"This Is an Asylum": Neoliberalism, Disaster Capitalism, and the Work of Teaching

• In Event: Roundtable Session 44
  In Roundtable Session: Identity Work, Teacher Work: Reconstructing the Real Work of Teaching

Abstract

This paper presents data from a qualitative study of the working lives of 5 women elementary school teachers in the Southern United States. The author applies Naomi Klein’s (2007) analysis of disaster capitalism to neoliberal education reform to theorize teacher's working lives and how it became possible that teachers no longer recognize the work that teaching has become. The author provides a "gap filling" narrative about the swift and sweeping changes in education presently and concludes in arguing that neoliberal education reform limits teachers’ access to the ethically oriented aims for which many of them became teachers in the first place.

Author

• Elizabeth Pittard, Georgia State University