Governing teachers’ subjectivity in neoliberal times: the fabrication of the bonsai teacher

ABSTRACT

This paper interrogates and elaborates on the fabrication of teachers’ subjectivity who work in school contexts governed by neoliberal policies. Theoretically, the conceptual metaphor of bonsai pedagogy is proposed to understand teachers’ processes of subjectivation enacted by neoliberal discourses, policies, and practices. The article aims to understand the relationship between the processes of (de/re)-professionalisation and the subjective experience of malaise, suffering, and sickness lived by teachers in the exercise of their work. Bonsai pedagogy is offered as a complementary category of analysis and interpretation of these processes that is more sensitive to teachers’ subjectivity. The research is based on 35 narrative interviews with Chilean dissident schoolteachers who are members of teachers’ political organisations. I analyse three strategies used by the bonsai pedagogy: i) controlling and saturating teachers’ time; ii) managing and guiding teachers’ practices; and iii) obstructing teachers’ creativity. I discuss how the bonsai pedagogy reduces the capacity of teachers to unfold and construct their subjectivity in alternative ways. Since Chile has implemented neoliberal reforms in education longer than any other country, understanding how neoliberalism operates through and around Chilean teachers can contribute to furthering our knowledge of how teachers worldwide can resist and deal with neoliberalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Teachers
• subjectivity
• bonsai pedagogy
• neoliberalism
• Chile

Acknowledgments

I want to express sincere gratitude to Stephen J. Ball, Francisca Corbalán, Luis Carabantes and two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on the earliest versions of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. According to the Real Academia Espanola [Royal Academy of Spanish], agobio refers to the effects suffered by someone from being imposed ‘excessive activity or effort’ resulting in serious worry and great suffering. I will use both words, burden/agobio, because the word does not have an exact translation to English and also because it is how Chilean teachers have themselves referred to their current subjective state of affairs.

2. I gained my PhD from the Department of Education, Practice and Society of the University College of London (UCL) Institute of Education (IoE).

3. Six of them made use of notebooks during the interviews. The other two told me that they had used them, but they forgot to bring them with them to the interviews. Some just wrote a small topic with a subtitle that was then expanded in the interview. In other cases, they wrote several pages about their limits and experimentations.

4. The research project was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of IoE-UCL.

5. Some of these extracts were first ensembled in a more extended version in the first analytical chapter of my PhD thesis. Although the following analysis draws importantly on this chapter, I have re-elaborated and rearticulated important parts of it in order to construct a more compact and direct analysis.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo [Beca Chile Doctorado Extranjero N° 6690/2015].

Notes on contributors

Felipe Acuña

Felipe Acuña PhD in Sociology of Education from UCL - Institute of Education. He is currently an academic researcher at the Research Centre for Socio-Educational Transformation (CITSE), Universidad Católica Silva Henriquez. His research focuses on understanding the formation and regulation of teachers’ work and subjectivity and critically analysing the diversity of policies, discourses, and practices that govern and shape the everyday school experience.