Abstract
This article uniquely employs Beverley Skeggs’ ‘hierarchies of personhood’ as a means to explore the iconographies of teacherhood in neoliberal times. Drawing on the narratives of three male primary school teachers in England, it examines and critiques the neoliberal ‘subject of value’ that is acquisitional, performative and self-propelling. ‘Self-projection’, ‘self-protection’ and ‘self-separation’ are identified as a trio of self-care practices that invite normative identity claims as they articulate with embodiments of value found in gendered, classed and raced discourses in contemporary cultural and political domains. The article is therefore about how, within school communities, conditions of personhood are established through regimes of value, and how these regimes are bound by the logic of commodity and exchange. In addressing the limited attention given to the localised formation of masculinities within neoliberalism, the article contributes to an emerging area of scholarship via its innovative engagement with sociological conceptions of personhood and value. The article thereby seeks to mark a shift in the academic and public discourses framing ‘male primary school teachers’, as it critically examines how such an identity category hinges on regimes of value conditioned by interlocking technologies of neoliberal educational governance, patriarchy and classism.
Introduction
From the moment he said it, late one summer-term afternoon, the teacher’s comment that lends itself to the title of this article has been a data ‘hotspot’ for me (MacLure, 2013). It has niggled and jabbed, intrigued and troubled me; it is a lively data fragment – challenging, inciting, affective (Benozzo et al., 2013). Each time I return to it, I am struck by the power of the moment being narrated, and then the wider discourses and politics it encompasses; struck by the visceral force of the spikey words and the world they conjure: The line that sticks with me was my [school]mate Luke. He said, ‘Charlie, just play the fucking white man. Just go into school, get a fucking cushy job’, d’you know, ‘move to [a better area]’. And I always remember thinking, ‘Shit, that’s an option for me’, and I’d never really seen that as an option. As horrible as the words were, and he wasn’t meaning it in a mean way, what he was saying was: ‘I’m a six-foot-seven black guy with a criminal record, who’s 26, who lives in [a poor area where they grew up], who’s got no GCSEs [General Certificate of Secondary Education – secondary school leaving qualifications]. Don’t boohoo me down, you prick, go and sort it out’. And actually, seven years later, that’s what I’m doing really. (Charlie)
Neoliberalism is a political-economic theory used to construct and justify government priorities and practices that utilise the logic of market economics, and it has has effected a sociopolitical transformation since the 1970s (Webb et al., 2014; Trnka and Trundle, 2014). A core principle is that individuals’ freedom of choice is paramount, which equates to freedom of market participation where this is untethered from – though sponsored and legitimated by – state intervention (Wilkins, 2016). As such, ‘social well-being rests on individual choice and can only take place within an unrestricted market-driven model of development’ (Webb et al., 2014: 33). Neoliberal governance therefore seeks to reduce the social, political and economic investments and risks typically assumed by government, and transfer these risks through responsibilisation onto individuals. Neoliberal policies are those that seek to individualise and privatise the social welfare state (Peters, 2017) and, by invoking human capital theory – that individuals are driven by rational choice, balancing ‘profits’ and ‘loss’ – economic principles such as competition become the ‘generalizable grid of intelligibility’ for social life (Anderson, 2016: 740; see also Wilkins, 2016). Neo-liberalisation can thereby be read as an assemblage of ‘tactics, mechanisms and other technologies used to persuade populations to discipline themselves economically and/or enterprisingly’ (Webb et al., 2014: 33) – to act in self-interested ways and conform to the norms of the market (Larner, 2000).
Neoliberalism encourages a prioritisation of the economy and, as such, ‘education systems [are] mandated to develop efficient, creative and problem-solving learners and workers for a globally-competitive economy’ (Robertson, 2007: 11). Under neoliberal imperatives, education is framed as an individual good, with the public good visible only as an aggregate of individual ends (Olssen, 2000); learners are expected to construct themselves as responsible, ‘rational utility maximisers’ (Olssen, 2000), to live ‘a “performative” and entrepreneurial existence of calculation that involves organising themselves in response to targets, indicators and evaluations’ (Keddie, 2016: 109).
Teachers are caught up in these logics too, and this is the focus of the discussion that draws on international research in the following section. Developing from that, I outline the unique approach that this article adopts to understand neoliberal teacherhood, employing the notion of ‘hierarchies of person value’ (Tyler, 2015; Skeggs, 2011) to explore how these regimes of value are constituted by ideas of individual worth that have become tied to the logic of commodity and exchange. Findings from interviews with three male primary school teachers in England are used to examine ‘the centrality of gender in processes of subjection under neoliberal governance’ (De Coster and Zanoni, 2017: 1), addressing the ‘very limited attention [that] has been given to the formation of masculinities in relation to neoliberal subjectivities’ (Stahl et al., 2017: 1), and thereby contributing to an emerging body of scholarship (see, for example, Stahl et al., 2017; Walker and Roberts, 2018; Gorman-Murray and Hopkins, 2016: Cornwall et al., 2017). Moreover, as Phipps (2018: 4) argues, ‘neoliberal modes of value … interact with gender, race, class and other relations’, and this article seeks to present an account of these intersecting dimensions of teacherhood as they relate to school communities, exploring and troubling these particular and insidious ‘mechanisms of differentiation’ in the face of growing disparities between sectors of society (Pratt, 2016). The argument is that the contemporary identity of ‘male primary school teacher’ can be seen as conditioned by interlocking technologies of neoliberal educational governance, patriarchy and classism. As such, established discourses that privilege young, white, heterosexual men can legitimately be mobilised by these male primary teachers as resources within ‘an educational environment marked by an aggressive neoliberalism’ (Hall and McGinity, 2015: 3) to position themselves as subjects of value – indeed as subjects that have more value than others – within school communities.
Iconographies of teacherhood in neoliberal times
The influence of neoliberal social and economic policy climates is significant in how teachers’ identities are now constructed (Francis and Skelton, 2008; Ball, 2016; Wood and Brownhill, 2016; Connell, 2009; Done et al., 2014; Kirk and Wall, 2010). In this version of professionalism, the distant governmental regime manufactures self-control and adherence to behaviour defined by government imperatives (Jeffrey, 2014). This is secured within neoliberal policy by strengthening the capacity of the state to hold teachers to account – for example, via the high-stakes inspections and school ‘league tables’ that have emerged following the 1988 Education Reform Act (Wilkins, 2018; Hall and McGinity, 2015). Practices of ‘managerialism’ and accountability constitute technical-rational, instrumental subject positions for teachers to adopt (Troman, 2007; Sachs and Mockler, 2012), and this managerialist drive for teachers to conform to centrally controlled government policies, practice and performance metrics has coincided with a ‘drastic loss of autonomy and professional collegiality’ (Jeffrey, 2014: 111). The values once established within the profession have been superseded, where the ‘old iconographies of teacher-hood’ – which encompassed ethical and moral axes of ‘vocation, care, dedication and self-investment’ (MacLure, 2001: 176) – have become repurposed in the service of attainment targets (see Dadvand and Cuervo, 2018). The requisite professional identities in neoliberal times – the contemporary iconographies of teacherhood perhaps – are ‘individualistic, competitive and bureaucratic’ (Jeffrey, 2014: 112).
Such subjectivities have emerged in the context of quasi-markets in education (Whitty, 2008; Ball, 2007) and the diversification of the schooling landscape (see Department for Education, 2016). In this environment, ‘collective identities are encouraged only insofar as they support corporate objectives’ (Stevenson, 2017: 546), and new types of teacher subjects are encouraged through the ready incorporation of discourses and practices from the business field (Courtney and Gunter, 2015). As marketplace values come to dominate, identities oriented around ideals such as collegiality, truthfulness, mutual respect, authenticity, courage and compassion are threatened (Nixon, 2005). There has been a ‘destruction of solidarities based upon a common professional identity’ (Ball, 2003: 219), and teachers have been described as willing to ‘embrace the role of teacher, but want[ing] to shrug off the identity’ (MacLure, 2001: 176).
And yet the old iconographies of teacherhood die hard; against the embedded routines of neoliberal governance, teachers do describe a heightened awareness of their moral and ethical boundaries (Ball, 2016), and articulate a ‘process of struggle against mundane, quotidian neoliberalisations’ (Ball and Olmedo, 2013: 85). However, such is the normative effect of neoliberalism (Connell, 2013) that as the school teaching body becomes increasingly constituted by those educated in the ‘post-professional age’ (Jeffrey, 2014: 118), whose own educational experiences and learner identities were shaped by heightened competitive and instrumental objectives, teachers may be more likely to invest their fate in the success of their marketised institution and conform to its norms, ‘sustaining a collective belief in both the institutional rhetoric and their voluntary adherence to it, making resistance seem unnecessary’ (Jeffrey, 2014: 118); they ‘may no longer have a language for making sense of teaching in any other way’ (Pratt, 2016: 901). Indeed, the language of educational policy – ‘autonomy, deregulation, freedom, and innovation’ – is a technology of control through ‘which a hollowed-out state both steps back, and steps in, through new forms of “regulated self-regulation”’ (Stevenson, 2017: 546, quoting Jessop, 2002). Wood and Brownhill (2016) suggest that teachers might now be seen as agents of neoliberalism, becoming handmaids of educational cultures striated by competition, self-responsibility and individuality.
This contemporary ‘neoliberal professional’ teacher (Ball, 2003) is enterprising and entrepreneurial (Foucault, 1994; Bührmann, 2005; Peters, 2017). Rewarded are those who can construct – fabricate – performances and products which manage the requirements of ‘neoliberal surveillance’ (Webb et al., 2009; see Thompson and Cook, 2012) – a change in emphasis ‘from practice that is effective to practice that has the hallmark of effectiveness’ (Pratt, 2016: 896). Ball (2003) describes the deleterious effects of these ‘terrors of performativity’ which emerge from imperatives to demonstrate an upward trajectory and prove compliant within an unrelenting ‘discourse of improvement, challenge and aspiration’ (Jeffrey, 2014: 117; see also Mockler, 2013). The ‘terror’ of performativity is that teachers come to perform certain practices in order to appear competent, improving, and to enable accountability – but these actions are stripped of meaning or worth in their own right. Jeffrey (2014: 95) sees such fabrications as evidence that the ‘habitus of performativity’ has now become an accepted part of educational subjectivities – that new kinds of teacher subjects have emerged (Ball, 2003; Ball and Olmedo, 2013; Hall and McGinity, 2015).
Self-projection, self-protection, self-separation
Schooling’s regulatory and quantification-oriented performance cultures (Sachs and Mockler, 2012) employ ‘measuring, ranking, and auditing performance’ as defining features of contemporary governance (Shore and Wright, 2015: 421). This reflects the neoliberal shift from ‘overt forms of control or “oppression” and toward more covert forms of control imbued with individuals’ own desires and active participation in the development of an entrepreneurial self’ (Webb et al., 2014: 33); we are persuaded to make ‘market principles the guiding values of [our] lives, to see [ourselves] as products to create, sell and optimise’ (Ventura, 2012: 2). As such, neoliberalism ‘seeps under the skin of its subjects and becomes absorbed into the bloodstream’ (Stevenson, 2017: 549), and is indicative of a shift from disciplinary societies to ‘societies of control’ (Deleuze, 1992). In this context, I suggest that a trio of what could be called ‘self-care’ practices – self-projection, self-protection and self-separation – emerge for teachers as they negotiate the contemporary educational terrain.
Self-projection
For teachers, then, as self-monitoring and monitored selves (Mockler, 2013), ‘passing judgement, on yourself or on others, becomes the ideal mode of talking about teaching’ (Hall and Noyes, 2009, cited in Stevenson, 2017: 546). Such comparative-competitive frameworks, which have taken root in contemporary educational policy (Wilkins, 2018), are neoliberal technologies necessitating an active production of capital – to ‘develop innovations with/in’ ourselves (Webb et al., 2014). Hence, moments of judgement and comparison become opportunities for promotion, to reap rewards or mitigate sanctions; they ‘stand for, encapsulate or represent the worth, quality or value of an individual or organization within a field of judgment’ (Ball, 2003: 216). Self-projection and an accumulation of material and symbolic capital becomes doxic in the teaching game.
In this way, mechanisms of accountability which grade and rank are measures of how much ‘value’ teachers have added (Stevenson, 2017: 546), and this ‘value’ comes to be seen as a private good for teachers (Pratt, 2016). Good pupil attainment data or an ‘outstanding’ lesson observation, for example, emerges as a commodity which has exchange value. Within the accountability regime, teachers ‘are reorganized both as competitors for the crucial surplus represented in high test scores and as salespeople for their own pedagogical performances’ (De Lissovoy, 2013: 428). As such, Pratt (2016: 900) argues that teachers are ‘encouraged to think about their teaching as a personal act of “profit-making”’. Through engagement with Bourdieu’s notion of ‘capitals’, Pratt (2016) suggests that there is a ‘market exchange’ involving teachers, pupils and schools. Each party is able to acquire cultural, social and economic capital within the field of their school, which can be exchanged – for teachers, this can involve making use of their pupils’ assessment data in service of their own hierarchical positioning and economic benefit – for promotions and pay rises. It is Pratt’s contention that this alters not only teachers’ assessment practices, but also the nature of their relationship with pupils (see also Lunneblad and Carlsson, 2012; Thiel, 2018). Similarly, Wood and Brownhill (2016) consider that individualised, responsibilised and competitive environments encourage teachers’ attribution of blame for poor pupil progress to others such as ‘absent fathers’ and ‘single mothers’, without taking heed of contextual social and economic factors. It is pertinent to note that during a time of ‘resurgent class resentments’ (Tyler, 2015: 503), fuelled by austerity politics, such shorthand descriptions of the feckless lower classes are ‘ruthlessly employed [in political and public discourses] to divide people along a vampiric axis of blame for diminishing social resources’ (Tyler, 2015: 506); this is the social, cultural and political environment in which teachers make such judgements.
Self-protection
In this context, all but the most profitable cooperations with others in the school community can be jettisoned – within dynamic market hierarchies, it is imperative to protect one’s capital assets. It becomes necessary to engage in a ‘form of reflexive prudence’ that involves careful calculation to maximise benefits and mitigate harm and risk (Trnka and Trundle, 2014: 139 ). An acceptable degree of pupil progress has to be evidenced for one’s own self-protection (Stevenson, 2017), where a ‘rhetoric of blame and fear and the promulgation of heroic narratives of exemplary teachers’ (Mockler, 2013: 36, citing Taubman, 2009) is a particularly insidious aspect of neoliberal governance enabling the transformation of education – teachers enact policies against their better judgement to avoid being perceived as ‘unprofessional’ compared to colleagues (Moore and Clarke, 2016). Done and Murphy (2016) draw on Foucauldian analyses to suggest that these ‘dividing practices’ in neoliberal policy are a technique that secures such teacher self-regulation through the government of individualisation, whereby we are ascribed defining characteristics and divided from others (and from ourselves), which (re)produces particular social and professional identities. This classification and atomisation is desired from neoliberal policy, which depends on symbolic and spatial separations (Webb et al., 2014) to enable the continuous reconstitution of teacherhood as entrepreneurial and self-protecting.
Self-separation
The production and classification of particular social and professional teacher identities is important here. As practices of self-care are prioritised, the neoliberal subject is charged with identifying itself amongst a variety of choices (Webb et al., 2014). Webb et al. (2014) develop the argument that this ‘unequal and circumscribed’ choice relates to a politics of belonging – we seek to anchor our selves in practices of self-care which feel ‘more like me’ and avoid those ‘practised by them’ (38). As achieving a semblance of ‘self-worth’, or ‘self-satisfaction’, can only come through practices of self-care that are in line with the rules, styles and conventions of a particular culture (37, citing Dilts, 2011), complying with expectations becomes the less risky option. Yet this can involve practices of self-separation, as we are compelled to seek recognition of our social and professional identities in contexts of competition and comparison. Recognising oneself and identifying with are processes of interpellation (Watson, 2010) and, for example, male primary school teachers are hailed into and made subjects of discourses of professionalism, of masculinity, of heterosexuality, of role models, of behaviour management and of career advancement (Cruickshank et al., 2018; Burn and Pratt-Adams, 2015). Coming to recognise oneself within this assemblage draws boundary lines, offering opportunities for intelligible identities to emerge. Those teachers who can fit the hegemonic heterosexual, able-bodied, ‘white elite professional norm’ (Lugg and Tooms, 2010: 78) may be able to reap rewards whilst being drawn into identity practices that are exclusionary (see Tooms et al., 2010). For example, Courtney and Gunter (2015) describe head teachers’ relentless search for the ‘right’ kind of teachers who ‘fit’ with the ‘vision’ for their schools; membership of a school community may be granted to those who match a particular template, and the politics of fitting in becomes a matter of strategic boundary-marking.
Phipps (2018: 4) contends that ‘neoliberal modes of value … interact with gender, race, class and other relations’, which leads to judgements where some people are deemed dispensable and others worth protecting. She describes this ‘reckoning up’ in neoliberal educational institutions as based on the value we bring, which justifies and secures patterns of differentiation between fungible human-capital units. Here, when considering male primary school teachers and masculinity in particular, it is key to note that ‘traditional hierarchies intersect with newer evaluative technologies [in educational institutions] to ensure that certain people are reckoned up differently’ (Phipps, 2018: 7). These ‘power/value relations’ reflect – yet obscure and perpetuate – social inequalities through neoliberalism’s attempt to ‘erase issues of social identities’ and ‘wipe away intersectional identity categories’ (Stahl et al., 2017: 3; see also Apple, 2014); entrenched gender hierarchies, for example, can be denied by measures of professional value and worth that are nevertheless structured by those established hierarchies.
Hierarchies of person value: a theoretical framework
Notions of value, capital and exchange, and of individuation and belonging, are key in Beverley Skeggs’ influential understanding of contemporary ‘conditions of legitimation and self-formation, by which the self is required to repeatedly reveal its value through accruing and investing in economic, symbolic, social and cultural capitals’ (Skeggs and Loveday, 2012: 472). Within a field, or ‘social universe’, agents compete with one another for a share of the highest-prized capitals, in an effort to increase the value of the capital they hold (Rowlands and Gale, 2018). Extending Bourdieu’s understanding of such capitals, Skeggs provides an ‘intersectional account of how bodies come to be differently inscribed with value within contemporary social-symbolic circuits of exchange’, creating classed, gendered and racialised ‘hierarchies of person value’ (Tyler, 2015: 500). Skeggs (2011: 509) conceptualises ‘personhood’ as ‘social and moral states produced through encounters with others located within relations of production and reproduction’, and based on contingent, situational practices. As such, personhood is a sociality – a relationality – which goes some way towards disrupting ‘certain ideas of the self [which] produce singular, contained, individualised models of the social subject’ that are used in much sociological research (Skeggs, 2011: 497). As Winkler-Reid (2017: 150) notes, such a take on personhood contrasts with ‘the analytical primary of neoliberalism which often results in a surgical articulation of ideal subjects’, and instead allows a more nuanced appreciation of how notions of value and worth circulate in the ‘everyday’ to produce personhood. This is important, since ‘neoliberal and gendered norms operate through relations of accountability in which one seeks recognition as a viable human being’; this production of personhood is not just a calculative and rational individual act (De Coster and Zanoni, 2017: 23).
Such analyses must be undertaken, however, with an awareness that the neoliberal ‘subject of value’, promoted across ‘government policy, political rhetoric, popular culture and academic discourse’, is the normative subject in contemporary times (Skeggs, 2011: 503; see also Skeggs, 2004). As all bodies are produced as expressions of value, compared against the model ‘flexible’ middle-class subject of acquisition and appropriation, some bodies are constituted as improper and variously excluded: These different figures of value locate people in different vectors of time and space; the ‘subject of value’ is a forward-propelling subject/object, individualised, always accruing through exchange and investment in order to enhance futures, opposed to those who are either blocking this future-oriented subject or fixed as a ready supply of labour. (Skeggs, 2011: 502)
The study
The research was a multi-interview project involving several individual meetings with male teachers in English primary schools who worked as Special Educational Needs Coordinators (SENCOs). The project was a PhD study completed in 2016, conceived to address the gap in research about the experiences of men in the SENCO role and as middle leaders in primary schools. Although findings specific to the nature of the SENCO role do not form part of the data presented in this article, it is nevertheless important to note because SENCOs’ work involves a great deal of contact with a range of stakeholders in a school community, most pertinently here their teacher colleagues and parents. Invitations asking for men working as primary school SENCOs to take part in this research were shared via local education authorities, two providers of the mandatory SENCO qualification, an online government forum for SENCOs and professional networks. This article focuses on the narratives given by three participants, all of whom were in their late twenties/early thirties and identified as male and white British. They were all around five years into their teaching careers, and their schools tended to serve communities that were relatively economically disadvantaged and ethnically diverse. One of the participants was based in a major city in the south-east of England, one in a small city in the West Midlands, and one in a town in the south-east. Pseudonyms – Charlie, Simon and Graham – are used for the participants.
The interviews were narrative in nature, broadly focused on being a man in a primary school and a SENCO. In two meetings with each of the three men, which produced six hours of audio-recorded material, the discussions were loosely structured, informal and conversation-type encounters (Goodson and Sikes, 2001). The narratives constructed can be seen as part of a dialogic process (Frank, 2010); they are practices that bring into existence relationships and exclusions, and draw attention to the contingent ways these teachers ‘create themselves in relation to social, political and regulatory structures of their environment’ (Jeffrey, 2014: 119). It was therefore pertinent that these meetings took place in the men’s offices, as this allowed for our conversations to be grounded in their working environment. This meant that during discussions about relationships with colleagues or teaching approaches, for example, the participants showed me resources or referred to rooms we had just walked past. The interview material was recorded and transcribed, and the data generated were thematically analysed (Braun and Clarke, 2006). In line with the theoretical framework, this took the form of focusing on narratives of ‘value’ and ‘comparison’, as I sought to avoid reproducing and legitimating the normative positioning of ‘male primary school teachers’ by only seeing these men as the site of ‘truths’ projected by and onto them – for example, as deviants, disciplinarians or careerists. Rather, I wished to pay closer attention to the ‘position of judgement’ (Skeggs, 2005: 977) that is afforded to and maintained by these men amid these discourses, to examine their narratives of accruing and securing relational ‘value’ within primary school communities. This resulted in an exploration of the conditions of teacherhood/personhood that hinge on regimes of value made available by an interlocking of neoliberal technologies of educational governance, patriarchy and classism.
Findings and discussion
‘There was no other person like me there’: capitalising on the status of normative masculinity
A recurring theme in these men’s talk was comparisons with colleagues and, in particular, with other men: In this school, there aren’t many men … when I joined there was one gay art teacher, and a guy downstairs called Matt who’s, like, five foot four, wears running shoes … with trousers – d’you know, he’s not making the effort with how he looks, and I turn up and usually I wear a tie, got trousers, had a haircut, relatively well presented – it was just after summer, so I’d been to the gym – and you go out and all of a sudden you’re flavour of the bloody month … that was because I was a male member of staff who had time for people and would listen, and had done things to help people. (Charlie)
The second teacher mentioned also has insufficient capital to compete in the relational hierarchy that Charlie delineates, and bodies emerge as significant in this account, where this colleague’s diminutive stature compares less favourably to his own gymed body. As Lindisfarne and Neale (2017: 41) argue, against shifting patterns of male work, ‘new dominant masculine styles are those that celebrate fitness and strength’ as an ‘elite gain’ – it is a marker of those who have ‘made it’ and who make the right lifestyle choices. We can see here how these male bodies become commodities and central to self-projection. When Charlie says incredulously that his colleague is ‘not making the effort with how he looks’, he is surprised because this other man is not actively accruing value to himself. As a form of neoliberal governmentality, ‘self-improvement’ has come to ‘dominate life domains from employment and education to health, consumption and leisure’ (Walker and Roberts, 2018: 3), and it can be said that this discourse becomes embodied in the relational hierarchy of the male primary school colleagues described here.
Charlie’s account suggests that he feels he has to perform his value. He presents himself as unique, but implies that this is an achieved status – he has made himself the (type of) man the school had been waiting for. Graham narrates a similar view: I think I just got a personality and skill set that just fitted in with what the need of the school was at the time … I think there was definitely an agenda when I went for the job; it was almost, our SENCOs aren’t doing a particularly good [job]; here comes a bloke that’s got all this [SEN] background … there was no other person like me there, in the sense of, with the background but also the personality. There was just one other bloke when I started, and he was the music man, so he’d got that musical background, a little bit quirky as performers can be – admittedly, I’m quirky as well – but almost a bit serious with regards to [the work].
‘Best thing about the school’: ‘lateral hostility’ with female colleagues
A particular and normative version of maleness can be seen, then, as a commodity which is performed and protected in order for these men to accrue value to themselves. It is also the case that within the audit machine of neoliberal education (De Lissovoy, 2013), such gendered identities are entrenched as there is a ‘conjunction of neoliberal and gendered demands imposed upon subjects in the accountability space’ (De Coster and Zanoni, 2017: 25). The subject of accountability is one that ‘prioritizes the performance of a masculine rational and self-directive self’ (De Coster and Zanoni, 2017: 24; also see Warin, 2013; Walker and Roberts, 2018) – the terrain ordered by procedure, certainty and results is coded as masculine, and this coalescence enables particular male primary teacher identities to be narrated as favourable when compared to female teachers: I knew I could do a better job than her. I knew my practice was completely different to hers. And the way she did things was very different to the way that I would do it. I thought for that school I could do a better job. (Simon) But then, when you’re a bloke that just comes along and does the [knocks on table in a sequence motion suggesting following a procedure] … whether parents had sort of felt that things weren’t being done, I can’t sort of say for definite, but when parents are coming in to me and you’re having these meetings … things may have started to hurry along with the processes. (Graham) Well, there is a theme like ‘the Mum’s come in because she fancies you’, not cos you’re good at your job. We had a [pre-inspection review] and it was a really harsh lady and she was really slating some people … and I had everything tight; my folder was fucking brilliant. D’you know, I’d done everything I can for Ofsted [the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills – the UK government’s school inspectorate] – presented it, she loved it – [and she said] ‘best thing about the school’. [Then my colleagues say,] ‘Well, that’s cos she fancies you’ … You’re a mug. Just fuck off and say thank you, d’you know? … But then a bit of me after that died. I was, like, you’re fucking idiots. I don’t want anything to do with you … and you know why it’s done? It’s cos you’re a challenge. You’re a threat to their authority, blah, blah, blah.
This excerpt also shows an undercutting of the masculinist ‘rationality’ assumed in analyses of neoliberal self-making that offer ‘surgical articulation of ideal subjects’ (Winkler-Reid, 2017: 150). Charlie is livid, dejected, enraged and fucked off. These are affective ‘feelings of existence’, the ‘atmospheres that envelope and animate neoliberal reason as it emerges, circulates and changes’ and ‘that in enigmatic ways accompany the translation of neoliberal reason into policies and projects’ (Anderson, 2016: 736). Drawing on this idea, a febrile atmosphere is sensed in Charlie’s account of the divisive surveillance of this pre-inspection review, which generated micropolitical battles; the flush of competition burns bright as the terrors of performativity demand individual responses – and this can be seen to extinguish future opportunities for cooperation and collective engagement contra such policies and projects.
‘Just different values, I suppose’: trading up to join ‘leafy’ communities
It was common for the men to refer to their unique role within their schools, framed around understandings of the local community and a perception that certain gendered stereotypes permeated these communities. For example, Graham describes working in a ‘very deprived’ area with many ‘single-parent families’, and so ‘good male teachers’ are often employed to teach in older primary year groups to do all the ‘mopping up’ if things have ‘gone wrong in the previous years’. Similarly, although with fathers as the target, Simon suggests that because of the ‘socio-economics’ of the area, pupils do not know how to ‘take praise’ and ‘work with someone who isn’t shouting at them’; he notes that the way the local ‘men in particular talk to their children is very blunt, almost a shout’. Burn and Pratt-Adams (2015: 183) suggest that there is a ‘male role model script’ which tends to orientate male teachers’ identities around the idea of becoming ‘substitute patriarchal parents’, as saviours to pupils with absent fathers and single mothers. It is possible to see such a discourse in Graham’s and Simon’s views here, and this allows us to examine how this ‘script’ ties in with the idea of capital accumulation; the male primary school teacher is framed as uniquely placed to aid these pupils’ accumulation of social, cultural and intellectual capital when their parents are unable or unwilling. As Simon continues: At my last school … the parents had a lot more inter – ‘interest’ is the wrong word – had a lot more time for their children … The pressures on children were very different – are they going to pass their 11+ [grammar school entry examination]? What sort of secondary school are they going to go to? Have they done enough homework? That was their main interest … they valued the support that you gave. Here, it’s very much the children are our responsibilities … I mean, the area’s not great. Um, we’re sort of split on a half-council, half-private estate; the school feeds into that. Whereas at [my last place], very leafy, the school was an outstanding school, heavily oversubscribed. Yeah, just different values, I suppose.
The image of a ‘leafy’ area is prominent in Simon’s narrative, as it is utilised to signify a community that values the capitals accrued from education and lauds the return on this investment: I like the idea of [being a head teacher in] a small village school … I like that sort of old-fashioned idea of the school being the centre of a community, and teachers having that air of authority is wrong but, you know, being people who are looked up to and everyone in the community knowing [you], and everyone having the responsibility for the children in the community … So, like, being known in the pub, and down the shop; you know, everyone knowing each other … I like that sense of community. I mean, not – I love being in [this] school, I love – the social side, the relationships at school – but I’m more than happy just to go home and that be it.
This fetishization of leafy community life features in all the men’s career-aspiration stories. Graham feels that [SENCO work is not as difficult] if you work in a nice little country suburb somewhere – you might have one dyslexic child who’s very bright in other ways, you know … I’d probably want to be looking for somewhere more leafy where I could just teach, because I found … it was very much behaviour management took up a lot of your time. The line that sticks with me was my [school]mate Luke. He said, ‘Charlie, just play the fucking white man. Just go into school, get a fucking cushy job’, d’you know, ‘move to [a better area]’. And I always remember thinking, ‘Shit, that’s an option for me’, and I’d never really seen that as an option. As horrible as the words were, and he wasn’t meaning it in a mean way, what he was saying was: ‘I’m a six-foot-seven black guy with a criminal record, who’s 26, who lives in [a poor area where they grew up], who’s got no GCSEs. Don’t boohoo me down, you prick, go and sort it out’. And actually, seven years later, that’s what I’m doing really.
Conclusion
By using the concept of hierarchies of personhood, this article has examined a mechanism through which the neoliberal education environment interpellates teachers as competitive, individualistic and entrepreneurial. These iconographies of neoliberal teacherhood are played out relationally, such that differential degrees of value are attributed to colleagues and parents within school communities. Contemporary teacher identities are shaped as they negotiate an affective terrain requiring performances which accrue value to themselves and assess others in terms of facilitating their access to investable capitals within the field. A trio of self-care practices - self-projection, self-protection and self-separation - are proposed here as a way to examine these normative responses as they articulate with embodiments of value found in gendered, classed and raced discourses in current cultural and political fields.
The young, white, heterosexual, able-bodied male primary school teachers in this research are thereby able to narrate identities that prize self-improvement and effective performance which delivers results, and encompass aspirations of ‘trading up’ to work in better communities. The discussion of these narratives was enabled by a unique engagement with the theoretical framework offered by Skeggs, which invited a focus on how contemporary teacherhood/personhood is constructed through processes of revealing and legitimising one’s value via accruing and investing different forms of capital within a field. A key contribution, then, in terms of the study of male primary school teachers, is the conclusion that traditional and entrenched social hierarchies – notably, gender, but also sexuality, class and race here – intersect with technologies of neoliberal educational governance (for example, comparative-competitive school inspection preparations, managerialist foci on procedures and processes, or notions of aspiration and individual responsibility). As teachers in the contemporary educational field seek to generate and protect their stock of personal capital, this mesh of social and governmental hierarchies serves to legitimise a set of narratives and identities which amplify the privileges of those who already hold relative advantage.
Therefore, whilst some men in primary schools can more readily access resources to frame themselves as highly prized assets, this raises questions about those who do not ‘have access to the dominant symbolic circuits of personhood legitimation’ (Skeggs, 2011: 503). How can teachers who are drawn to become neoliberal ‘subjects of value’ come to understand and work with other modes of value – those which are not performative, acquisitional or self-propelling? What role can initial, and ongoing, teacher education programmes play in raising awareness of neoliberal teacherhood as self-projecting, self-protecting and self-separating, of the ways that some bodies can move more easily into and move more quickly within a teaching career, and in challenging the social hierarchies this supports? And how might this generate more collegial and cooperative relations within and across school communities?
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author would like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for the PhD studentship that enabled this project.