The Double-voiced Nature of Becoming a Teacher in the Era of Neoliberal Teaching and Teacher Education

ABSTRACT

As policy makers’ neoliberal reforms continue to impact teaching and teacher education, stakeholders across both fields of teaching continue to seek out alternative practices that assist educators in fostering democratic learning experiences for children in schools. However, many continue to struggle with the impact of these reforms on their teaching. Thus, there is a need to better understand how to support preservice teachers in authoring themselves so that they enter the profession in a manner that allows them to speak back to policy makers’ demands and engage in democratic teaching and learning processes with their students. The instrumental case study examined in this article investigated this issue by examining how a sample of preservice teachers in a large urban teacher education program authored themselves as teachers who spoke with and against policy makers’ neoliberal reforms. These findings demonstrate that while preservice teachers appear willing to pursue alternative visions of schooling they still seem to focus on individualized choices in avoiding policy makers’ reforms. Thus, there appears to be opportunities for teacher educators to support preservice teachers in developing the skills required to speak back to policy makers’ neoliberal reforms so that they can author themselves as the teachers they want to be.

KEYWORDS:

• Preservice teachers
• Bakhtinian theory
• neoliberalism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. A Title 1 school is a school where at least 40% of the children in the attendance area of the school or at least 40% of students enrolled in the school come from low-income families. The most common measure of low-income status is the percent of children who are eligible to participate in the federal government’s free and reduced-price lunch program. Being identified as a Title 1 school entitles that school to receive additional federal funding that is to be used to improve the academic achievement of the children from these low-income households.

2. The authors would like to thank the editors of this journal and the reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions for improving this article. They would also like to thank the teachers who participated in their research project.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christopher P. Brown

Christopher P. Brown is a Professor of Early Childhood Education in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. His research centers on how education stakeholders across a range of political and educational contexts make sense of and respond to policymakers' reforms. He has looked at these issues using multiple theoretical and practitioner-based perspectives that span the fields of early childhood and elementary education, curriculum and instruction, teacher education, and policy analysis. Through this work, his goal is to understand and advocate for early learning environments that foster, sustain, and extend the complex educational, cultural, and individual goals and aspirations of teachers, children, and their families.

Kate Puckett

Kate Puckett is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, specializing in early childhood education at the University of Texas at Austin. Research interests include how early childhood teachers are influenced by policy reform particularly quality rating and improvement systems (QRIS) and play as an evidenced based curriculum.

David P. Barry

David P. Barry is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, specializing in early childhood education at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include early childhood preservice teacher education, early childhood teacher self-care, and the incorporation of trauma-informed teaching practices in early childhood learning spaces.

Da Hei Ku

Da Hei Ku is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, specializing in early childhood education at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on how social context influences education as a whole and families, communities, teachers and policy in particular. Before graduate school, she taught as a bilingual Pre-K teacher in Chicago.