Editorial: Preparing teachers to confront neoliberal discourses and to teach children equitably

This special issue was provoked by a sudden epiphany while preparing for a conference presentation in 2015. A graduate student and I had analysed narratives from teacher candidates ¹ documenting their journey from students to teachers during their early childhood teaching practicum as part of an initial teacher education programme with a purported social justice emphasis and an intense focus on incorporating families’ funds of knowledge into early childhood settings (Gaches and Walli, 2015; González et al., 2005). While preparing to share our analysis, I suddenly realized how easily we had slipped into an assumption that these teacher candidates were on a linear pathway towards achievement of standards that would legitimate them as “teachers” (Cannella, 1997; Gaches and Walli, 2015; Osgood, 2006). During teacher education class sessions, I was working with students to challenge and disrupt dominant discourses of child development and to privilege the discourses and knowledges that young children were bringing into their early childhood settings. Yet neoliberal mandates of teacher accountability had diverted my researcher-attention to these same students’ attainment of teaching standards. It was at this moment that the full impact of normalized discourses and practices of neoliberal education reform (Giroux, 2007; Harvey, 2005; Rizvi, 2017) hit me like a sucker-punch and, as I gasped for air, I wondered how other teacher educators and researchers were currently facing this dilemma to prepare teachers to confront neoliberal discourses while also focusing on issues of social justice and to teach children and older students equitably.

Framing the tensions

Much of current teacher education in the USA and globally has been framed by neoliberal policies and discourses. There are ever-increasing mandates for strict adherence to attainment of standards in teacher preparation programmes, most especially those focusing on technical–rational skills and knowledge attainment including dominant discourses of psychology and child development, behaviorist techniques of management of students and emphasis on “methods” courses as pedagogical skills (Kennedy, 2015; Kumashiro, 2015). Additionally, there are increased accountability measures implemented to demonstrate teacher candidates’ mastery of these standards including the use of teaching licensure tests and the edTPA (Cochran-Smith and Villegas, 2015; Imig et al., 2016). Furthermore, the market-economy focus on teacher preparation has been a fertile feeding ground for alternative pathways to teaching licensure (e.g. Teach for America, Chicago Teaching Fellowship, and more) where in just a few short months those with a Bachelor’s degree in any field become classroom teachers in high needs schools (Zeichner and Peña-Sandoval, 2015). A common theme in all of these neoliberal policies and discourses is that all teachers will focus their efforts on their student charges attaining appropriate mandated test scores indicative of attainment of uniform standards through standardized curriculum and pedagogy (Hill, 2007; Sleeter, 2012). From a neoliberal perspective, the purpose of education has become the preparation of students for the workforce and more particularly as “the means to rise above others” (Lipman, 2011, para. 13), especially if you are already of the privileged dominant culture (Apple, 2001).

Yet, the students that teacher candidates will be teaching are increasingly diverse and bring to the classroom many different ways of knowing, being, and interacting with the world. In response to this increasing diversity and, more importantly, the historical marginalization of anyone not part of the more powerful dominant culture, teacher educators have placed increasing emphasis on multicultural education, social justice education, culturally relevant/responsive pedagogy, and culturally sustaining pedagogy amongst others. Each of these terms has its own history and perspectives (Paris, 2012), the discussion of which is beyond the scope of this editorial. However, a significant emphasis of each has been a rejection of deficit approaches to difference and diversity and a respect for and incorporation of students’ ethnic, cultural and linguistic capital within their educational experiences. The ultimate vision and goal for these perspectives is a more democratic, equitable and socially justice society (Paris, 2012).

The reality is that our teacher candidates will be living and teaching in a world where neoliberal discourses and policies govern many of the ways in which they will be required to teach and that teacher candidates will be living, teaching and learning alongside students, families and colleagues that are likely to be quite diverse from themselves. Teacher candidates are expected to simultaneously demonstrate attainment of neoliberally determined standards by themselves and their students while also incorporating and building upon the multiple literacies and funds of knowledge of their students. Learning to negotiate between these contrasting discourses is one of the themes that runs through all of the articles in this special issue. I would argue that as teacher educators we have an ethical and moral responsibility to prepare teacher candidates for these tensions.

Potentials, possibilities and pitfalls

This special issue begins with two articles focusing on teacher candidates confronting neoliberal discourses and how teacher candidates could envision the world differently. Lupinacci, Happel-Parkins and Lupinacci detail how they work with teacher candidates to confront the taken-for-granted assumptions of Western thinking that are often at the core of the neoliberal agenda. Through what they refer to as an “ecocritical framework in teacher education” (p. 654), the teacher candidates are challenged to recognize our interdependencies upon each other and all living species. Hara and Sherbine find possibilities in visioning techniques with teacher candidates to help support them in their resistance to neoliberal pressures of standardized curriculum and high-stakes accountability measures. Hara and Sherbine present possibilities for how teacher education and teacher educators can support not only teacher candidate resistance but also how teacher candidates’ visioning should become collaborative visioning including multiple stakeholders in their practicum (and then teaching) experiences.

Where these articles focus on confronting neoliberal pressures and supporting teacher candidates to think otherwise, another movement in teacher education has been to direct teacher candidate attention towards the communities that are often quite different to those from which they have come (Sleeter, 2018; Zeichner, 2016; Zeichner et al., 2014). The teacher education programmes in the next two articles in this special issue have made this turn. Teacher candidates in Lash and Kroeger’s teacher education programme participate in social action projects as a way to see themselves as “change agents in the broader sense of the world as well as their increasingly neoliberal classrooms…and add to their sense of efficacy in teaching” (p. 692). The authors provide a realistic vision on the possibilities and limitations of these experiences and offer “gradients of social action for justice” (p. 703) as a way to recognize the variability in teacher candidates’ incremental steps toward activism and advocacy. Engaging with the community is approached quite differently in the article by Cipollone, Zygmunt and Tancock. In this teacher education programme community mentors have become “de facto teacher educators” (p. 709) as they work alongside teacher candidates in a project developed with the community. This project and the relationships that unfolded brought teacher candidates to deeper engagements with this community, its children and families as well as an increased understanding of how systemic injustices operate to benefit those already in power at the expense of others.

Attempts to shift these power dynamics and what is being privileged is the focus of the next two articles. Stanton and Morrison describe how the Montana Indian Education for All policy challenges settler colonialism through mandated privileging of Indigenous experiences in the PreK-20 curriculum. In presenting two case studies, they provide insights into how policy initiatives such as this create opportunities for legitimizing, honouring and truly incorporating community narratives. However, these authors also document how teachers and teacher candidates are limited in their implementation of the curriculum framework particularly by lack of resources and teacher understanding in incorporating Indigenous counter-narratives in the face of dominant-culture resources such as the existing textbooks. Saavedra and Salazar Pérez approach disrupting these power dynamics through more of an inside-out confrontation. These authors use pláticas, a Chicana/Latina feminist methodology drawing from deeply personal exchanges and experiences within and amongst women of color, to confront and challenge neoliberalism in their teacher education programme. Their article describes the tensions they experience, drawing from and responding to their own oppression by and complicity in neoliberal mandates and practices. Their article is a strong reminder of the complexity of these tensions within teaching, learning and society.

The next two articles in this special issue bring attention to the lived difficulties in actually implementing a shift in focus from standardized, high-stakes neoliberal practices to the incorporation of “democratic accountability” (Yeh, this issue, p. 764) and “a more humanizing culture” (Chang and McLaren, this issue, p. 795). Yeh’s article follows four teacher candidates after graduation to their first classrooms. While the teacher education programme from which they had graduated focused on ways to incorporate students’ ways of knowing, being and doing, as these novice teachers entered their own bilingual classrooms they were challenged by constraints from the neoliberal policies (e.g. high-stakes testing, use of time, teacher merit pay, developmental pedagogical approaches). This led the novice teachers to fall back on more essentializing incorporation of children’s culture or even to leaving the profession altogether. Furthermore, reflecting back on how their teacher education programme had prepared them, the novice teachers also noted that while the programme had good intentions, it was still dominated by “an overwhelming bias of Whiteness” (p. 776). The pervasiveness of this bias within a programme actively seeking to address historical marginalization of minority groups in mathematics education reinforces how normalized neoliberal discourses, policies and practices have become. Thus, Yeh points to the importance of teacher candidates learning how to “push back or fight against the negative consequences of these policies” (p. 775).

The urgency of addressing the tensions between neoliberal mandates of high-stakes testing and a more humanizing culture are highlighted in Chang and McLaren’s article as they point to the frightening statistic of 22 students committing suicide over 8 months in Hong Kong. Teacher candidates in their project directly connected this statistic with the high-stakes testing culture and the number of youth who feel disassociated from any system of support or care. In their dialogic article, Chang and McLaren provide some keen insights into the historical framing of the issues that led to this national and cultural emphasis throughout the schooling years on high-stakes testing. While both teacher candidates and teachers note their desire to incorporate more student-centered and inquiry approaches to learning, their actual teaching practices are driven by mandates from administrators and parents fearing the outcomes of rankings, titles and test scores. For the teachers in Chang and McLaren’s work, it is the relationships they could build outside of the official curriculum that could create a more humanizing culture for emotional support.

Throughout the articles in this special issue there is a sense that the normalizing discourses, policies and practices of neoliberalism are a force that is not going away anytime soon – or perhaps ever. While we can work with teacher candidates to confront these discourses and to engage with communities and incorporate their ways of being, doing and interacting into education settings as much as possible, the final two articles in this special issue have a sense of resignation and acceptance that neoliberalism is here to stay. However, this doesn’t mean that teacher candidates, teacher educators or teachers accept their neoliberal lot in life and become lemmings leaping into the abyss. These articles highlight how teacher candidates can cope with demands from neoliberalism and the tensions between neoliberal mandates and their desires to teach children equitably. Neoliberal accountability measures of teacher certification take center stage in the article by Greenblatt. The article provides a detailed description of the development, implications, and some of the effects of the edTPA, a performance assessment required for teaching certification in New York. While much of Greenblatt’s article focuses on the neoliberal underpinnings of edTPA, there are important points regarding how teacher candidates coped with the demands of the assessment. While some teacher candidates taught to the assessment for their own professional survival, others found ways to game the system, such as strategic selection of where they would student teach and teaching to meet their students’ needs while still crafting a portfolio that met the requirements. Meanwhile, other teacher candidates chose to ultimately avoid the assessment by seeking employment outside the state or outside public education altogether.

The final article in this special issue directly acknowledges neoliberal discourses as one of the main stressors that teachers must confront on a daily basis which affects their social and emotional wellness and can lead to teacher burnout and attrition. Damico, McKinzie Bennett and Fulchini propose mindfulness training as a way to help teachers cope with these tensions and demands. In this small-scale study, first-year teachers who took part in “mindfulness-based support” (p. 828) professional learning sessions found the opportunities to connect with other first year teachers of as great a benefit as the mindfulness techniques themselves. This points to some of the possibilities for how teacher education and the education system itself can support teacher candidates, teachers and teacher educators as they confront neoliberal discourses and seek to teach children and all students equitably.

Where does this leave us?

The impetus of this special issue began with a sucker-punch that left me gasping for air as I sought some way to understand how we negotiate with teacher candidates the tensions between neoliberal discourses that force teaching and learning (and thus students) into neat little standardized boxes while wanting to rip open the boxes freeing students, learning and teaching so that all could engage with the world and learning in ways that were most meaningful for them. The articles in the special issue foreground some of these potentials, possibilities and pitfalls. Based upon the contributions from the authors in this special issue, I propose some supports for teacher candidates, teachers and teacher educators as we live with these tensions every day.

Be ever mindful of our interdependence upon each other and those with whom we share our environments (animal, non-animal, etc.)

Listen deeply to and engage with communities in ways that are meaningful for them. Share our visions with each other and work together for each other’s benefit.

Acknowledge that there are things in the world that we cannot currently change but that we also cannot just accept and keep going. Resist what can be resisted. Turn up the volume when marginalized voices are being silenced. Find ways to humanize the de-humanizing.

While this is by no means a comprehensive list of supports, it is hoped that it provides some summary points of how we could support teacher candidates in moving the purpose of education from workforce preparation and further societal stratification (Lipman, 2011) towards a more democratic, equitable and socially just world (Paris, 2012).