Abstract
Teachers face considerable and increasing pressure in their working lives. Labor intensification compels teachers to work faster, harder, and longer. However, teachers also experience increasing external control over what they teach and how they teach. These processes are increasingly made possible by the “datafication” of teaching, whereby the educational process is increasingly transformed into numbers that allow measurement, comparison, and the functioning of high-stakes accountability systems linked to rewards and sanctions. Although there is no question that being able to use student assessment data to support learning has an important place in teachers' repertoire of skills, “datafication” refers to the use of data in a way that has become increasingly detached from supporting learning and is much more concerned with the management of teacher performance as an end in itself. This article presents two currents of critical thought in relation to teachers' work, labor process theory and poststructural analyses grounded in the concept of performativity, and discusses them as a way of “making sense” of teachers' work and the “datafication” of teaching, with a particular focus on questions of control and resistance. It seeks to understand why, despite the pressures on teachers, teacher resistance has seldom developed in ways, at times, or on a scale that both experience and theoretical insight might have predicted. There are clearly significant differences between the two perspectives presented in this article, not least in the ways they conceptualize and explain “resistance.” However, common ground is identifiable and the two theoretical approaches can be bridged in a form that can be productive for those seeking to “speak back to the numbers.” In looking to broker this theoretical divide, I argue that frame theory, rooted within the sociology of social movements, can offer a fruitful way of theory bridging, while also providing the basis for a wider politics of transformation. The article offers several examples of grassroots initiatives formed to oppose standardized testing in England that provide practical examples of this “ideas work” in action.
Highlights
In almost every part of the world, teachers experience similar pressures
We argued that increased tensions in the workplace, arising from workforce reform and attacks on teachers’ labor process, provided opportunities for union organization to mobilize teachers and to push back the frontier of control in favor of educators and at the expense of the new managerialism
TEACHERS’ WORK IN AN AGE OF PERFORMATIVITY – CONTROL FROM WITHIN. Those who are critical of the neoliberal turn in education policy and its impact on teachers, teaching and the experience of students, but who are uncomfortable with the determinism often associated with labor process analysis, have looked elsewhere for the thinking tools that can help understand the developments in teachers’ work
Summary
In almost every part of the world, teachers experience similar pressures. Expectations are rising, often fueled by the competitive drive of global league tables (Sellar & Lingard, 2014). Teachers experience these pressures in the form of a relentless drive to “raise standards” whilst the test scores generated to measure “output” are in turn used to compare teacher against teacher, school against school and, increasingly, nation against nation (Apple, 2005; Steiner-Khamsi, 2003) Central to these developments is the transformation of complex educational processes into data points which can be used to sort, order, benchmark, compare and rank. In this article, I focus on two particular currents in the study of teachers’ labor, which both offer sharp critiques of contemporary developments in teachers’ work and seek to explicitly connect the experiences of teachers with the responses of teachers, the possibilities of resistance. In using frame theory to “theory bridge” I argue it becomes possible to suture together competing perspectives, and thereby develop the theoretical pluralism necessary for understanding contemporary developments in teachers’ work
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