Can We Take Something Oriented Toward Brutality and Turn It Into Liberation? Reinhabiting Continuous Improvement

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 10:50 am Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Teacher Learning and Learning to Teach (Table 9)

Abstract

This paper investigates a contemporary imperative of education reform, continuous improvement, as situated in my own experiences as a classroom teacher and school coach deputized for its implementation. Employing critical autoethnography, I enact an attempt to move myself from a relationship to continuous improvement suffused with control into something that might approach strategy and repair. In this effort, I read my own narratives alongside contradictory perspectives that continuous improvement positions teachers as agents democratizing school reform and also as individuals subjectivized to an intensifying neoliberal environment. I suggest possible avenues of strategy and repair may include pursuing ongoing negotiations between continuous improvement and broader collective endeavors towards equity, or turning its practices towards participatory action research designs from underneath.

Author

• Eric Y. Shieh, New York City Outward Bound Schools