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Abstract
Exploring teaching as an upper secondary school teacher through lived experience offers pedagogical insights that have been challenged over a period of 25 years, when neoliberal educational policies gradually transformed the conditions for teaching in Swedish schools. The article is grounded in the assumption that the teaching profession is complex and there are multiple tacit dimensions inherent in being and becoming a teacher. Several of these dimensions are captured by the notion of pedagogical tact and have to be learned through practice. However, over the past few decades, the implementation of neoliberal policies in the Swedish education sector have changed the conditions for teaching, and created an area of tension between the teacher’s pedagogical alignment and the educational practices influenced by neoliberal values. The aim of the study is to describe how the author experienced these tensions, and what they meant for her becoming and being a teacher in three different pedagogical sites: a higher education preparatory program, a vocational preparatory program, and in adult education. The description is grounded in the lifeworld phenomenological approach and carried out through personal narrative.
Highlights
Every pedagogic practice has its own specific traits and peculiarities to which teachers must adjust
The following description is grounded in my own lived experience of becoming and being an upper-secondary school teacher in three different pedagogical practices over a period of 25 years
Being a teacher in these sites, I experienced divergences in the requirements of each situation, which made me develop my pedagogical understanding of every student’s uniqueness and special needs. Such a pedagogical understanding is embraced by the notion of pedagogical tact, which is described by van Manen (2015) as “a feeling-understanding” (p. 78) that includes the teacher’s sensibility and sensitivity to every child’s uniqueness
Summary
Every pedagogic practice has its own specific traits and peculiarities to which teachers must adjust. I started my teaching career at a higher education preparatory program in 1989 when the Swedish education system had just started facing changes resulting from neoliberal policies such as educational marketization, effectiveness and measurement These changes were not yet influencing everyday teaching in the upper secondary school where I worked. The implementation of pervasive neoliberal educational policies gradually transformed the conditions for teaching These changes challenged my ability to develop pedagogical tact in student encounters and created tensions between my pedagogical alignment and the educational practices influenced by neoliberal values. The aim of this discussion is to describe how I have experienced these tensions, due to neoliberalism, and what this meant for my being a teacher. The following lived descriptions are grounded in the lifeworld phenomenological approach (van Manen, 2007, 2015; Roth, 2002) and derive from my memory, which means that the study is empirically based on autobiographical memory described through first-person epistemology (de Anda & Geist-Martin, 2017; Klein & German, 2004; Levine & Pizarro, 2004)
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