Effects of Accountable Policies on Teachers' and Students' Subjectivities

• In Event: Refusing Curriculum Systemizations: Immeasurable Difference, Indeterminacies, and Multiplicities

Abstract

Objectives:
Over the past decades, education policy in Brazil has sought to consolidate accountability strategies, promising a more equitable system. In general, it is a policy in line with that recommended by the OECD and supported by numerous governance networks. The Common Core approved in 2017 to be implemented by 2020 is part of that policy. With the pandemic, in-person school activities were replaced by remote learning. The accountability discourse continued to insist on the economized language, calculating the losses for students of being out of schools in terms of non-achieved competences. In this paper, I turn to a school on the periphery of Rio de Janeiro to discuss the effects of this neoliberal educational policy in its daily life, especially those that concern the subjectivation processes of the school's subjects.
Theoretical framework:
I take neoliberalism as a normative discourse that economizes life, in dialogue with Brown (2015, 2019) and with the studies of recent educational policies produced by Ball (2012) and Ball, Maguire and Braun (2012). Inspired by the performance of the selfhood (Derrida, 1992) and by Butler's (2015) notion of performativity, I seek to explore the excess that overflows the determined character of neoliberal normativity.
Methods:
I assume, like St. Pierre (2021), that poststructural research needs to “refuse pre-existing (...) methods and methodology because they over-determine thought and practice” (p.164). Without renouncing empirical work, I have sought to define it in dialogue with post-qualitative research. I name the methodological experience I bring in this paper phantasmatic PAR, in which I deal with “data” from a research carried out for 4 years in a public school, treating these data as traces (Derrida, 2008).
Data sources:
In a phantasmatic PAR, the idea of data can only be used under erasure, as ghostly hauntings that produce movement, without being able to be told representations. The school we work with proudly defines itself as a “different school”, a metaphor around which our in-person (2018 and 2019) and remote (2020 and 2021) meetings with the school community took place. Such meetings sought to work on the idea of a collective memory (Davies and Gannon, 2006) of the future – shuffling temporalities.
Results:
Post-qualitative research needs to be accompanied by writing experiments, which is why our results have been presented in texts that seek to blur the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. In this paper, I bring narratives from a “different school”: the ambivalence of resistance to more than 50 different policies in place at the school, as well as everyday practices that intend to loosen the norms that hinder the circulation of difference in the lived curriculum.
Scholarly significance of the study:
In seeking to understand the pervasive effects of accountability discourses promising total inclusiveness in shaping teachers’ and students’ as economized beings, the paper aims to deconstruct the normative production of a neoliberal ontology that divides subjects into classes. It intends to open the possibility of imagining education as the exposure to radical alterity.

Author

• Elizabeth F. Macedo, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro