Structural marginalisation, othering and casual relief teacher subjectivities

Abstract

Produced through market relations of neoliberal managerialism, teacher subjectivities are becoming progressively commodified. With the increasing casualisation of the teaching workforce, the well-being and status of casual relief teachers (CRTs) can be seen as an area of concern, at risk of ‘flexploitation’. More than just a convenient labour pool, CRTs operate on the margins of school communities, a space fraught with a range of issues. In many instances, CRTs experience less job satisfaction; less rapport with students and colleagues and less access to school information, professional development, resources and teaching materials. This article draws on a positioning theory to frame the discursive production of CRT selves within the neoliberal milieu. It offers a detailed analysis of collective biographies that explore narrative formations of casual teaching. Schooling discourse is replete with metaphorical language that frames teacher positioning, and a range of existing metaphors in CRT literature highlight their vulnerability in particular. Rather than offering an analysis that addresses casual teacher performance as a problem to be solved, this article proposes that the relationship between ‘structural marginalisation and the ‘othering’ that CRTs can experience is associated with the politics of market-related performativity.

Keywords:

• casual relief teachers
• category boundary work
• discourse
• markets in education
• neoliberalism
• subjectivities

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Charteris

Jennifer is a teacher educator with over 25 years of teaching experience in New Zealand, Australia and the UK, working with students, teachers, principals, school communities and school in-service advisors. She has taught in the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors. As a professional development provider with the University of Waikato, NZ, Jennifer has provided professional learning for principals and teachers that aimed to raise student achievement through targeted assessment for learning and culturally responsive pedagogies. Leaving for Australia in 2010, Jennifer taught on the Graduate Diploma in Education (middle years) programme with La Trobe University. At the University of New England she teaches research methods at masters level and learning theory in the BEd primary course.

Kathryn Jenkins

Kathy Jenkins has been practised as a secondary teacher of english and history in Queensland and New South Wales, Australia. She now lectures in the learning and teaching area (pedagogy), thus tends to focus on ‘how to teach’ rather than ‘what to teach’. Kathy’s areas of research have broadened over time to include teacher education, casual teacher work, cooperative learning, environmental education and peace education.

Michelle Bannister-Tyrrell

Marguerite is a lecturer in school pedagogy/gifted and talented education in the School of Education, University of New England, Australia. She has over 20 years of teaching experience in the primary sector and began work as a teacher educator at UNE in 2005. Her research interests are in the areas of understanding and supporting pre-service teachers’ approaches to learning, and gifted education practices in rural contexts. She has published in the former area. Marguerite teaches in pre-service education courses including evidence-based learning and teaching practices, and rural/remote, multi-stage, casual, and gifted and talented, education.

Marguerite Jones

Michelle Bannister-Tyrrell is a member of the learning and teaching team within the School of Education at the University of New England, Australia. As a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, she specialises in education psychology, gifted and talented pedagogy and learning and teaching. She has been recognised for her scholarship, being awarded the 2015 John Geake Outstanding Thesis Award presented by the Australian Association for the Education of the Gifted and Talented. In 2014, she won the Beth Southwell Research Award for outstanding thesis from the NSW Institute for Educational Research.