Stuck in the Middle: Neoliberal and Neoconservative Expectations in Teacher Education

• In Event: Platformed Pedagogy: The Work of Teaching in the New Edtech Landscape

Abstract

Objective:
This paper presentation juxtaposes neoconservatism and neoliberalism to underscore their intertwined roles in shaping the teaching profession and labor expectations of teachers and teacher educators. As a cisgender brown man, immigrant, teacher educator, and research advisor at a Minority Serving Institution, I reflect on my lived experiences and discursive engagement with my students, colleagues, and leadership to emphasize the importance of taking critical approaches to technology use and integration in teacher education and practice. Specifically, I demonstrate how academic leadership borrows neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies to concentrate power in whiteness. Finally, I propose subversive approaches by repurposing new media technologies to creatively navigate neoliberal and neoconservative expectations in teacher education.

Theoretical Framework:
Neoliberal ideology extends the concepts of freedom and democracy to economics by claiming that the road to liberation is through financial liberty that can be achieved by participating in free-market capitalism (Thorsen, 2010). Neoconservative ideology extends the concepts of security and control to economics by claiming that social Darwinism should dictate survival in the not-so-free market (Apple, 2006). These definitions highlight a key difference in the two ideologies currently dominating academic discourses–and as a consequence–teacher education. Academia, in broad cultural brushstrokes, can be understood as informed by both of these perspectives.

Method and Data:
Over the last four years in a tenure-track position, I have been taking notes on my interactions as a brown man in the white academia. Together with other critical scholars, as we shared a series of challenges with whiteness in academia, the role of neoliberalism and neoconservatism in enabling and enforcing whiteness became more obvious. In this paper, I will use my own observational and field notes, student work, records of communication with leadership to analyze how neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies are mixed in teacher education–especially in ways that impact expectations of labor in a technology-immersed reality.

Results and Significance:
Analyzing these data sources from an interpretive perspective, I find that faculty and students that are critical of the culture of efficiency or resisted uncritical adoption of new technologies were framed as lazy and incompetent. Faculty and students that disregard union rules and labor laws to take on excess class sizes and unpaid labor outside contract time are publicly lauded for their service. Neoliberal language frames the adoption of platforms for virtual learning as progress, often using terms like ‘equity’ and ‘access’ to underscore social justice facing performativity.

Official university discourse employs language of independence, development, and growth from neoliberal discourses to further policies and practices that center whiteness. When critical faculty and students push for social justice-oriented change and reform, neoconservative language of tradition, local governance, and individual responsibility is brought in that shifts the labor of social change on faculty and students of color with minimal power and influence. I argue that both neoliberal and neoconservative discursive practices in academia are utilized to center and serve whiteness. There is a need for critical repurposing with and without technologies to subvert neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies and allow space for place-based, relational work.

Author

• Rohit Mehta, California State University - Fresno
  Presenting Author