Gettin’ a little crafty: Teachers Pay Teachers^©, Pinterest^© and neo-liberalism in new materialist feminist research

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I share data from a year-long study investigating the manifestations of neo-liberalism in the working lives of five women elementary school teachers in the United States. I discuss how gendered discourses of neo-liberalism construct what is understood as possible in the material-discursive production of the women’s subjectivities concerning a surprising market created by teachers for teachers that is largely promoted through the social media site, Pinterest^©: Teachers Pay Teachers^©. Utilising new materialist feminist theory [Braidotti, R. 2000. “Teratologies.” In Deleuze and Feminist Theory, edited by I. Buchanan, and C. Colebrook, 156–172. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; Dolphijn, R., and I. van der Tuin. 2012. New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press], I analyse how the teachers intra-act [Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Half Way: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] with curricular material actants [Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] that have the capacity to alter the course of events in women’s work and lives. I argue that these material actants further entangle the material-discursive, virtual-real production of subjectivity and influence women teachers in variegated but particularly gendered ways that ultimately reinforce emerging theories around the gendered nature of neo-liberal subjectivity [Gill, R. 2008. “Culture and Subjectivity in Neoliberal and Postfeminist Times.” Subjectivity 25 (1): 432–445. doi:10.1057/sub.2008.28; Walkerdine, V. 2003. “Reclassifying Upward Mobility: Femininity and the Neo-liberal Subject.” Gender and Education 15: 237–248. doi:10.1080/09540250303864].

KEYWORDS:

• Teachers/educators
• substantive topics
• curriculum
• substantive topics
• post-structural theory
• theory
• women
• substantive topics
• materiality
• substantive topics

Notes

1. All participants and school names are pseudonyms.

2. While not technically a requirement, many states applying for and receiving Race to the Top grants included the implementation of CCSS in their applications. Ultimately, forty-two of the 50 states in the United States have adopted the CCSS (www.corestandards.org).

3. Pinterest^© is a social media website and smartphone application that allows users to browse content using a search function. All content are images that often link to an external website. Users then ‘pin’ images to their boards which they can sort by areas of interest. Figure 2 is a screenshot of a board on Pinterest.

4. Though I knew both Rose and Joplin prior to the study, I asked each participant the same questions in the first interview. These questions can be found in Appendix.

5. I have elsewhere (Author) theorized the good enough teacher subject position within the context of the neo-liberalisation of education. The good enough teacher is what Walkerdine (2003) calls an ‘impossible subject position’ that is nonetheless constantly ‘held up as possible.’ The good enough teacher discourse is further maintained through the production of curricular materials, as discussed here.

6. Figure 5 is a photograph of some of Taylor's TpT^© lessons. It was her idea to spread them out as they are in the image. She, too, seemed surprised at the amount of the floor in her classroom they covered, as she ran to get Mary to show her.