Search results for: Neoliberalism

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.

This study examined, through the lens of narrative inquiry, the lived experience of a beginning teacher during her first two years in a neoliberal school system. This narrative inquiry has revealed how an idealistic beginning teacher, enamoured with a constructivist pedagogy and eager to teach and inspire, was engulfed by a neoliberal school culture and taught in a way antithetical to what she had believed. The authors conclude that this story illustrates how neoliberal thinking and practice have impacted the lived experiences of an ordinary beginning teacher and helps to illuminate potential causes of tension and conflict that novice teachers in Singapore are likely to encounter in their induction into the profession and their adoption of alternative pedagogies to teach against the grain of educational neoliberalism that has taken a stranglehold on Singapore’s school system.