A Truth Space for Challenging "Good" Neoliberal Teaching and Surveillance

• In Event: Questioning and Creating "Truth Spaces" in Social Foundations Classrooms

Abstract

The course covered in the first presentation is offered at a private, elite research university to first- and second-year students in a teaching and learning doctoral program. Taught by a tenured faculty member who covers most of the department’s diversity and social justice offerings, the course attempts to unsettle the (often fixed) notions of “good” teaching among doctoral cohorts composed primarily of middle-class, cishetero-White students with prior K-12 teaching experiences in public schools. Following a brief course overview, this presentation will highlight the tensions and opportunities that emerged across two sessions: one on surveillance in schooling, grounded in a reading of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1995); and the other on neoliberalism in education. Together, these sessions prompted doctoral students’ critical reflections on their prior engagements as K-12 teachers with the structures of schooling. For some, these sessions also led to uncomfortable reckonings with their own complicity as former K-12 teachers with neoliberal educational reforms and the surveillance of students. These reckonings marked a challenging identity transition, as class members increasingly took on emergent identities as critical, university-based scholars while reconciling with previously held beliefs about good teaching. The implications of facilitating that transition within social foundations courses, especially those taught by tenured faculty members, will be addressed in the conclusion of this presentation.

Below is a brief description of this course:

Teaching and learning are social phenomena that reflect and inform the aims, anxieties, and conflicts of the social contexts within which they unfold. Engagements in thoughtful and effective educational research and practice demand nuanced understandings of the complicated and evolving relationships between educational enterprises and the societies that shape them. In this course, we will examine the social foundations of teaching and learning. Specifically, through a series of theoretical lenses, we will question how social formations like democracy, capitalism, race, feminism, and networked publics have attempted to define the goals and substance of educational endeavors. Additionally, we will consider the implications of the social foundations of teaching and learning for our own work as educational scholars and practitioners.

Author

• Ed Brockenbrough, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author