Resisting neoliberalism: teacher education academics navigating precarious times

ABSTRACT

While the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic upon higher education institutions has been well documented, less is known about how academics themselves responded to these rapid changes. This paper analyses the experiences of teacher education academics from Australia and New Zealand (n = 13) who were interviewed during lengthy pandemic lockdowns. Whilst rarely using the language of resistance, participants revealed multiple ways they navigated these seemingly totalising forces of neoliberalism through working to maintain quality education, collegiality, criticality and care. Using theory to help inform our understandings of resistance, our study identified three forms of resistance that were underpinned by feminist, post-structural and critical pedagogy theories. In the face of likely ongoing uncertainty into the future, paying attention to how academics navigated the pandemic provides valuable insights into forms of emergent resistance in moments of extreme precarity in higher education, and the importance of these for continuity and hope.

KEYWORDS:

• Resistance
• pedagogy
• pandemic
• precarity
• teaching

Introduction

Universities have long been subject to a neoliberal culture characterised by market competition, ranking and globalisation, where corporatisation, standardisation and audit cultures are reified (Shore and Wright 2020) and where accelerationism, work intensification and productivity pressures produce ‘academic subjectivities rooted in self-commodification’ (Taylor 2020, 255). A large body of literature suggests that for many academics, these conditions have been further heightened since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and the significant upheaval of their institutions along with considerable personal disruption (e.g. Blackmore 2020; McGaughey et al. 2022). However, much of this literature assumes academics have been passive during this significant upheaval of their institutions, and that the neoliberal project is all-encompassing and totalising. Much less attention has been given to how academics have resisted these changes and worked to maintain quality education, collegiality, criticality, and care.

In this paper, we consider the experiences of teacher education academics from Australia and New Zealand (n = 13) who were interviewed during the height of the pandemic lockdowns. What emerged from these interviews was a sense of grief at the loss of much that they held dear, alongside glimpses into tactics and strategies they were using to navigate and defy the forces of neoliberalism that promoted massification of education, digitalisation of learning and the weakening of relational pedagogies and community connections. While their semantic usage of ‘resistance’ was rare, we were very interested to explore these diverse, and often unseen, forms of resistance, especially in context of on-going retrenchment and rationalisation in higher education. We were aware that narrow definitions of ‘resistance’ unnecessarily restrict the subtlety of the strategies of resistance in which academics may engage (Bottrell and Manathunga 2019; Danvers 2021; Manathunga and Bottrell 2019; Webb 2018) and therefore one intended contribution of our paper was to explore more deeply ways in which resistance could be theoretically and empirically understood. In addition, we were curious to see how this ‘Covid moment’ was indicative of former and future patterns in higher education and how academics might negotiate ‘the multiple and contradictory aspects of neoliberal spaces, techniques, and subjects’ (Larner 2003, 509).

Our paper begins with a brief outline of the context of our research. We then explore previous research examining resistance in neoliberal higher education. This reveals various diverse forms of resistance, and we turn to sociological and educational theories to help understand these various expressions. After describing our methodology, we draw on theory to help us explain three forms of resistance our participants described, giving examples from their interviews. Through this analysis, we derive a typology of theoretically informed classifications of resistance. We conclude by considering the implications of such resistances beyond the pandemic, and the need to examine more closely emergent forms of resistance through educational strategies and solidarities and how these might support and inform others in higher education. In the following section we explain how our research evolved in two countries during the global pandemic.

Context of research

Our research took place in 2021 in Australia and New Zealand. While Covid significantly impacted higher education at a global level, these two nations both shared a historic strong economic reliance on the international higher education student market, which meant both experienced marked declines in new international student enrolments from early in the pandemic as they experienced some of the longest border closures in the world. The economic loss associated with this downturn in international student enrolments also led to academic redundancies, and programme retrenchment alongside rapid changes in academic modes of work in both countries. Similar to many countries, rapid lockdowns in both nations saw huge investments in remote learning through proprietary learning management systems, the digitisation of administrative tasks, the exclusion of non-vaccinated academics and compromising new modes of operating under remote management. These conditions created an important context for our investigation of teacher education academic experiences and responses during pandemic times.

A second reason why we chose Australia and New Zealand as the focus and locus of our research was because it reflected our own academic labour. The research team are all associated in some way with teacher education institutions and wanted to understand the emergent impact of the pandemic on our programmes and cohorts. We also recognised that higher education systems and teacher education programmes within Australia and New Zealand share a strong policy and curricular emphasis on the preparation of graduate teachers who can enact and transmit global competencies (Borkovic et al. 2020). As our focus was on global graduates and the impact of the pandemic, we did not initially have a focus on resistance. Yet, our attention was drawn to the despair and at times anger of our participants at the changes wrought by these pandemic-affected years (and indeed were caught up in this ourselves). It is in part this level of affiliation with our participants that drew us to a closer study of how they were responding to changes and resisting these. It is also likely this meant our own allegiances and affiliations at times generated biases in what we emphasised and how we approached the research which we acknowledge at the outset.

Neoliberalism and academic resistance in higher education

Concerns about the apparently totalising forces of neoliberalism within the contemporary academy have fuelled a significant scholarly literature which describes an academic culture and climate where corporatisation, standardisation and audit culture are reified as ‘academic capitalism’ (Slaughter and Leslie 1997). This literature also describes the role of the neoliberalisation of higher education in ‘disciplining and subjugating the academic workforce’ (Lucas 2014, 215). As Ball (2016, 1054) puts it, ‘there is for many in higher education a growing sense of ontological insecurity; both a loss of a sense of meaning in what we do and of what is important in what we do’. While these changes have been noted for many decades now, it seems that these conditions and impacts were heightened and exacerbated further during the global pandemic, contributing to the ‘general malaise’ in education post-Covid in multiple countries in the following years (Stewart, Couch, and Devine 2022). While the future is still uncertain, our guess is that the new normal extends upon and amplifies the old where economic instrumentalist discourses continue and to an even greater extent, become the only logic given for the justification of higher education. Within such contexts, academics are frequently ‘overworked, undervalued, underfunded in research, and exhausted with serial restructuring and contradictory policies and priorities’ (Blackmore 2020, 1334).

Yet, as pervasive as these conditions appear to be, there have been cautions against the continued use of totalising or monolithic interpretations and accounts of neoliberalism. As Giroux (2000) states, ‘domination is always partial and leaky’. Shahjahan (2014), too, has described the ‘always incomplete nature of hegemonic neoliberal logic’ within higher education (225). Into these ‘cracks’, studies of resistance have emerged within education but also across multiple other fields (sociology, politics, and beyond). The idea of the ‘resistory academic’ (Edwards 2022) is a popular one in many ways as academics attempt to respond to aspects of casualisation and the ‘erosion of valued aspects of their work’ and ‘rejecting new ideologies’ (Antoniadou and Quinlan 2022, 526). As Anderson (2008, 252) notes, ‘trained in analytical thinking and inured to critique, academics are unlikely to passively accept changes they regard as detrimental’.

The forms resistance takes can be quite diverse. More than just public protest, several authors argue that resistance within higher education is not simply a reaction to repressive power but can include processes of adaptation, and subversion and that collectively serve to chip away at the micro-politics of power and present opportunities for academics to pursue alternative priorities, resistances and refusals (Bottrell and Manathunga 2019; Thomas and Davies 2005). This includes forms of resistance that go beyond the individual to reinstate collective values and behaviours such as ‘a commitment to collegiality (over and above competitiveness); challenging the normative discourses of over-work and exhaustion in the quest for productivity, and attending to the ‘“quieter” intellectual virtues of the profession’ (Skea 2021, 407). Taylor and Fraser (2021) for example, describe the importance of collegiality and alliances that might resist the settler colonial forces at work within the university, but they also caution that such alliances can be worn thin with time and pressure. These examples point to ‘hidden resistance with surface acting’ through which academics ‘symbolically comply […] without actually following through, performing privately according to their own values’ (Antoniadou and Quinlan 2022, 526). However, while this literature on resistance revealed a diversity of definitions and forms, we became aware that it was often weakly theorised and classified. In addition, as academic jobs became even more tenuous during the pandemic, we realised that spaces for resistance closed in and as academics fought to retain conditions, resources as well as jobs and this provided a crucial opportunity to examine resistance within this state of extreme precarity in even greater depth.

Theorising the practice of academic resistance

Understandings of resistance can be drawn from a range of theories and across many academic traditions. Traditionally, the primary way in which resistance has been understood is as a form of opposition, with an emphasis of forms of collective public resistance (Johansson and Vinthagen 2014). This reflects decades of study in politics and social movements which focus on activism in the public sphere including walkouts, strikes, protests and public lobbying. It includes strategies of ‘critical public intervention’ conducted through protest using public strikes, radio, art and other forms of media within and outside the university (Darder 2011, 696). These and other public domains are ‘spaces of possibility’ which scholars such as Webb (2018, 99) have advocated, which include the occupation of university buildings along the lines of movements such as Occupy. Such collective actions in the public domain can enable the creation of ‘insurrectionary moments’ with the potential to ‘unleash the collective imagination and stimulate an outpouring of creativity that blows apart common sense and offers glimpses of a future world’ (Webb 2018, 106).

Yet, research has shown that resistance is much more than ‘fighting’ or ‘objecting’ and can include multiple forms of action and non-action, including refusal (Zembylas 2021), re-inscription, adaptation and subversion (Thomas and Davies 2005), some forms which may be invisible to the public. Research underpinned by feminist and post-structural theory has repositioned resistance from narrowly being understood within the public square and drawn attention instead to private and domestic spaces – traditionally obscured from the public gaze – and sought to see these as spaces of everyday resistance that include embodied, everyday, and informal practices of minority groups, including those of women (Dixon and Marston 2011). Such theory places weight on a social ontology of connection, on interpersonal relationships and the ethics of care which take place to generate mutuality and well-being (Gilligan 1982; Lawson 2007). Such actions can include ‘small acts and kind words’ (Horton and Kraftl 2009), forms of relational connections including friendship and strategic solidarities (Askins 2015), and an ethic of care and cooperation (Tronto 2020). Informed also by post-structural theory, this approach to resistance allows for complexity and contradictions by seeing participants as contributing to, as well as being part of, the social and political discourses they themselves occupy (Grant and Giddings 2002).

While forms of critical pedagogy are seen as a critique of dominant educational system (Apple, Au, and Gandin 2009), these are less commonly included in resistance literature. As our focus was on teacher educators, and influenced by our own roles in this field, critical pedagogy as a form of resistance that advocates for both a critique of oppression and the promotion of ‘praxis’ (Freire 1973) in responses, was another theory we found to be useful, yet often under-developed in resistance literature. Stemming from critical theory, this recognises that ‘consciousness of relations of subordination and domination is the first step in moving toward the critical sensibility needed to build counterhegemonic movements in education and elsewhere’ (Apple and Buras 2006, 282). Freire (1973) refers to this as a form of liberating or problem-posing education which seeks to develop critical consciousness or conscientization. This is an act of ‘resistance’ in that it breaks with the traditional patterns of banking education and places the teacher in dialogue with the student that is it itself a ‘practice of freedom’ (61). Its end goal is the emergence of awareness of injustice and oppression as well as the ability to critically intervene to address these, in order to create (utopian) hope for different and new possibilities (hooks 2014). These theoretical understandings of resistance drew from wide academic domains and provided us with a broad and generative theoretical base from which to view forms of resistance in our study.

Methodology

Our research involved semi-structured interviews with 13 teacher education academics who were employed full time within a university faculty or school of education at recruitment. Teacher educators are not commonly the focus of studies on higher education academics, and we valued their deep insights into educational change during this pandemic moment. As our research took place at a time when most of the research team were in lockdown scenarios ourselves, our methodological strategies were restricted to online interviews rather than face-to-face or more embodied options such as observations. Nine academics were recruited from eight Australian universities while four academics were recruited from two New Zealand universities. While the small number of participants did not permit a representative sample of universities, attempts were made in the case of the Australian participants to engage academics at universities located in varying states and territories and in metropolitan, rural and regional settings. Given the proportionally small number of New Zealand universities overall, these efforts were not deemed to be relevant to the recruitment of the New Zealand participants. Ethics for this study was granted by the Deakin University Human Ethics Advisory Group on 15/04/2021 [HAE-20-181].

Participants were identified for recruitment because of their involvement in the design and/or delivery of teacher education programmes and/or research concerned with the production of global competencies in preservice teachers. They were identified through web searches for such programmes and research and through their public academic profiles. This sampling strategy reflects our methodological intention, which is not to make representative claims drawn from large cohorts of academics, but to provide a fine-grained analysis of the individual accounts of a relatively small number of people in particular institutional contexts at a particular historical moment. We acknowledge a likely bias in the sample of these academics as it is likely teacher educators are well-versed in aspects of ‘educational resistance’. That given, we view this group to hold significant insights into education that could be shared with other academics as reflecting on the state of education was a key part of their lives. Saying this, there were still likely blind spots held by this group, and indeed our own analysis of their responses, given our own close affiliation, that restricted our analysis and vision. No attempt was made to recruit academics at specific stages of their career: the final sample does include early career, mid-career and established senior academics, but this variety emerged spontaneously from the final sample rather than being a function of the research design (See Table 1).

Table 1 . Demographic characteristics of participants.

Pseudonym and location	Experience in higher education*	Academic focus
Bella, Australia	Experienced	Teacher education, Global education
Gidgit, Australia	Experienced	Teacher education, Global and civics education
Colin, Australia	Early career	Teacher education, Citizenship education
Fred, Australia	Experienced	Teacher education, Higher education learning
Tiffany, Australia	Mid-career	Teacher education, Citizenship education
Wilson, Australia	Experienced	Teacher education, Sociology of education
Carl, Australia	Experienced	Teacher education Global Education
Jeff, Australia	Mid-career	Teacher education, International Education
Sophie, Australia	Mid-career	Teacher Education, Comparative education
Simone, New Zealand	Early career	Teacher education, Global Education
Salesi, New Zealand	Early career	Teacher education, Pacific education
Caleb, New Zealand	Early career	Teacher Education, Comparative education
Corinne, New Zealand	Experienced	Teacher Education, Citizenship education

*Key: Early career = 5 years or less; Mid-career = 6–15 years; Experienced = 16 years+.

Each interview ran for around one hour. A series of common questions, prompts and scenarios were used to ensure continuity across the interviews, to ‘generate complex, nuanced thoughts and descriptions’ (Bearman 2019, 4) while still enabling participants to pursue their own lines of thought (Roulston and Choi 2018). Prior to the interview, participants were invited to view a short video montage of images and text captured from university websites that depicted various constructions of the global graduate. This provided a means of opening up personal stimulus and reduced our reliance on ‘talking’ as the only means of gathering data by opening up potential for alternative mode of communication (Thomas and Moss 2018). Interviews were audio and video recorded as enabled by the software package which allowed this feature, which helped the international team understand and get to know participants at a time when no travel was allowed. These recordings occurred with the explicit permission of each participant, then de-identified and transcribed using pseudonyms. Participants chose their own pseudonym or were assigned one depending on their individual preference.

Our analysis of the interview data involved a process of reflexive thematic analysis as expounded by Braun and Clarke (2019) and comprehensively explained by Braun et al. (2019). NVIVO was used to code the data based on descriptive labels and to generate initial themes. We initially looked for examples of protest and public expressions of resistance but as these were rarely mentioned explicitly by participants, we had to develop codes by looking more deeply. We then used an iterative process to develop codes by turning to theory (see section above) which gave us broader terms and understandings to inform our coding of resistance. For example, as a result of reading Freire’s understanding of ‘critical consciousness’, we coded for examples of promoting critique of society and education and critical thinking, streamlining overlapping coding where possible. This process recognises and reflects Braun and Clarke’s (2019, 592) view that ‘qualitative research is about meaning and meaning-making, and viewing these as always context-bound, positioned and situated’. During this phase, data were re-coded and further refinements were made to delineate themes and clarify the relationships between them. This iterative process also enabled us to develop a broad typology of theoretically informed examples of resistance which we explore in the following section.

Forms of resistance

In the following sections, we illustrate how our analysis of participants’ active responses to the pandemic, informed by theory, enabled us to develop generative and broad understandings of resistance.

Public opposition as resistance

As discussed above, while resistance is most commonly understood as an oppositional public act that (Johansson and Vinthagen 2014), only two participants (Caleb and Gidgit) gave such examples. It is likely that this reflects the precarious times of the pandemic when public displays such as protests were relatively rare (Pleyers 2020). Speaking from New Zealand, Caleb (early career academic) described an instance of collective public opposition when he and his colleagues responded to the introduction of a new software system driven by the need to recruit more students, especially international students. They ‘launched a little bit of a coup about this, or a push back’. For Caleb, what mattered was ‘what benefits our students’, whereas the new system was seen to reflect a solely economic imperative. This had become a greater concern to Caleb during the pandemic as he feared the precarity it triggered could lead to the further entrenchment of a corporate university model. Somewhat cynically he explains how precarity is built into higher education and has been around long before the pandemic:

Are we presuming that COVID is making a new world? Because I wouldn’t say it is. I would say the precariousness, you know, of people who are coming out with graduate degrees has always been precarious and is increasingly precarious. And I think […] part of what we sell is that you’ll be more competitive in that precariousness and more likely to find stability. But also, we don’t want you to be too stable, because we want you to come back and get the next micro credential for the next career shift and so on.

At the same time, Caleb highlighted a different kind of challenge for academics: ‘the challenge of not becoming sort of too jaded or cynical in the work along the way’.

For Gidget (experienced academic) in Australia, on the other hand, direct resistance appeared to be energising. A seasoned academic, she described the way in which ‘at the university level, you have to fight City Hall, you know, the upper, the Vice Chancellor and all of those people’. Following a discussion when she offered strong critique of her university’s replacement of face-to-face with online lectures and tutorials, she stated: ‘you have to make a case for why you would be doing these things that you’re trying to do, you know, so you’re always fighting’. Gidget’s understanding of academic work as oppositional resistance reflects a legacy of collective forms of resistance built by ‘network[s] of radical alliances’ amongst academics (Webb 2018, 102) that continued, at least to some extent, through the pandemic.

Education as resistance

Using education as a form of resistance in itself was the most common form of resistance proposed and enacted by our participants, who sought to equip their preservice teachers to promote inclusion, radical hope and enhanced social justice through their teaching. This strategy largely utilised the space of the classroom as a space of resistance in the absence of being able to move easily into the community. In describing it, our participants drew directly on the theorists of critical pedagogy, frequently referring to Paulo Freire and John Dewey as all were stepped in education theory as teacher educators. Our analysis suggests that this education as resistance took three distinct forms that related to knowledge selection, developing critical thinking and naming alternative ways of learning and being, or ‘utopian pedagogies’. The first of these was educating through strategic selection of critical knowledge, whereby our participants selected educational topics that encouraged their preservice teachers to critique forms of imposition and exclusion such as racism and sexism to promote a broader suite of knowledges and understandings of the world. Speaking from Australia, Colin (early career) described his conscious efforts to foster this kind of critique:

What I’m trying to get them to do is build connections and tear down the walls between the classroom and the rest of their communities. And it’s often around a particular issue, so things like sustainability or bushfires or things like that – refugees, migrants, you know – so it’s one of those big global citizenship issues that we’re all conscious that we’re going to be dealing with.

In New Zealand, Salesi (early career academic), a Pacific Nations academic, frequently referred to pedagogical acts that sought to challenge the ‘very traditional’ and Euro-centric field of teacher education. For him, this involved ‘being able to disrupt some of those systemic structures that disable, you know, our generative thinking around pedagogies, around knowledges that matter to people’ in order to make space for Pacific learners’ knowledge, identities and culture. For Caleb, also in New Zealand, the desire to encourage the ‘knowledges that matter to people’ was part of a hopeful pedagogical shift he could see happening in his institution, one that celebrated ‘knowledge exchange, knowledge share, embeddedness in the community’.

A second form of education as resistance which participants conveyed sought to encourage the development of critical consciousness or conscientization (Freire 1973). In harmony with this tradition and the praxis which Freire advocates as its outcome, those of our participants who employed this form of education as resistance held deeply felt positions and views about the contemporary academy. Fred (experienced academic) in Australia, for example, viewed education as a form of critical defiance and reflecting back in time stated that ‘in the past […] the university didn’t necessarily have to sell its soul to recruit students, to be viable’. His pedagogical response to the contemporary state of teacher education was to develop a new unit for his Master of Education students which sought to equip them with resistor skills. As he explained:

… this unit is called ‘education in a post-truth era’. So a graduate, I would hope, from [university name] would be able to live in a post-truth world but be able to have the capacity to see through all that – excuse the bluntness, all that crap – and be able to define what is actual and what is not actual.

For Colin (early career), too, the imperative of teacher education was to enable preservice teachers to act for social justice, not only in a theoretical professional future but in the present:

I don’t think it’s enough to just stuff young people’s heads full of what it might mean to be an active citizen: it’s got to be something that they do, and they’ve got to do it while they’re at university. Otherwise, it’s never gonna be done.

Carl (experienced academic), also from Australia, held that education and knowledge is, above all, ‘something that is holistic, something that is reflected upon, something that is about making connections’. He drew on Freire’s (1973) notion of banking education, in which knowledge is bestowed by those in power on those who have less and serves the interests of those in power, to pose a series of critical questions about the kind of knowledge that might be pursued and promoted within contemporary higher education overall, and teacher education in particular:

How do we reward a person who actually we identify as thinking big thoughts and as being totally committed, but does not fit into the miniaturised, the banking world of education, the banking of various credit points, and things like that. […] How do we develop courses, how do we develop opportunities for some students, not all students, to be rewarded for what really is what is needed, you know, for the future?

He went on to advocate for a teacherly orientation that is inherently critical:

If you keep on thinking about teaching as forever dynamic, an organic profession that needs to change and needs to pick up on whatever other conditions that prevail and engage with them critically and engage with them effectively, then it can be argued that every day you teach, you teach differently in a new way, rather than the same way.

The third and final form of education as resistance involved the use of utopian pedagogies (hooks 2014) to name new and alternative ways of being and teaching that could humanise teacher education. hooks (2014, 12) describes utopian pedagogies as ‘that movement that makes education the practice of freedom’ and part of the hope for different and new possibilities. For some of our participants, the pedagogies they employed within their teacher education work served as such sites, creating spaces that could promote ‘the kind of social relations that might characterize an alternative way of being’ (Webb 2018, 100). As a teacher educator in New Zealand of Pacific descent, this critical academic stance and praxis was intrinsic to Salesi’s work. It was also centrally informed by the legacies of his Pacific culture which encouraged him to think of much deeper and more relational ways of understanding teacher competences.

An approach to teacher education pedagogies that is both critical and inherently hopeful, something that Corinne (experienced academic) from New Zealand also held on to. For her, despite the creep of neoliberal conditions which she observed within teacher education and higher education more broadly, ‘there is sort of positive hope for the world’. This hope was clearly invested in her preservice teachers and the critical stance which she believed they might be prepared to take up:

I think that there are enough young people who are willing to stand back and say: actually, the world is in a perilous state at the moment, whether it’s COVID-19, or climate change, or, you know, war and conflict and forced migration, all of those things that are happening there. And it’s time for us as young people to forget what we’ve actually been taught or how we’ve been shaped or not to take the majority role models that we see and forge a path on our own, not as individuals but collectively, as this particular generation, in order to save this world.

Naming and seeing this sense of hope was one way academics could hold on to a more hopeful future for education during these precarious times.

Everyday activisms as resistance

While the forms of academic resistance we have just discussed take place in the observable and more official spaces of the teacher education classroom and its attendant pedagogies, everyday activisms as resistance relate to actions that are generally undertaken in domestic, private or unseen spaces and that operate through relational encounters (Lawson 2007). Our identification of this kind of resistance was primarily informed by critical feminist theory and the attention it gives to critiques of dominant (and often male-led) hierarchies of institution, behaviour and process. Larner and Le Heron (2005) remind us that while neoliberalism is deeply entrenched in higher education, there are still multiple and contradictory contestations which exist, including ‘possibilities for new forms of collegiality’ (845). While they describe these new forms of collegiality primarily as cooperation between universities, our participants appeared to be exploring other forms of collegiality, including those which manifests between academics and build caring relationships within the ‘uncaring’ institutions of higher education (Kerby, Branham, and Mallinger 2014).

The importance of this collegiality as a skill and an attribute within teacher education emerged from Tiffany’s (mid-career academic) account of the orientations she sought to foster in her graduate teachers within her Australian university: ‘how you develop a sense of adaptability, resilience, flexibility and collaboration through a degree is something we reflect on because in a risk-averse way we are driven – or our students are driven – by assessment tasks that assure certain knowledge and skills’. For Colin in Australia, there was in fact ‘a moral imperative’ to promote these collective orientations within his graduate teachers. He described the imperative to promote ideas of ‘education for the public good’, an approach which he described as ‘that very old fashioned but still relevant Deweyesque kind of approach to education as a means of associated living’. For Colin, the task of the teacher educator remained ‘to educate people to live together’.

This focus on interpersonal relationships and the ethic of care they require is an important part of an ontology of connection which refuses to fragment individuals from one another (Lawson 2007). For Simone (early career academic) in New Zealand, too, caring relationships were key aspects of the pedagogies she employed and key characteristics of the graduate teacher whom she hoped to produce. She also framed these relationships and ethics of care as a means by which both teacher educators and graduate teachers could resist neoliberal forces. This recalls recent arguments informed by feminist theory that care and compassion, including compassion for oneself, can be employed as a tool for resisting and disrupting oppressive and isolating neoliberal norms within the university, and that it can create spaces for new academic possibilities (Guglielmo and Jordan 2022; Killam 2023). For Simone, this kind of care and relationality as a form of academic resistance was not only a necessary strategy but one that had deep cultural roots:

I think, always, and I guess I’m coming also back to a Māori or Indigenous perspective, where relationality or strong connections as people is really important. […] So this is one of my teachings around that kind of massification and that kind of knowledge worker kind of thing, which conflicts with that. [We need] graduates who are responsive, who are in terms of education, who are relational, who are able to respond to the needs of the learners, regardless of what setting there is, who have a good understanding of themselves, your own identity as somebody in New Zealand, but also as a person within the world.

When Simone went on to further describe the kind of global graduate teacher whom she worked to produce, this was once again a teacher who was ‘critical and responsive to the needs of learners and […] good at getting on with, you know, working collaboratively as well’. One of her greatest concerns was that conditions in the contemporary academy worked against this kind of collaboration and critique, and that this had been exacerbated since the pandemic: ‘one of the dangers of COVID is that we’re very focused on individualism’. Simone resisted this isolating academic culture by teaching in a way that constantly emphasised the collective. As she explained, ‘I’m always an advocate for our student graduates being attuned to humanity and social justice and in taking action where needed to respond to the things in the world that affect us all’.

One final form of resistance elaborated on recently by Zembylas (2021) and Bhungalia (2019) conveyed a further form of everyday activism that we saw in our research – that of refusal. Refusal is not necessarily an act of opposition, but can include ‘a kind of absenteeism, a disinvestment from rules of engagement’ (Bhungalia 2019, 390). Our participants hinted at this in their refusal to accept policies which were introduced by their institutions during the pandemic. For Caleb, the professional imperative included ‘finding areas where I have – I feel that I have a voice or an opportunity to challenge’. For him, this kind of direct resistance is integral to the academic stance:

So being cognisant of some of those forces at work, and recognising that actually, you know, we’ve all constructed this thing called education. And so we can keep refining and redefining it, and we don’t have to accept it.

Such a stance is evocative of the utopian possibilities (hooks 2014; Webb 2018; Zembylas 2021) which so many of our participants held on to amidst the precarity of the pandemic which created ‘boltholes’ or ‘breathing spaces’ in the academy (Webb 2018, 96) where statements and actions of resistance became possible.

Discussion and conclusion

As we explained at the outset of this paper, our research took place at a time of heightened precarity in higher education institutions. It highlights the grief and despair that some teacher education academics felt in response to the onslaught of change rendered by the pandemic. While resistance was not named by many in explicit terms, it was apparent that their responses, through their selection of teaching content, their pedagogical strategies to promote critical thinking and hope for the future, and their collaborations and relational care, were indeed resisting many of the features of neoliberal higher education accelerated by the pandemic. At a time when the pandemic was enabling higher education institutions to push through even greater levels of neoliberal intensification, our research revealed multiple ways in which these academics sought to ‘prise open the cracks in neoliberal logic’ (Manathunga and Bottrell 2019, 2).

One challenge our research faced was how resistance could be defined and understood. Our initial dismissal of participants as lacking resistory tendencies relied on rather thin notions of what resistance could look like. In addition, while other studies provided some glimpses of different forms of resistance, but we found it difficult to put together as a clear typology underpinned by theory. A key contribution of our study, therefore, is a fresh theoretical typology of resistance that moves away from seeing it only as something enacted in reaction to institutional forces and instead recognises it as multidimensional, fluid and generative and taking place in multiple spaces and through diverse means (see Table 2). Importantly, this broad understanding came through revisiting sociological and educational theories that included feminist, post-structural and critical pedagogical theory that provided insights into how to group diverse responses to the pandemic. These theories helped us to understand resistance more deeply, especially to the context of educational spaces and educational roles (see Table 2).

Table 2 . Theoretical origins for typology of resistances in education.

Forms of resistance	Public opposition as resistance	Education as resistance	Everyday activisms as resistance
Theoretical origins	Multiple political and sociological theories	Critical pedagogy	Feminist and post-structural theory
Examples of ideas, actions and strategies	Direct action – protest, petitions, lobbying, and debating	Selecting critical content for teaching Developing critical consciousness (Freire) Utopian pedagogies	Strategic collegiality Relational care Refusal

Using theory, we derived the three categories of resistance for which we saw empirical evidence. While we had few examples of direct action, our study revealed many ways participants were drawing on their knowledge of educational theory and practice to prioritise the strategic selection of critical content knowledge, the development of critical consciousness through teaching and the imagining of utopian worlds where such learning could still occur (see Table 2). In addition, they sought to prioritise professional relationships and collegiality, even when these were under threat. Our final category, everyday activisms, was informed by feminist and post structural theory and revealed forms of everyday relational care, strategies solidarities and refusals (Table 2). While such forms of subtle resistance can mean relatively low levels of disturbance to higher education institutions and the academic status quo, Thomas and Davies (2005, 701) suggest that they can nevertheless lead to the ‘destabilising, weakening and greater incoherence of dominant discourses’. The intention of this table and this typology is to not to rigidly pin down resistance into neat boxes, but instead we view it is a beginning of a generative conversation that we invite other researchers to contribute to. For example, this study opens up questions, such as, what other more sub-categories beyond the ones we propose here for education as resistance and everyday activisms might exist? Do these categories hold true to other educational sectors, such as compulsory schooling? Early childhood centres? And what might students make of these forms of resistance?

While our study had limitations related to small numbers of participants and a very specific point in time of precarity for the academy associated with Australia and New Zealand, it has implications for neoliberal contexts of higher education now and in the future. In the first place, it highlights the significant strain universities are under related to significant upheaval in traditional forms of funding (such as declining funds from international students, from government research policies and with research institutions under threat from new generative artificial intelligence claims etc.) and associated questions about the role of universities in society (Blackmore 2020; Ball, 2016). A continuation of a culture of precarity and uncertainty associated with aggressive policies of retrenchment, restructuring and redundancies means that the need for academic resistance is not likely to end soon. In such contexts, our research accentuates the importance of exploring the ‘conditions of possibility’ (Manathunga and Bottrell 2019, 2) that may still persist in the contemporary, post-colonial university for critical resistance.

Second, while our research took place in 2021 during extensive pandemic lockdowns in Australia and New Zealand, the shrinking spaces for resistance that remain within the neoliberal academy have been declining for many years. Prior to the pandemic, Webb (2018, 101) warned that ‘critical/radical/utopian spaces within the academy are shrinking’ (101). While our study did confirm this to some extent, it also revealed multiple creative forms of resistance that were pursued to enhance and protect criticality in teaching and the maintenance of critical graduates, alongside enduring collegiality and connection in academics’ everyday interactions with each other and their students. Examples included emergent forms of resistance within choices of curricular content, pedagogies and solidarities. Within our small group of participants, we noted that the more experienced academics navigated the changes presented by the pandemic with a stronger sense of resistance to recently developed ‘solutions’ (e.g. digital and remote learning) and weathered the tumult with less anxiety but often a fierce sense of embracing the fight, at times derived from experience (see Gidgit, Corrinne, Carl, Fred). Such strategies could be a source of inspiration and guidance to novice academics and usefully be included in teacher education programmes as well as higher education programmes more generally.

Finally, our study underscored just how significant everyday activisms were that showed collegiality and care in uncaring institutions (Kerby, Branham, and Mallinger 2014). Developing strategic solidarities was a key way our participants addressed isolation, digital fatigue, anxiety and the ongoing emotional toll brought on by constant change and retraction. Whilst often hidden beneath the need for survival, the small acts of kindness, care and collegiality enabled continuity and hope in what felt like futility at times in the face of growing atomisation of higher education. Covid-19 provided a unique opportunity to glimpse possible changes the future of higher education given the accelerated way changes occurred. Paying attention to how academics navigated this moment as we have done in this paper provides valuable insights for the future and for contexts beyond New Zealand and Australia, and heightens the importance of resistory pedagogies of hope, connection, creativity in the neoliberal university.

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to participants who gave us significant amounts of time during whilst dealing with the stresses of teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic. We wholeheartedly ‘felt’ and experienced these interviews with you! We are also grateful for the funding support of our institutions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This paper draws on data from a 2021–2022 research project, Critical Times: Producing the Global Graduate in a Pandemic. The project was funded with grants from Deakin University’s Strategic Research Centre in Education, Research for Educational Impact (REDI), and from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.