Portraits of teachers in neoliberal times: projections and reflections generated by shadow education research

ABSTRACT

Shadow education (or private supplementary tutoring) has grown exponentially both as a phenomenon and an area of research. Based on a qualitative content analysis of international research on private tutoring published in the last four decades (1980–2018), this study explores how teachers and their teaching practices are represented in this literature and what such constructions mean for teacher professionalism. The findings reveal a variety of competing views about school teachers and the teaching profession, reflecting a partial and particular conception of the teaching profession. Influenced by the neoliberal logic, many of these projections portray teachers who participate in tutoring activities as corrupt or narrowly frame their work in terms of profit, competition, or entrepreneurship. Given that most of the reviewed research does not draw on teachers’ own perspectives, we call for more nuanced and multidimensional approaches to understanding teachers’ complicated roles and negotiations in this time of neoliberal globalisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher professionalism
• private tutoring
• shadow education
• neoliberalism
• qualitative content analysis

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our sincere thanks to a team of fellow researchers at Lehigh University who worked with us on the earlier analysis of the project that this study was originally part of. Our appreciation also goes to the two anonymous reviewers who helped us improve the quality of this paper.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The term was first used by Mark Bray, who observed that as the mainstream curriculum changes, much of the content in the shadow changes accordingly (Bray 1999a).