Animating Teachers: Affect and Educational Reform

• In Event: Affect in Education

Abstract

In The Teacher Wars, Goldstein (2014) writes: “Today the ineffective tenured teacher has emerged as a feared character, a vampiric type who sucks tax dollars into her bloated pension and health care plans, without much regard for the children under her care” (p.3). Governors and state legislatures moved against teachers’ collective bargaining and tenure. Even President Obama promised to “stop making excuses” for bad teachers.

The educational historical present is animated by the flows of ideas, beliefs, statistics, and images of teachers (Berlant, 2010; 2011). Following Mel Chen (2012), I am interested in the liveliness, sentience, or agency--the animacy--attached to successful and unsuccessful teachers. Chen argues that animacy is central to theorizations of affect. “[A]nimacy hierarchies are simultaneously ontologies of affect” (p.190), declares Chen, since they “are precisely about which things can or cannot affect—or be affected by— which other things within a specific scheme of possible action” (p.30).

I trace the agencies of the “ineffective tenured teacher” and the “champion teacher” across a number of current books [e.g. Farr, Teaching as leadership (2010); Goldstein, The teacher wars (2014); Green, Building a better teacher (2014); Lemov, Teach like a champion (2010); Ravitch, Reign of error (2013); Rhee, Radical (2013), among others] and films [e.g. Waiting for superman (2010); Won’t back down (2012)]. Following Berlant (2011), I am working here to slow down our apprehension of the historical present. As Berlant writes, “We understand nothing about impasses of the political without having an account of the production of the present” (p. 4).

Author

• Nancy L. Lesko, Teachers College, Columbia University