Beyond productive labor and value production: feminist angles for examining teachers’ work and accountability policies

• In Event: Making visible the unseen: Interrogating Education in Latin America through Feminist and Intersectional Lenses

Proposal

In the last decades, the governance landscape of education has been transformed as a result of the globalizing of neoliberalism and the embedding of a distinctly new economic rationality. This new governance set a ‘quality spotlight’ on teachers’ work (Robertson & Sorensen, 2018) that encompasses changes in the content, regulation, and training of teaching through accountability systems at a global and national level. Teacher accountability as the way in which teaching is modified and controlled, is a strategic result of this governance. However, while education policies keep adding pressure to teachers through accountability systems there is a lack of conceptual resources around teachers’ labor that can provide further understandings on the manufacturing of control and compliance (Stevenson, 2017). Representations of labor in social sciences still rely on industrial production of material goods and on an idea of capitalism as an equivalent of industrialization (de la Garza, 2020). Consequently, most attempts to analyze teaching as labor have relied on fixed categories that tend to miss key aspects, such as teaching inherent caring and social reproductive functions, whilst leaving other aspects insufficiently theorized. This paper develops a framework to delve into the nature of teachers’ labor through the contributions of feminist lenses. It builds from the concepts of social reproduction (Fraser, 2022), value-generation (Mezzandri, 2022) , and labor regimes (Baglioni, 2021) through which I argue that teachers stand in a threefold position regarding labor. First, teachers’ role in the social reproductive sphere is pivotal in replenishing new generations of workers, which pushes us to think of their work in relation to other forms of labor. Second, as workers, teachers’ labor regime is based on labor disciplining within and beyond the school because social reproduction is always at the core of the modes in which work is organized and experienced (Baglioni et al., 2022). Third, under the current commodification of education, teachers also produce in the sense they take part in the production of education as a commodity.

This proposed framework is used to analyze a set of 21 teacher policies implemented in Chile between 1980-2021 using process tracing (Collier, 2011) with an emphasis on control mechanisms and fabrication of compliance. In this presentation I focus on those advantage points that feminist angles enable in contrast to what tends to be obscured under pure productive understanding. In doing so, I describe teacher policies as sometimes contradictory devices and identify how different roles of teachers’ labor have entered conflict over this period. In addition, I show how apparently separate and even opposite struggles, such as parental' school choice, are actually intimately connected to the circuits where teaching circulates and hence, can constitute sites of solidarity and sites for labor appropriation. Finally, the presentation concludes by stating that we cannot understand how differences that control teachers are created by just limiting the scope to the labor process in the workplace. In this task, a feminist angle is key for understanding how labor processes and labor regimes are related to one another.

Author

• Rocio Fernandez Ugalde, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge