Stratified legal consciousness of music teachers in the age of neoliberal reform

Abstract

School improvement and its associated policies aim at providing a quality education, a burdensome weight which rests largely on the shoulders of teachers. To achieve such ends, policy texts have been reformed with neoliberal underpinnings, which allow private organizations to enter a space that previously operated through public institutions. In this study, I examined the lived experiences of music educators as they navigated the policy landscape of a nonprofit private organization called Teaching Music in Under-Resourced Schools (TMUS, a pseudonym). I used legal consciousness as a theoretical framework, a lens suggests that flourishing in personhood is limited to one’s ability to navigate new laws and policy structures, to analyze data. Using this framework, I found that participants worked in spaces not between public and private, but instead within both public and private. Participants who displayed a high level of legal savviness enacted policy more fluidly, while those that demonstrated legal evasiveness struggled to make decisions. Findings suggest that participants demonstrated a “stratified participation” in policy enactment, seeing policies as dynamic intersections of expectations and practical contexts. A key implication of this inquiry is that private organizations, when seen as an addition to the public space as opposed to as an alternative, can provide teachers more avenues of meaningful practice if they are conscious of the multiple sets of policies available to them.