How does achievement exist? Putting achievement sous rature and inviting new questions about teaching and learning

Abstract

Schooling today is steeped in a material-discursive community of achievement. Its ubiquity has become such that terms to qualify and quantify learning through achievement, for example high performing, average, below grade level, underachieving, lack of growth, and so on, and the technologies for identifying and treating the conditions of its construction have come to dominate the material and lived experiences of those in US schooling institutions. In this paper, I hope to tell the story of achievement as a productive material-discursive system that has been circulated as a scientific “truth” of nature and development and that has produced the subject of “the student” who is simultaneously the object of study and the site of administration and regulation of achievement theory-practice and technologies. The extensive body of work from critical psychologist and poststructural feminist researcher Valerie Walkerdine on developmental psychology, neoliberalism, and the humanist subject will guide my inquiry into the role that power/knowledge has played in the construction of “truths” about children that has produced, regulated, and repeated achievement in schools, and, consequently, theory-practices of teaching and learning. I will also consider how humanist and neoliberal discourses complicate and contribute to the overall apparatus of achievement. I will invite posthuman feminist questions that will serve as a path toward a (re)conceptualization of learning within and beyond achievement-structured confines.