Anxiety of performativity and anxiety of performance: self-evaluation as bad faith

ABSTRACT

Self-evaluation, a devolved, rigorous form of teacher inspection, has increasingly been promoted in educational circles as a way to balance both teacher autonomy and accountability. Such balancing acts help to alleviate anxiety around inspection, for the teacher who would otherwise face a visit from an inspector, and for the public who are concerned about self-evaluation being less objective. Using the Irish policy of self-evaluation, this paper will first explore the evidence-based approaches and the appropriation of a ‘language of evaluation’ that are inherent to so-called low-stakes accountability systems. In part, such mechanisms are used in order to alleviate anxiety. The anxiety that self-evaluation focuses on, however, corresponds only to aspects of teaching that are conducive to measurement, and therefore refers solely to what may be called an anxiety of performativity. Furthermore, its attempts to repress an anxiety of performativity ironically fails to acknowledge a more fundamental form of anxiety that teaching as a ‘performance’ involves. Using Sartre’s idea of ‘bad faith’, this paper will ultimately argue that teaching inevitably involves an element of anxiety that should not be repressed but rather should be lived and worked with well, something which self-evaluation in its current form fails to capture.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-evaluation
• performativity
• anxiety
• bad faith

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. After a lengthy period of sporadic inspections, the Republic of Ireland introduced a more internal-focused self-evaluation in the late 1990s for a variety of reasons. This emphasis on internal review has resulted in the minimising of the role of the external inspector to an advisor of sorts, whose role is mainly to ensure that the process of self-evaluation is being undertaken in a rigorous and evidence-based way (see: Coolahan & O’Donavan, 2009; McNamara & O’Hara, 2012).

2. Both of these forms of evidence are recommended by prominent self-evaluation proponent, John MacBeath (1999) as well as the Department of Education and Skills (Ireland) (2014a, 2014b).

3. This report must contain specific targets, following the SMART acronym, which ‘may not be measurable in a quantitative or numeric way, but they should be capable of being measured in a way which can show whether the desired improvements have been achieved’ (Department of Education and Skills [Ireland], 2016a, p. 41).

4. There is certainly an air of verificationism, in this line of thinking—that any judgement of teaching must involve measurable evidence if it is to be considered accurate or robust. From this, one might surmise that the teacher must use evidence-based approaches if her judgements are to be ‘objectively’ assured, and this is not only so that she can understand her own practices in this more measurable format, but also so that the wider public can remain reliably informed on what is happening in the classroom.

5. For a more thorough understanding of this, see Heidegger’s (1954) usage of the term in ‘A Question Concerning Technology’.

6. Evidence of this ‘enframing’ can be seen in the more recent examples of self-evaluation reports released by schools which have been made publically available on the Department for Education website.

7. Sartre downplays this position somewhat in his later works. This is particularly evident in an interview in the New Left Review in 1969, entitled ‘The Itinerary of a Thought’. Marxism was to have a profound influence on his post-war writings, in which he began to see the ways in which individuals are conditioned by various social factors and histories over which they have little to no control.

8. The focus for this paper will be bad faith as a denial of freedom, since this is most pertinent to the argument outlined here.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alison M. Brady

Alison M. Brady is a PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow at the UCL Institute of Education. She also works as the London Branch administrator of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Her research is within the field of philosophy of education, which focuses on offering a critique of current understandings of teaching and learning as represented in teacher evaluation policies, and conceptualising teaching more broadly through the lens of 20th-century existentialist thought. Related publications include ‘The Regime of Self-Evaluation: Self-Conception for Teachers and Schools’ (British Journal of Educational Studies, 64(4), pp. 523–541) and an upcoming book chapter for Philosophy and the Study of Education (Routledge, London) entitled, ‘The Teacher–Student Relationship: An Existentialist Approach’.