Rodríguez et al., 2020). Teachers may struggle to find “good” material amidst the “ubiquity of resources marketed as educational” within the TOMI (Sawyer et al., 2020, p. 16). Searching requires significant labor, intensifying teachers’ work, while for-profit platforms extract that labor for profit. Identifying quality content may require significant labor, reinforcing neoliberal harms.

Finding Professional Community and Agency on the TOMI

Teachers are often stifled by neoliberal standardization and administrative control (Author, 2018). On the TOMI they exercise agency, choosing edu-influencers to follow, selecting their preferred classroom materials, and engaging as entrepreneurs. Nonetheless, teachers may struggle to find a valuable network. The TOMI privileges certain voices (Pittard, 2017) who are conventionally attractive and white (Marwick, 2015). Influencers of color are paid less than their white counterparts (Frier, 2021), and algorithmic racial bias can reinforce white supremacist values (Noble, 2018), making it a challenge for edu-influencers of color to gain followers. Agency on the TOMI is limited by racialized capitalism.

Profiting and Consumerism on the TOMI

Low teacher pay is a persistent issue (Karp & Sanchez, 2018), perhaps because women are willing to work for lower wages (Montgomery, 2009). The TOMI enables teachers to supplement teaching income (Reinstein, 2018) and experience professional satisfaction (Pittard, 2017); however, if teachers were simply paid more for their work, offered high quality curriculum, or time to collaborate with peers and develop resources, perhaps the need for the TOMI and its entrepreneurial imperative would be lessened. Moreover, the TOMI reinforces the dangerous neoliberal message that teachers need to constantly consume (Author, 2021) along with potentially unachievable cycles of improvement seeking (Pittard, 2017).

To conclude, centering these three core issues may facilitate teachers’ critical reflection on the TOMI to counter dominant discourses around the future of curriculum and their role in this future.

Authors

• Catharyn Crane Shelton, Northern Arizona University

• Stephanie Schroeder, Pennsylvania State University

• Rachelle Curcio, University of North Florida