Becoming-teacher as (in)activist: Feeling and refusing the force of university policy

Abstract

University teaching is the target of intensified policy making. The policies’ purpose is sometimes to solve a specific problem but always to demonstrate the ‘quality’ of the institution. Policies also seek to normalise university teaching practices according to value-laden ideas of what those practices should be. Normalisation exacts a painful price: by necessity it produces the abnormal, the unethical, even the unspeakable. This paper explores the normalising force of teaching policies as they are plugged into the assemblage of a becoming-teacher and wonders about the possibilities for activism in relation to that force. In an open-ended process of clouded agency, the wilful human self of Becoming-Teacher^BG struggles with and against new norms: if she is to stay recognisable as a good academic subject, she must negotiate with them. Yet, it’s not all up to her. Composed from complex alliances between teaching places and technologies, teaching (and taught) selves, teaching policies and curriculum materials, Becoming-Teacher^BG is sometimes undone by the new norms and sometimes refuses them. This paper offers a ‘critical view from the body’ (Haraway, 1988: 859) with respect to university teaching policies in order to inspire conversation about the varied ground and nature of everyday academic activisms – including some that might look like a lack of activism – with the goal of encouraging them to flourish as spaces of freedom and refusal towards a better university. Such (in)activisms seek to change the business-as-usual of the university, usually at a micropolitical level, but they may also set larger changes in motion.

Becoming-Teacher^BG undone (August 2013)

Shaped like a small amphitheatre, the windowless room is black. Black walls, black screens, sleek black and chrome chairs on castors, charcoal carpet flecked with black. Everything in this room in the bowels of the flash business school is modern and new. It feels like a television studio. Becoming-Teacher^BG doesn’t belong here. Her heart pounds, her mouth is dry, and hot flushes raise hell through her body.

She’s first into the room, skewered into a small, brightly lit space between the only two doors, shakily navigating the PowerPoint display. Students stream past, paying her no attention at all. She feels invisible. Avoiding the front row, they’re heading for the semi-circular layers of desks stretched above her. Grabbing a spot, they roll around on stylish chairs, making their places, settling.

Becoming-Teacher^BG’s place is down at centre-front. She has choices. She can stand behind the bulky e-lectern and more or less disappear. Or she can be fully exposed in the middle of the small apron of space between the e-lectern and the first layer of desks. Or she can place herself somewhere along the empty front row of desks. She mourns the absence of the traditional lectern, that elegant and undemanding form of support for both notes and a body.

She places herself and her notes at the empty first row, taking small comfort from its physical proximity. But she doesn’t settle. Unsettled doesn’t come close to how out-of-place and alarmed she feels.

Gradually, the room fills until they’re at time. Around 30 of the 45 students on her list have arrived. They’re looking at her now, expectantly. Something inside her turns. Quite suddenly, these young students feel hostile, even threatening, to her. She feels crazy. The wave of fear could be another hot flush but it feels like something else, something more serious. This teaching does not belong to her: not the content, nor the technology she must use, nor her feelings towards the students. Even the room feels her enemy. For the next 50 minutes, and then again with different students, she teaches through a heaving sea of rising and falling panic.

The following week Becoming-Teacher^BG is in the doctor’s surgery, unable to return to class. Somehow, teaching has turned on her. She is undone.

Teaching policy forces itself

If a world can be what we learn not to notice, noticing becomes a form of political labour (Ahmed, 2017: 32).

More and more insistently, university policy forces itself upon its teaching subjects. Indeed, institutional policy now penetrates all the assemblages that academics are produced by as becoming-researchers, becoming-teachers, becoming-administrators, becoming-citizens. But where policy ‘offers’ (enforces) possibilities for new practice, it also creates disturbance in the assemblage into which it is plugged. Older relations and practices are cast beyond the pale, new kinds come into play. Policy creates opportunities for refusal, which might also be forms of activism.

In this paper, I take up Sara Ahmed’s suggestion that the ‘simple’ act of noticing can be political. Through stories of lived experience and critical commentary, I try to notice complex, difficult-to-trace effects of university policies on what it means to be a university teacher in a large urban research-intensive university in Aotearoa New Zealand. First, I draw on the conceptual resources of assemblage theory and autoethnography to explore policy’s implication in the story of a becoming-teacher being undone. Then I offer two stories of muddled, or failing, forms of activism in relation to teaching policy. Like the first story, these are tales of ‘the particular plight of the teacher who stands alone in their classroom … and sees something cracked … and finds it intolerable’ (Ball and Olmedo, 2013: 85). I use them to highlight policy’s penetration of our subjectivities as university teachers, to unsettle prevailing stereotypes of activism, and to propose (in)activisms as always within our reach. I close by arguing that small, muddled and ambiguous activisms are a quotidian resource for recouping an academic life worth living, one where we critically respond to (among other things) new norms of university teaching as they are forced upon us through policy. In so doing, we undermine the monolithic, depredating and fear-engendering forces of risk aversion, ‘excellence’-seeking and standardisation that our universities invoke more and more in everyday academic life.

Assemblages: Becoming-teacher and Becoming-Teacher^BG

Agency can be strange, twisted, caught up in things, passive, or exhausted. Not the way we like to think about it. Not usually a simple projection toward a future (Stewart, 2007: 86).

Across this paper I move between writing about ‘the becoming-teacher’ and ‘Becoming-Teacher^BG. The becoming-teacher is a persona immanent to an assemblage composed of multiple, connected, heterogeneous parts that all, human and non-human, manifest agency and mobility through ‘alliance’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2013: 26). The prefix ‘becoming’ underscores the processual nature of this persona and thus signals a critical ontological shift in which the human element is decentred from the controlling seat. Becoming-teacher is a buzzing hive of alliances between the incessantly moving and changing parts comprising their assemblage. In counterpoint to the generic becoming-teacher, Becoming-Teacher^BG is a biographically particular case. Her particularity is only of as much interest here, though, as her kinship with other cases of becoming-teacher that are always compositions of familiar (and generic) parts of the assemblage: the particularity of the human self we call the teacher/lecturer/instructor shares a history of training and credentials with others of her kind. She also mostly shares a plethora of alliances with other elements of the assemblage: the lecture theatre, the electern, the syllabus, the slideshow, the projector, the students, and, and, and: ‘the fabric of the rhizome [assemblage] is the conjunction, “and … and … and … ”’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2013: 26). ¹ Nowadays teaching policies are also familiar, generic parts of becoming teacher: plugged into the assemblage, they set in play new alliances, new desires and affects, new doings.

A Deleuzian assemblage is interesting not so much because of what it is – it is always changing – but because of what it does. Any ‘subjective’ agency (doing) that becoming-teacher is capable of is bent, mutated, sped up and slowed down by complex interrelationships among the assemblage’s parts. The agency of the parts is always potential rather than actual, but also their agency is not all of the same kind. For example, the human parts entangled in the becoming-teacher assemblage (the teacher-self, but also her students, co-teachers, other colleagues, head of school, dean of teaching and learning) have intentionality (Pickering, 1993). In contrast, the non-human parts – such as course readings, handouts and slide-shows; the teaching room, its tables and chairs; the electern, screens and carpet; the room’s smells and lighting, its time of day – do not. There is ‘no material counterpart’ to human intentionality (Pickering, 1993: 566). Nevertheless, the non-material parts of becoming-teacher have potent agency of other kinds. Think of the projector in the teaching room for example: its effects on human bodies, its enablement of the flow of ideas and images into the classroom. Indeed, its potency may be most felt when it fails. ²

Such a view of becoming-teacher might be seen as anathema to activism, with its traditional connotations of forceful, purposive action. But not so. Within the assemblage, there is always potential for activist doings, as I will explore in some detail below. In this exploration, though, I find ambiguous doings that only in a muddling way take a stand, do good, try to cause change for the better. I characterise these doings as ‘(in)activisms’. The agency inside these doings is more like that described by Kathleen Stewart in the quote above: ‘strange, twisted, caught up in things, passive, or exhausted’ (2007: 86). Such passive or exhausted but also recalcitrant doings might also be called a ‘politics of refusal’ (Ball, 2016: 1141), but here refusal is partial, incomplete and failing some of the time. Sometimes, like the act of noticing, it looks like inactivism; sometimes it is more recognisable as activism. It’s hard to tell the difference, certainly from the outside of the becoming-teacher assemblage. But it’s even hard to tell from the inside, such is the strangeness and twistedness of Becoming-Teacher^BG’s agency: she is motivated to refuse but those motivations are not transparent to herself. Activism of this kind chimes with that described by James Burford, where he writes about ‘“weak” feelings such as depression, numbness and anxiety’ (2017: 70) as resources for political work.

Methodology – or, can critical autoethnography be post-humanist and activist?

[L]ocation is about vulnerability; location resists the politics of closure, finality, or to borrow from Althusser, feminist objectivity resists ‘simplification in the last instance’ (Haraway, 1988: 590).

The argument I make here draws on ‘personally’ felt experiences of being a university teacher. In assemblage thinking, ‘[t]he first and second person “I” and “you” are not nonexistent, but rather secondary to the third person “we” that is collectively immanent to the assemblage’ (Nail, 2017: 27, italics added). In this sense, becoming-teacher is the primary persona of the assemblage, ³ whereas Becoming-Teacher^BG is secondary. I have tried to underscore Becoming-Teacher^BG’s secondariness, her dependence on the primary collective persona of the becoming-teacher, by voicing her experiences in the third person singular.

My methodology is influenced by critical autoethnography, a humanist standpoint perhaps incongruous with the posthumanism of assemblage thought. But, for some thinkers in the field, there is a connection. Critical autoethnography derives much of its force from the foundational charge of feminist thought that the personal is (always) political: the ‘critical’ stance provides us ‘with clear and powerful theoretical frameworks … for understanding how [personal] stories help us write into or become the change we seek in the world’ (Holman Jones, 2016: 228). Feminist writers such as Stacy Holman Jones (2016), Joy Scott (2014) and Ruth Behar (1996) draw a genealogical line between what critical autoethnography can do and Donna Haraway’s influential essay, ‘Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective’ (1988). I follow this line back to Haraway’s essay, remembering her work is foundational for feminist post-humanist thought.

Haraway’s essay makes a strong claim for ‘feminist objectivity [which] means quite simply situated knowledges’ (1988: 582). By situated knowledges, she signifies knowledges arising from (and inevitably about) ‘particular and specific embodiment’ (Haraway, 1988: 582) such as that of Becoming-Teacher^BG. Situated knowledges are those for which we are answerable: we cannot retreat behind claims to have the god’s eye view, but must make our location, our standpoint, visible as the basis for what we know. Moreover, we never innocently see the world: we ‘learn how to see’ it (Haraway, 1988: 583) and our seeing is always mediated by ‘instruments of vision’ (Haraway, 1988: 586). Crucially for critical autoethnography (and its detractors), Haraway asserts that ‘[i]dentity, including self-identity, does not produce science; critical positioning does, that is, objectivity’ (Haraway, 1988: 586). Testimonies that rest on the authenticity of the self (I was there and I am she) are not enough, because ‘we are not immediately present to ourselves’ (Haraway, 1988: 585). The self is split and contradictory but, nevertheless, is able to ‘interrogate positionings and be accountable, … can construct and join rational conversations and fantastic imaginings that change history’ (Haraway, 1988: 586): this self is capable of critical thought and actions towards a better world.

Feminist objectivity, then, is inescapably embodied and partial, and, methodologically, critical autoethnography foregrounds these features. Embodiment and partiality are powerful foundations for our claims to knowledge, providing we do not resort to identity, nor brute experience, as the basis for truth. In this logic, the critical authoethnographer is unable to offer a ‘self-identical narrative’ (Jackson and Mazzei, 2008: 313) – that is, a truthful story in the conventional sense. Instead, she can only perform an ‘I’ who is a problem, who produces a story of ‘evocative, ethical, and failed practices … a story that confronts the truths and traces that are both possible and impossible’ (Jackson and Mazzei, 2008: 314). In response to these insights, I try here to mash-up posthumanism and critical autoethnography towards activist ends. I mingle two voices – a first-person author who thinks with assemblage theory and a third-person singular voice who tells stories from the field. This third person is not the god’s eye view from nowhere but the intimate view from an embodied, partial and unfinished self.

Writing Becoming-Teacher^BG via feminist objectivity means keeping a critical eye on her self-description by persistently questioning her assumptions and truths – undetected blindspots will always be at work. It means aiming for a kind of analytic precision in order to unpick, from within the complexity of her experiences, the effects of institutional teaching policies. ‘It’s not easy to see things in the middle’, say Deleuze and Guattari, ‘rather than looking down on them from above or up at them from below … try it, you’ll see everything changes’ (2013: 24). My desire in looking at things from the middle of a particular becoming-teacher assemblage is to excite new ways to think about activism – including how activism and inactivism are impure, broken even, categories for living in and changing the university.

The policification of university teaching

The university works for the day when it will be able to rid itself, like capital in general, of the trouble of labor (Moten and Harney, 2004: 104).

For several decades now, at least in the ‘West’, university teaching has been the target of intensified policy-making. ⁴ The clear intention behind such policies is to standardise the pedagogies of university courses and classrooms, both actual and virtual, according to value-laden and normative ideas of what university teaching (and learning) should be. Once policies are sufficiently detailed and comprehensive, the university removes the obligation of its becoming-teacher labour force to think, to judge, to decide, which is the first step towards removing the need for such troublesome workers altogether.

The improving and specifying intentions of policy have applied especially, and perhaps most explicitly, to student assessment, but they reach ever more widely and deeply into every dimension of teaching. Through policy, ‘[n]orms become striking: holdable as palpable things’ (Ahmed, 2017: 43). The genre of policy is the command of the father, thus teaching policies are littered with orders: ‘Lecture capture provides supplementary learning resources, but does not replace face-to-face teaching. … Course information must state whether lectures [sic] recordings will be made available or that an exemption has been granted.’ ⁵ (And so on.) As more and more policies are plugged into the becoming-teacher, more and more orders are activated to reshape her practices towards better, more desirable, standards. As her practices are ‘improved’, so becoming-teacher’s sense of what is possible, desirable, normal practice narrows. Her responsibility to enact professional judgements about how she teaches – her academic freedom – is overrun, violated even, by the institution’s determination of what ‘best promotes learning’. ⁶

But where does that institutional determination come from and why? Stephen Ball suggests that educational ‘policy work is often a piecemeal process of “fixing” problems’ (2015: 309). Typically, teaching policies name their causal problems in vague, normative terms, almost always appealing to ‘high quality’ (the problem of teaching not being good enough) and ‘student success’ (the problem of student failure): ⁷

The University supports the recording of lectures, and other teaching activities as appropriate, as part of its objective to provide a high-quality learning and teaching environment that maximises the opportunity for all students to succeed. ⁸

To support the University’s goal to develop and maintain a high-quality learning environment by providing a framework for the evaluation and quality assurance of learning and teaching at the level of the course. ⁹

In the language of quality and good practice, ‘the ideological character of policy ideas’ is obscured (Horrod, 2020: 17). Yet, as the second extract above indicates, the rise and rise of teaching and learning policies ¹⁰ is a function of the late 20th-century emergence of the performative university and its embrace of the ideology of excellence (Readings, 1996). This ideology not only valorises the standardisation of good practice but also the continual improvement of that practice. Its logic ‘offer[s] to make us better at what we are supposed to do, through interventions of various kinds, but at the same time they ensure that perfection is always out of reach and that there is more work to do on ourselves’ (Ball, 2015: 308). The demand of teaching policies – ‘improve yourself!’ – is limitless; the implicit judgement is that the becoming-teacher’s practice is ‘never good enough’ (Horrod, 2020: 10). In this logic, the ‘truth’ of teaching and learning is that they are always already problems of someone’s failure (the becoming-teacher’s, the becoming-student’s) requiring the fix of this policy or that. Violence lies in policies’ demands that the becoming-teacher remakes herself despite any reservations she might have in order to be normal, satisfactory, meritorious, excellent (what it takes to be praised, to keep her job, to be promoted). A consequence of this violence is a damaging hollowing out of academic freedom, not just in the sense of freedom from oversight but in the more important sense of responsibility to make decisions.

The undoing of Becoming-Teacher^BG

The phallic lecturer wears a mask of extreme compliance with policy as a condition for the licensing of power, simultaneously simpering in deference and brandishing data, oxymoronic, compromised, but a proper, professional, teacher. What is relinquished here? Critique? Collegiality? Activism? Unionism? Other forms of professionalism? So we have … an illusion of positivity and progress which simultaneously locks the phallic teacher in to dependencies and anxieties (McKnight, 2020: 506).

At the time of her undoing, Becoming-Teacher^BG was an experienced and senior academic who had recently changed position from working in a central role as an academic developer to working in a Faculty as a discipline-based academic. Recruited to her new position because of the Faculty’s need to grow the ranks of research-active staff, her decision to apply was largely motivated by feelings of despair at the co-option of academic development to the expanding sphere of managerialism in her university. In the new role, she would leave this troubled arena and re-engage with teaching students in courses for credit. So she was fragile with the sorrow of leaving work she had loved, but also excited about new possibilities. Teaching was her milieu: not only had she spent a couple of decades teaching fellow academics how to teach, the classroom was a place where she felt most confident, at ease, energised.

Soon after arriving in the Faculty, though, she was struggling to find teaching. Many other new staff had been recruited in the same period, which was prior to the upcoming national research audit. As one of the last to arrive, most of the ‘available’ teaching was already allocated. She began to develop new courses in her field but, with prolonged approval times, it would be at least a year or two before she would be teaching them. When her head of school asked her to tutor on a large first-year course taught by a colleague on another campus, she grabbed the chance. ¹¹

Much had changed in the few years since she had last taught postgraduate courses for the Faculty. Most radically, through shifts in national legislation and policies, students had been rewritten as fee-paying consumers of higher education: ‘not like customers, they are customers’, says Bill Readings (1996: 10). With this rewriting came a fundamental shift in the nature of both the teacher-student and the institution-teacher relations. Courses and classroom pedagogies had become a suite of services, subject to regular audits of customer satisfaction. ¹² In this way, courses and classroom pedagogies became fair game for intensified institutional ordering and surveillance. Enter the grinding levers of policy, which are (invisibly) everywhere in the story of being undone: from the alienation of the student evaluation of courses and teaching from Becoming-Teacher^BG’s sphere of authority, to the architecture of the teaching room, dominated as it is by the normalising technology of the electern, which (in this story) stood at the focal point of the students’ downhill lines of sight into the teaching pit. Becoming-Teacher^BG has never liked the shift from the homely dynamism, versatility, simplicity and concreteness of the multi-media overhead projector + black/whiteboard + handout technologies of her early teaching years to the slick packaging of PowerPoint and its ilk. She has never enjoyed interacting with and, especially, depending upon the unpredictable technologies of the electern. In fact, when she’s nervous (as she often is when she starts teaching a new group), she cannot problem-solve even quite simple technical glitches, which makes her feel stupid and incompetent.

Looking back across time and place, it seems that a potent element in the undoing of Becoming-Teacher^BG was her perception of the changed, more risky, relations between her and her students, in which university policies played a leading role. (If she had been a more junior academic, she might also have felt at risk in relation to the institution.) With students steadily being made over into customers, she felt as if her students were enemies, sitting in judgement on her every mistake, on the verge of discovering she had no right to be teaching them. The feeling of danger was amplified by other interrelated elements of Becoming-Teacher^BG’s assemblage: the antagonistic architecture of a room fitted out like a television studio, which arrayed the students on mobile chairs above and around her, but pinned her to the central pit; the sensor-driven lighting in a room without windows; the room’s location in a massive and unfamiliar basement floor; the (for her) hostile slab of the electern; the unfamiliar course content; the ambivalent status of older women within her society; the recent shift from a position where she had visibility and standing to one that, despite being more senior in rank, lacked much of either; and, and, and. All become vulnerabilities in a policy-driven system that prioritises student satisfaction with teaching over all other values, all the while demanding higher and higher fees, and packing students into larger and larger classes, with fewer and fewer prospects post-degree.

Being undone took Becoming-Teacher^BG back to her days of working with early-career academics on their teaching. She had often heard stories about their fears: fear of trying any kind of pedagogy that was not usual in the department, fear of being on the receiving end of critical student evaluations, fear of losing their job as a consequence. Sympathetic enough, she had never really understood the fear. Now it came to her, perhaps to teach her: fear, like sadness, can be pedagogy (Ahmed, 2017: 62). It was a long and painful lesson: the event plunged her into sadness, a depression that took several years of recovery. And still there is scar tissue.

Scar tissue: First lecture (July 2019)

Becoming-Teacher^BG organises the first lecture of her course carefully. The excitement she used to feel is extinguished by apprehension, with its disquieting bodily sensations. She visits the teaching room in advance (it’s not on her campus) to familiarise herself with its layout and machinery. It’s locked, which means the first time she gets in will be for the first lecture. She worries: often, the person teaching in a room before her doesn’t leave until (after) the last minute. If that happens, she’ll be under pressure. Shamefacedly (she can’t believe this is still a problem), she asks her friend to come along – then, if the technology doesn’t work, she’ll have help for problem-solving. Later, she will ask the students, but in the first class she won’t know them and being unable to sort out the technology has become a kind of unbearable failure. It feels as if it puts her teacherliness in question, even though this course is one she has long wanted to teach, and she knows students usually enjoy it.

Blessedly, the small room is empty, the lights come on, the technology works. Becoming-Teacher^BG’s friend hugs her and leaves; a dozen or so students arrive in dribs and drabs. They, too, are unsettled by the beginning of a new course. She watches them come into the room and is reminded of Mark Edmundson’s description of undergraduates as a little ‘sweet and sad’ (1997: 43): definitely not dangerous! The PowerPoint, projected onto both screens, dominates the cluttered room, a hackneyed sign of her preparation and professionalism. Over the next couple of hours, her apprehensive body slowly settles, although she notices herself dealing cloddishly with the teaching materials: if she gets them in a mess, she can’t quickly find what she needs. Sometime during the lecture, everything suddenly turns off, the room is plunged into semi-darkness. By then, though, her inability to problem-solve technical glitches doesn’t matter – she and the students have connected, and they’re already packing their bags to head out into the sunshine for a fieldtrip. She has survived the first class.

From pain to (in)activism: Policy refusals

I turn away now from teaching policy’s harms to think about how policy creates opportunities for refusal, which might also be forms of academic activism. Once again I draw on stories from Becoming-Teacher^BG’s work, this time to explore moments of complex and clouded agency in relation to two particular teaching policies that are explicitly wielded over her – seeking to bring her into conformity with institutional norms. My curiosity is whether, from the vulnerable and unsteady (embodied, pained and partial) location of Becoming-Teacher^BG, I can discern something helpful, hopeful even, about academic (in)activism.

Record your lectures! (June and September 2019)

When a new university teaching edict arrives by email, Becoming-Teacher^BG baulks. Citing the Lecture Capture and Release Policy and Procedures verbatim, the message reminds all Faculty academics of ‘the lecture release exemption application deadline’. The practice of recording lectures is now mandatory across the university although, she is told, she can apply for an exemption under certain conditions. Her senior undergraduate course meets the first condition but, recalcitrantly, she doesn’t apply. She disagrees with the compulsion – it gives students the wrong message about coming to class, and it impinges on academic freedom. And she disagrees with the officious chain of command for exemptions – ‘applications are made … via e-form to the Dean or delegate’. Yet another low-trust bureaucratic process choking already overflowing days. Instead, in the first class, she mutes the e-lectern’s microphone (she cannot turn the recording off) and explains why she will not be recording the lectures.

Mid-course, another email arrives, this time personally addressed to Becoming-Teacher^BG. It appears the Faculty ‘has been advised’ that the ‘recordings Tab on the Canvas course page has been disabled’ and she is instructed to change the settings to enable the release of her (silent) lecture recordings. Despite her ignorance of how the Canvas recordings tab came to be disabled, she is hailed as miscreant and feels a burst of anxiety for her earlier refusal. She replies appeasingly:

I would like to ask for an exclusion from this policy going forward – we run the classes in a very interactive way and I think recording them could have the effect of depressing the students’ involvement in the discussion. I seem to remember an exclusion is possible, but I didn’t pursue it earlier because, when I checked the room, it initially appeared that it was not a ‘lecture-recording enabled room’.

The following day’s reply gently reproves her for non-compliance by restating what she had earlier ignored: ‘Exemptions need to be applied for prior to every delivery’. The matter ends: she has refused both completing an application and recording her lecture.

Remind your students to evaluate your course! (October 2019)

Yet another email. The pro forma message from a central office issues a terse directive: ‘We are half-way through the evaluation period! Please remind your students to submit their feedback in SET’. Becoming-Teacher^BG feels aggrieved by the tone of command, but there is more. Since working as an academic developer, she has watched a tool originally designed in the 1970s to gather formative student feedback for individual lecturers become formalised and centralised as a summative instrument. It is now firmly embedded in the machineries of quality assurance and academic performance management. Most recently, the Enhancement and Evaluation of Teaching and Courses Policy and Procedures have been amended to require student evaluations for every course iteration. This despite the policy’s accompanying ‘Guidelines’ that propose a minimum frequency of once every three years to ‘balance the need for evaluation information against the risk of over-evaluation, which risks higher levels of student non-participation, affecting response rates’. ¹³

Testily, she replies, copying in the Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic (who oversees such policies) and her Faculty’s teaching and learning leader (who enforces them):

To encourage my students to complete the SET, as requested below, I would have to agree that it’s a good idea to ask students to evaluate a course every time it’s taught. But I don’t agree with this – and perhaps the ‘naturally’ low response rates from students across courses suggest they don’t either?

I think once every three years or so is enough if the university requires a mandated baseline. Ironically, this particular course (‘The idea of the university student’) is one that is explicitly critical of the consumer logic of such blanket quality assurance practices and so it would be even more deeply humbug to make this request of my students more than once every three years or so.

Becoming-Teacher^BG explains her decision to the students: she tells them that, in her view, summative course evaluation once every three years is sufficient, especially given she always collects mid-course feedback. As she speaks, the risk opens before her, unnerving her slightly (why does she think like this? she never used to!): they might read her decision as a prohibition, and feel their rights are being infringed. Of course, she adds placatingly, they are welcome to complete the evaluation in their own time.

In the semester when these quite different moments of refusing policy’s penetration take place, Becoming-Teacher^BG is slowly emerging from the prolonged bout of depression with its acute consequences in her teaching. (There is a back-story here about a long journey of professional help.) In the first event, lingering sadness and anxiety deaden her capacity to respond directly to the email; instead she refuses quietly, subversively. The situation is complicated, too, because the email comes from a faculty colleague who she knows is just ‘doing their job’ – this is one of the ways institutional policies work, through the vestigially collegial tentacles of hierarchical and not-so-hierarchical work relationships. Becoming-Teacher^BG doesn’t want to make her colleague’s job harder. In contrast, the second email comes much later in the semester, coinciding with the gradual return of Becoming-Teacher^BG’s enjoyment in her teaching, and from an impersonal source. With more fire in her belly, she is able to more loudly and directly refuse to collaborate with the policy (although she cannot stop it being enacted).

While both events entail refusals of policy’s efforts to form an alliance with Becoming-Teacher^BG, neither look like academic activism as we might usually conceive it. Neither are collective, they have a limited public, they are less about changing the order of things than refusing it, they do not obviously arise from feelings of collective injustice so much as an affront to personal pedagogical values – although, crucially, for Becoming-Teacher^BG the personal of pedagogy is always also political-ethical work. But there is no programme here: Becoming-Teacher^BG’s actions are at least partially spontaneous reactions, compulsions, even ‘just’ recalcitrances. Especially in the first refusal, Becoming-Teacher^BG’s motivations were not particularly transparent to herself – she was too sad and anxious to think. The purpose of describing these actions in some detail, of drawing the reader into the banality of her doings, is to make an argument that these kinds of passive, exhausted, ordinary doings can be activisms, albeit of a muddled kind. Following Ahmed’s suggestion that ‘feminism can be lived as a failure to be habituated to a gender system’ (2017: 55), I propose here that academic activism can be lived as a failure to be habituated to a university system, in which policies play a central systematising function. Thinking in this way allows us to rethink our relations to policy: we might see policies less as injunctions to obedience and more as incitements to refusal. For Becoming-Teacher^BG, this rethinking transforms the daily depredations of policy into daily adventures of hope: she finds the ‘failure to be accommodated to a system [is] the condition of possibility for living another way’ (Ahmed, 2017: 62).

Declaring for muddled activism/(in)activism

Taking pain into account is the starting point; the aim of the ethical process, however, is the quest for ways of overcoming the effects of passivity, the paralysis brought about by pain. The internal disarray, fracture and pain are also the conditions of possibility for ethical transformation (Braidotti, 2010: 53).

There is no guarantee that in struggling for justice we ourselves will be just. We have to hesitate, to temper the strength of our tendencies with doubt, to waver when we are sure, or even because we are sure (Ahmed, 2017: 6).

In this paper I have brought aspects of feminist and post-humanist theorising into contact with the methodological resources of critical autoethnography to notice how the university teaching policy-practice nexus is ripe for academic activism. Toggling between the primary (generic) persona of the becoming-teacher and the secondary (particular and pained) one of Becoming-Teacher^BG, I explicate teaching policies as an element of the becoming-teacher assemblage with variable agency: policies do not have to dominate the activities of teaching despite this being their purpose. Admittedly the academic activisms explored here are not the stereotypes of activism, whether my own fantasies of piling up all the policies in the quad and burning them, nor the more familiar realities of organised protest on the street. These other public, collective, dramatic activisms have their place and I hope to enjoy both of them (again) before my days in the academy are over. What I show here is that, on a daily basis, there is room for more kinds of activism – small, muddled and pain-fuelled refusals that I call (in)activisms. These are the failures to be habituated to our university systems, what Ball and Olmedo (2013: 86) characterise as ‘the courage displayed in refusing the mundane, in turning away from excellence, in unsettling truths … [in practising] concrete liberty, which is localised and flexible’. Such failures might take the form of ‘slacking’ or refusals of work (such as filling out forms), even a kind of sneaky criminality that Fred Moten and Stefano Harney suggest is the ‘only possible relationship to the university today’ (2004: 101). The nature of refusals will inevitably vary in relation to the kind of academic position occupied and other personal characteristics of the actor: as an older white woman with a ‘permanent’ senior contract, Becoming-Teacher^BG has options that other becoming-teachers do not. Less courage is required of her than will be of others. But every academic worker has options and courage is always possible.

My argument goes further, though. I want to declare an ethical imperative: not only are these refusals warrantable forms of academic activism, but also we, academics/faculty, are required to engage in them. Not doing so risks relinquishing our intentionality as human parts of our assemblages who, before complying with the incessant demands the institution makes of us through its policies, must always first appraise them from a position of thought and principle. What new and incontrovertible norms are emerging? What practices, relations and subjectivities are being cast beyond the pale? For sure, there is always cause to hesitate, to waver: as Ahmed reminds us above, nothing about activism guarantees its justice. And our autonomy is not that of the free agent, the independent individual, but is the always compromised agency of the becoming-teacher. This agency, as Stewart describes, is ‘strange, twisted, caught up in things, passive or exhausted’ (2007: 86). But nevertheless it is the agency we have and, as academics who are members of the university, who are the university, and who earn our livelihoods and accrue social status there, we are accountable for how we use it. We are accountable for keeping things under question, in motion, open to transformation – for ‘creating the conditions of endurance and hence for a sustainable future’ (Braidotti, 2010: 56). Simply doing policy’s bidding in our teaching is not good enough: in fact, we can understand obedience as policy’s ‘triumphant irruption’ in us. ¹⁴ Instead, choosing a course of pursuing everyday (in)activisms enacts a different – more hopeful, lively and heterogeneous – university.