‘Cruel optimism’: teacher attachment to professionalism in an era of performativity

Abstract

This study provides a critical exploration of the way teachers’ attachment to notions of professionalism may facilitate a process whereby teachers find themselves obliged to enact centralised and local education policies that they do not believe in but are required to implement. The study argues that professionalism involves an entanglement of (past) occupational and (present) organisational discourses and that the remainders of the former facilitate the enactment of the latter. The study draws on Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism to help understand this process, whereby teachers’ attachment to professionalism may assist them in undermining the very values they believe it embodies.

Keywords:

• Education policy
• teacher professionalism
• discourse
• performativity

Notes

1. In more detail, we understand neoliberalism as an ideology and a theory of social, political and economic practices espousing a belief that ‘human well-being can best be advanced by the maximization of entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework characterized by private property rights, individual liberty, unencumbered markets, and free trade’ – a theory in which ‘[t]he role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices’ (Harvey 2007, 22). In relation to public education, neoliberalism is centrally concerned with the preparation for individual and national participation in an unchallenged but constantly evolving global free-market – ensuring that a suitably educated citizenry is able to work with that evolving system in ways that preserve the economic status quo or render it more advantageous to the nation state. In practical terms, neoliberalism attaches a market value to performance and product – ‘performativity’ – embracing or introducing numerical measures of the ‘quality’ of such production, such as test and examination scores, or inter-institutional ‘league tables’. Individual responsibility is given equal stress as individual freedom in policy rhetoric, in each case attached to the notion that social and financial success (and presumably consequential happiness) is within the grasp of every ‘hardworking’ individual within the current socio-economic system, and is also used to justify an often Draconian inspection regime, including the threat/practice of imposing a radical change of management on school deemed to be ‘failing’.

2. It is also the case that teachers working outside complete state control, for example in some academies, free schools and public schools, may have more freedom in relation to curriculum and pedagogy than those working exclusively within the state sector. Given our interest in exploring the relationships between mandated policy directives and policy reception and implementation, this is a key reason behind our continuing focus on teachers working within the state sector under current arrangements.

3. The stated commitment of the (mainly)UK government-funded Education and Training Foundation (ETF 2015) – which self-presents benignly as an ‘empowering’ tool for practising teachers – to ‘professionalising the workforce’ offers a striking illustration of this view and of its affective intent.