Portraits of Teachers in Neoliberal Times: Projections and Reflections Generated by Shadow Education Research

• In Event: Publication mentoring workshop session
  In Special Session: Teachers

Proposal

Brief information:
- the author is a final stage doctoral student (a PhD candidate)
- the purpose of the research: explore how teachers and their teaching practice are represented in the international literature on private tutoring published in the last three decades (1980-2015) and what such constructions mean for teacher professionalism.
- the primary research question: What images of teachers are portrayed through the lens of academic scholarship?
- conceptual framework: neoliberal impacts in education, teacher professionalism, private tutoring.


Proposal abstract (641 words)

Shadow education (or private supplementary tutoring) has become increasingly prevalent across the world since the 1980s. Many studies demonstrate that the rise of private tutoring, closely tied to the market-oriented education transformations, stems from the neoliberal ideology that has permeated global education policy landscape (Daun, 2004; Apple, 2006; Ball & Junemann, 2012). In fact, countries globally have been under increasing pressure to adopt new modes of educational governance, including decentralization and privatization, in order to diversify sources of educational finance as a response to declining public education spending (Rizvi & Lingard 2010). Approaches to improve educational efficiency also include reductions of teacher wages, rising workloads, and competition leading to high-stress teaching and learning environments in varying degrees (Goodson & Hargreaves, 1996; MacBeath, 2012; Boufoy-Bastick, 2014).

In this context, many people came to realize that “teachers were blamed for everything by everybody - by governments, by media and by the newly instituted league tables of school performance that shamed the ‘worst’ of them” (Hargreaves & Lo 2000, p. 4). Connell (2009) reasons that by making teachers increasingly accountable, policy documents related to teachers’ work and teacher education in Australia demonstrate the “neoliberal distrust of professions” (p. 221). In other places such as Egypt, teachers used to be viewed as respected autonomous professionals and “private tutoring was not in their dictionary”(Zaalouk 2013, p. 210). Yet now, many of them have inescapably participated in various forms of private tutoring as a way to supplement their incomes, whereas some become involved in the activity as part of their attempt to reclaim their social and professional status (Silova & Bray, 2006; Popa & Acedo, 2006).

In general, the neoliberal impacts on teacher’s work and professionalism have become evident in the recent literature. Past research also points to profound skepticism about the professional ideals and professionalism of teachers. Against this backdrop, given that shadow education has grown exponentially both as a phenomenon and an area of research, there is a critical need to document the changing conceptualization of teachers who participated in this form of education.

This study aims to explore the images of teachers and their professional practice embedded in the international literature on private tutoring over the last three decades. The primary question it seeks to answer is: What images of teachers are portrayed through the lens of academic scholarship? It uses the database of a larger research project that examines nearly 200 publications on private supplementary tutoring in the English language, published between 1980 and 2015. For the purpose of the current study, 82 publications selected have a focus on (K-12) school teachers who were involved in (different forms of) private tutoring, of which, 23 publications directly examined teachers’ perspectives. This research used consensual Qualitative Research (CQR), a method based on an inductive, team approach to data analysis. In the current study, a member of the research project team joined me in the data analysis process. Upon completing each of the analysis steps, the results were reviewed by a faculty auditor who also worked with the larger project to reevaluate any discrepancies until consensus was reached. The CQR method allows for the formation of models to explain how domains interact and fit together, while taking steps to ensure results are replicable and consistent.

The research findings include a parsimonious set of six categories depicting teachers who were engaged in private tutoring. They are the innovative, capable and indispensable teacher, the poor teacher, the corrupt teacher, the criminal teacher, the irresponsible/absent teacher, and the entrepreneurial teacher. The Discussion of the paper attempts to explicate how academic scholarship on private tutoring contribute to the changing representations of teachers. In making explicit and visible how teachers in shadow education are generally perceived, the study raises questions about what such constructions mean for teachers’ professionalism and ultimately, for the way we understand teachers' work and their legitimacy in the context of neoliberal globalization./.

Author

• Hang B. Duong, Lehigh University