Teach for Nepal: a global education reform movement at the intersections of neoliberal and postcolonial entanglements

• In Event: Neoliberalism and Globalization

Proposal

Teach for Nepal is one of more than forty-six independent educational enterprises under the aegis of the umbrella organization, Teach for All, that recruits high-achieving university graduates to teach in disenfranchised schools for two years. While supporters of the Teach for All model often consider it a panacea for educational and socio-economic challenges, TFAll has also alarmed educators around the world and been condemned as “not only patronizing” but also as “part of an ideologically driven and deliberate neoliberal attack on public education, teachers, teacher professionalism and working class or ‘other’ communities” (Price & McConney, 2013, p. 98).

Given the strong current of universalism that runs through Teach for All (TFAll) discourse as it exports a corporate brand and model of education reform across the globe, TFAll has been importantly situated by several scholars in neoliberal and globalization discourses. However, while Teach for All promotes itself as a ‘global’ movement that is finding ‘global’ solutions to educational crises around the world, it is enacted in specific localities that are already socially, culturally, politically and historically constituted, and as such, produces differential social effects. Therefore, understanding the ‘global’ phenomenon of Teach for All also necessitates locating the different Teach-For-programs in the contexts in which they are experienced.

In this paper, I understand Teach for Nepal (TFN) as one such program constituted by a set of converging, mediated discourses—regimes of power/knowledge that work in conjunction with material practices and disciplinary mechanisms. Through a close reading and coding of TFN’s texts (official materials, media coverage, blog posts written by TFN fellows [teachers], images and videos) as discursive articulations, I critically examine several dimensions of the program:

The first part of this paper is dedicated to understanding how TFAll’s neoliberal imperatives have been produced within TFN discourse. I contend that while TFN’s explicit goals are to improve the quality of public education, TFN discourse simultaneously undermines the ‘public’ itself, consequently reconfiguring social meanings and educational possibilities. I then attend to the discourse’s engendering of self-enterprising subjectivities, such that it constitutes a form of a neoliberal governmentality (Lemke, 2001) — a political rationality and a mode of governing “which extends from political government right through to forms of self-regulation, namely ‘technologies of the self’” (p.201). In the case of TFN, I also attend to the formation of entrepreneurial subjectivities that are enmeshed with discourses of nationalism to produce patriotic, enterprising citizen-subjects who ‘love’ and ‘serve’ the nation.

The second part of this paper is dedicated to understanding the entanglements of TFN’s neoliberal imperatives with the circulation and functioning of longstanding discourses of development and modernity. Drawing on the theorizations of postcolonial social relations as inextricably intertwined with language and representation, I show that TFN discourse reproduces and reinforces the colonial dimensions of development (‘bikas’) discourse, which reinscribes particular subjectivities as ‘other’— as inferior or deviant, and ultimately intervenes to ‘transform’ the ‘other’ in the image of the modern, educated, patriotic, entrepreneurial citizen-subject: an ideal that is embodied by the TFN fellow. TFN’s neoliberal imperatives intersect with the postcolonial underpinnings embedded in TFN discourse such that the educational ‘social enterprise’ also effectively takes on a 'civilizing' mission.

In conclusion, I consider those subjectivities that are marginalized, and occluded by dominant TFN discourse and draw on Della Pollock’s (2007) concept of the ‘error’— the mistake that challenges the normative repetition of the dominant discourse — to show how 'errors' produce “new political aggregates—provisional, uncomfortable, even conflictual coalitions of bodies which both respect the concept of situated knowledges and refuse to keep every body in its place” (Russo,1994 as cited in Pollock, 2007, p.246). I suggest that these ‘errors’ can be seen as points of departure for theorizing and imagining more ethical educational possibilities.

Author

• Sahara Pradhan, University of Massachusetts Amherst