Abstract
A teacher’s ability to feel successful – some might even say good – in today’s education system relies on a particular conception of academic success. We argue neoliberalism, as it operates in education, is a normalized trauma enfolded in the individual and collective bodies of women teachers producing overwhelming feelings of never being good enough while also not feeling entitled to do what is right – in the moment – for the children they teach. But this is not new; women have historically been positioned as others through whom educational directives should flow without question. Using the lived experience of the first author, teaching in the south-eastern United States, we describe some of the tolls neoliberalism has on the physical and emotional well-being of the woman teacher body in the search of being good enough. We argue it is time for teacher education to become a feminist project where women have access to the intellectual and analytical tools to make sense of what is being done to them and to give testimony and be a critical witness of these everyday traumas that are being inflicted upon them, their students and others collectively in schools.
Good enough
She’s under the table again, almost too big for the small space.
Tears fall and sobs shake her tight body.
I 1 crawl on hands and knees to her, not sure what to do and not sure what has led her here. I decide to just sit in this moment with her, in the pain, to let it all flow out until she is ready to speak.
She grasps my hand in desperation then we crawl out from the table together, and she moves her head into my lap. She cries and I cry with her, feeling her pain even though I am unaware of the cause.
The rest of the class has returned their focus to math sheets and centers, having lost interest in us and I spend the rest of the time devoted to ‘math’ with half of my body under a table whispering in a child’s ear that she is loved.
She is enough.
While it seems that what we call ‘teaching’ has flown out the window, I know I am doing something right and in this moment I feel purpose.
I also feel loved. I am enough.
Looking to be good enough in neoliberal trauma
In Elizabeth Dutro’s book, The vulnerable heart of literacy: Centering trauma as powerful pedagogy (2019), she critiques the notion that trauma is a one-time event or an experience that is limited to people who are marginalized in a society while also reasserting that systemic racism, classism and other oppressive societal forces traumatize those who are persistently othered. The latter point is a crucial one to consider given the recent popularity of ‘trauma-based’ approaches to teaching that tend to position Black and brown children and children with working-class and poor families as deficient, or traumatized, in their out-of-school lives. Dutro would argue that practices and pedagogies inside schools traumatize already marginalized children, youth and adults. Any ‘trauma-informed’ orientation towards teaching that does not interrogate the violent nature of racism and classism, for example, simply reproduces a deficit perspective of children who are furthest from social and educational justice. In sharp contrast, Dutro shows through moving prose and heart-wrenching narratives, the visceral effects of giving testimony to trauma and being a critical witness to trauma. She demonstrates time and again how critical witnessing through curriculum-facilitated and interpersonal relationships gives space for deep connection and healing in the classroom when children and teachers are with one another in a reciprocal relationship of testimony and witness.
We find Dutro’s feminist-oriented work helpful for making sense of Kali’s experience under the table with a child giving testimony to…something and her responding as a critical witness. Two bodies joined together in a pain that is unspeakable by a child, but also felt by the adult who is beside her holding her hand, who unknowingly finds a way towards being good enough, and loved, in the act of witnessing.
Jones and Spector’s (2017) work, drawing from feminist posthumanism and affect theory is also helpful for us, specifically their use of feminist scholar Lauren Berlant’s ‘…understanding that trauma is diffused throughout the ordinariness of living’ (p. 302). We can see, hear and feel the enfolded traumas in Kali’s responses to this small child under the table. As a teacher, she carries pain and sorrow too, and more is inflicted upon her each day through the ‘ordinariness’ of the neoliberal assault on women teacher bodies in the K-12 classroom every day.
It is no surprise that Kali found a moment of refuge and healing halfway under that table with her student during math time as they cried together. Beyond the shelter of the table was the unbearable weight of the everyday traumas of pressures to ignore children’s social, emotional and bodied needs and desires in service of test preparation and test scores. We argue in this paper that neoliberalism, as it operates in education and schools, is an everyday, ordinary trauma that is enfolded in the individual and collective bodies of women teachers producing overwhelming feelings of never being good enough while also not feeling entitled to do what is right – in the moment – for the children they teach. We believe that teacher education can play a role in educating future and practicing teachers about the forces of neoliberalism and at least offer intellectual and analytical tools for women teachers to make sense of what is happening to them in neoliberal institutions. This does not mean the traumas of neoliberalism would go away, but we do believe that understanding the systems of everyday traumas can offer power to teachers and potential openings for being and doing differently.
To that end, we argue that ‘incorporating a feminist critique of the aspirational idea of being the good – and good enough – teacher in historical and contemporary contexts into teacher education programs and coursework is an important part of educating future and practicing teachers.’
Everyday traumas of neoliberalism and the (never) good enough teacher
Teachers are constantly striving to be good enough in a space not originally created for them. As Elizabeth Pittard writes in her work on neoliberalism and women teachers’ working lives, ‘from the very beginning, women teachers were inserted into the place men once occupied – not because they were believed to be better qualified for the job by way of their education or intelligence, but because of their inexpensive and [presumed] inherent mothering abilities’ (2015, p.36). The takeover of schools by neoliberal corporate policies and practices over the last 20 years (e.g. Klein, 2007; Ravitch, 2013; Schmeichel et al., 2017) including the mandatory use of standardized testing has created a workplace that further diminishes women’s autonomy and professionalism in the classroom. These mandates, rooted in high-stakes testing practices, create hard-and-fast expectations of teachers that ironically keep shifting and changing and sedimenting into new targets for success (Pittard, 2015), creating anxious working conditions where teachers are constantly thinking about the tests and other mandates rather than being with the students in front of them.
As teachers go through their day, they may not even realize this is happening.
I know I was unaware of these forces pulling me through my days. Although, I could clearly identify the tension in my body between my to-do list and my desire to stop everything and just be with my students. But when the work of education gets forced through neoliberal practices or what some call a ‘business model’ (e.g. Ravitch, 2013), the purpose of education not only gets distorted into discourses of efficiency, data and commodities, but the trauma of that neoliberal distortion gets enfolded into teacher bodies (e.g. Crawford-Garrett et al., 2017).
The push for testing within the US was swept in with the George W. Bush administration and passing of No Child Left Behind, a law that declared ‘all states must test every child annually in grades 3 through 8 in reading’ (Ravitch, 2013: 11). NCLB opened the door for entrepreneurial opportunities within the education sector (e.g. Giroux, 2012; Karp, 2019; Ravitch, 2013). Private companies capitalized on the opportunity – selling tests, curriculum, professional development, and testing equipment. ‘Race to the Top’ – the education policy under the Barack Obama presidency – followed, bringing forth Common Core State Standards, expansion of charter schools, evaluation of teachers based off of student test scores, evaluation of schools and districts based on test scores and merit pay increases for teachers tied to their students’ test scores. Both bills (No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top) were built upon the neoliberal ideas that surveillance, evaluation and competition would create positive education reform – that the quality of schools, teachers and students equate to that of a test score (Ravitch, 2013). These reforms and their objectives frame the ‘business model’ that now entangles our school system.
This business model taken up so widely in education is intertwined with neoliberal capitalism including what is called the capitalist mode of production (Marx, 1990). This idea of school as a business also produces the idea that there must be a product, or something that is of value that is produced, and in the capitalism of schools that has become test scores. 2 Thus, the teacher in this education-as-business scenario must be conceived of as a worker whose labour must produce the valuable test scores, but of course they cannot even do that themselves since they are not the ones who take the tests. Rather, the teachers’ job becomes the production of students who produce good test scores. Nevermind that this scenario positions students as the unpaid workers who are producing the scores that are used to reward or punish teachers and schools (see Jones, 2012) and that the tests are inherently biased (specifically racist and classist), invalid, unnecessary for assessment and not an accurate or fair representation of student learning or what is important in education (e.g. Kohn, 2007; Neill, 2009).
In order to be deemed successful in this business model, teachers are typically expected to march through the curriculum in an efficient manner to hit all the standards that might be addressed on the test. They must effectively teach the curriculum and standards so that students are prepared to take the test and then produce the scores that are of value. Thus, the obsession with test scores have limited teacher autonomy and professional decision-making (Giroux, 2012; Pulsford, 2019), teacher satisfaction (Goldstein, 2014), diminished social and emotional attention in the classroom (Sondel, 2015) and a narrowed curriculum (Kumashiro, 2012). Thus, the production of test scores in this business model becomes a high-priced endeavour for the prized commodity, driving teachers to trade in their empathy, creativity, professionalism and innovation for scripted curriculum and more recently, even spend their own money on pre-made lessons/activities from sources such as TeachersPayTeachers (2020) as critiqued in the work of Pittard (2016).
All of this does not only narrow the conception of education and experiences of students, but it also inflicts everyday traumas on the teacher’s body as she enfolds the neoliberal ideas of value and begins to judge herself and shape her actions through the lens of the business model saturating her workplace: the successful production of the commodity.
She begins to evaluate whether she is good enough, defined by Pittard (2015) as a way: to emphasize that even though discourses of neoliberalism underscore post-feminist ideals of equality and meritocracy, the systematically embedded discourses that no woman is ever smart enough, pretty enough, successful enough, or (insert a word of your choice here) enough to be considered good enough, much less great, remains (p. 18).
Capitalism (and thus, business models for education) always centres competition and women have long been positioned to be in competition with one another (to be smarter, prettier, thinner, whiter, e.g. Jones and Hughes-Decatur, 2012). Neoliberal capitalism intensifies that competition forcing the rules and goals of the competition to keep moving, and thus women are forced to move and evolve with it in the pursuit of being perceived by others (typically, but not always, cisgender men administrators and policy makers) as good enough. Even if teachers’ students meet their goals, achieve high scores and pass the test, we – their teachers – will never be good enough. Neoliberal capitalism depends on our loss to survive. It is the competitive fight to survive that keeps the system intact, dehumanizing both teachers and students in the process.
We believe that Pittard’s work on teachers’ striving and failures to be good enough is the embodiment of the everyday traumas of neoliberalism in the workplace.
In this next section, we present a personal experience of Kali’s that depicts a feeling absent of good enough; a feeling that Hughes-Decatur (2011) calls not-enoughness that was inflicted through the implementation of standardized testing in her classroom. The images described through this story will portray some of the everyday traumas of neoliberal policies like standardized testing and its oppressive apparatus enfolded by the teacher body. We argue that capitalistic and neoliberal discourses create the not-good enough teacher and compare that to a moment in a classroom where the teacher did feel good enough. Finally, we will discuss the implications for re-defining enoughness in the classroom, focusing on the ordinariness of traumas inflicted on the teacher body.
Not good enough: A lived experience
The grade level team in my school decided that we would reward students for meeting their Measure of Academic Progress testing goals by letting them pin gold stars to a poster. The dread weighed me down as I pictured all my students staring up at the visual reminder of who made it, who we should declare to be good enough.
I was expecting all the emotions I would feel while watching my students compete against themselves and each other. The pit deep in my stomach filling with frustration, disgust and sadness. Here I was giving in. This was supposed to motivate students, and thus provide me, the teacher, with better test results, allowing administration and parents – and let’s be honest anyone else who has access to my scores – to judge my abilities as a teacher based on my students’ success on this particular test.
After testing was over and the posters were placed, I remember walking into my teammate’s room. Her poster was placed front and centre: glittery, gold stars filling up every inch of space.
I immediately started counting in my head… 1, 2, 3…stop this… 8, 9, 10…
this is doing nothing for you… 12, 13, 14…
this is not a competition… 15, 16, 17!
Seventeen of her students met their goals.
I was frozen. Having forgotten the reason I even walked into her classroom, I turned back around and headed into my own, shutting the door.
My eyes slowly focused on my own lacklustre poster. Tiny gold stars spread out over it, inching to fill up the voided space.
I didn’t have to count. I already knew how many were there.
11
Barely fifty percent of my class had met their goals, and the poster was right there to remind me of that fact. 11.
Tears poured out of me, and with every sob, every choke, every gasp for air I could hear the whisper, ‘she’s better, she’s more, she’s enough.’
Competition is what brought me to that devastating moment.
Competition between students and teachers
Competition that tells us we can never truly win, that we will never truly be enough. The bar will keep moving, and we will have to keep reaching. What I could not yet understand in that dark moment in my classroom is how we all collectively got to that place. How did this kind of competition arise within classrooms and schools? The struggle to be the best – or at least to be good enough – was slowly destroying my sense of self.
How neoliberal discourses create the not good enough teacher
Standardized tests quickly became a non-negotiable in the American classroom after the passing of No Child Left Behind (Karp, 2012, 2019; Miner, 2004/2005; Rubalcava, 2004). Karp (2019) argues, ‘State and national policymakers used the inequalities reflected in the test results to create a narrative of failure that undermined support for public education and drove educational policy away from equity concerns and toward punishment and privatization’ (p.32). When test scores are the commodity being produced, and ‘moments are the element of profits’ (Marx, 1990: 352), teachers must use every possible ‘moment’ to labour away, teaching the specific skills that have the potential for increasing test scores. Test scores, like money, are then used to reward and punish both teachers and students in hopes of ‘motivating’ them towards greater achievement.
Students from kindergarten to 12th grade are subjected to high-stakes tests that define their academic achievement and progression. These tests differ from other formative assessments teachers use within the classroom. Standardized tests are created by outside individuals and are given to a wide band of students throughout the county, state or country. Scores from these tests measure performance comparatively, assessing one student’s performance in comparison to another. While it is important, we acknowledge the impacts tests such as these have on students, we also must turn our eyes on teachers, like that of the first-author, who are perpetuating the system as they search to feel good-enough in a capitalistic neoliberal society (Pittard, 2015).
Through the rise of privatization, schools have handed their money over to big corporations that provide commodities such as curriculum, benchmark tests and technology. In this capitalistic endeavour, education has become an open market, where companies exploit national and state testing mandates by selling products that further push the testing initiative (e.g. Ravitch, 2013). This opening of public education as a ‘market’ for free enterprise is a textbook example of the neoliberal agenda spelled out by many including David Harvey (2005): private corporations and interests can gain access to public tax dollars and wield their power to influence what happens in the public sphere of education. But many still argue that education is funded by public money and should reflect the common well-being and interests of the public at large without being influenced or shaped by corporate interests. When these two very different ways of operating converge in one place – here, in public education – it not only creates conflict around issues of money and value but it also creates a struggle around what the objective of public education should be to begin with (e.g. Hall and Pulsford, 2019).
In a neoliberal system, the teacher becomes a producer of ‘human capital’, and thus her level of production must be measurable. We observe this through the substantial amount of money school districts spend on tests, curriculum that support tests and training teachers to teach curriculum that support tests (Karp, 2019; Ravitch, 2013). This shows that it is not just the teacher’s labour that makes the commodity (standardized test scores) valuable, but also all the labour that is contained in the instruments of teaching, including purchased curriculum, technology and materials (e.g. Marx, 1990: 432). Thus, when test scores become the commodity we are producing, buying and selling, we lose sight of the humans involved in the process. As schools and districts allocate a significant portion of their budgets in support of the testing system, they simultaneously trade-in teacher autonomy, morphing both teachers and students into mere instruments of producing value for the system.
This metamorphosis dehumanizes both teachers and students (Pittard, 2015) – their identity seen in relation to their test score(s) – urging both teachers and students to believe success is possible through the achievement of high scores. Valerie Walkerdine (2003), a feminist scholar who writes about the impact of neoliberalism on human subjectivity, describes how ‘one way in which governments can keep order is to make citizens responsible for their own self-regulation by producing discourses in which success as a constantly changing successful entrepreneur of oneself is possible’ (p. 241). Thus, it is assumed to be solely the teacher’s responsibility to produce students who produce acceptable tests scores, excluding all factors that potentially effect students’ performance (Kumashiro, 2012). Through this narrative, the teacher becomes an ‘entrepreneur of oneself,’ consistently learning new curriculum, technology and strategies, in hopes it will produce higher achieving students – consistently striving to be good enough.
We argue that the constant re-working of one’s self for standardized test achievement is not only demeaning and diminishing of individual teachers and the teaching profession as a whole, but it also positions the teacher to focus on the future as a place where her value will finally be confirmed (even when that confirmation is fleeting). This creates a dilemma for teachers: How can I feel good enough as a teacher when my value is measured by the outcome of a future test rather than my present interactions with my students?
The next section will zoom in on a moment where Kali felt good enough in her classroom. It will describe how this feeling developed within a space where there was love and connection and how both the child and Kali felt enough in a moment of being present with each other.
Good enough: A lived experience
She’s under the table again. I’m not sure what led to this moment — her hiding, my confusion.
I’m on the carpet working with a small group of girls on today’s math problems. We’re spread out, bellies on the floor, whiteboards in front of us. I’m desperately trying to keep the five of us on the same page all while making sure everyone feels heard, seen, loved, supported, and enough in this space. While not all these students have the skills needed to do the kind of math problems we are working on, I’m still expected to guide them through it. I can feel the frustration puffing out of their small bodies, wanting to feel successful. I try to push it in, to let them know that we will make it there, but I’m losing them.
One by one they fall off.
Two of the students manage to finish, having scrambled through the worksheet together. They move off the carpet and head to their desired math station. I’m left now with three girls who are all want my attention and who are all working on different problems.
I suggest we work as a group to help the student who is farthest behind.
They smile and nod their heads.
Thinking I made a good decision we continue on. Two minutes in and the fight for answers, rolling on the floor, and yelling over one another ignites within the space. As I try to rectify the situation my attention turns to two of the students and their argument. As the fire dissipates, I notice that the other girl has left the carpet. I search the room in panic, but it’s the sobbing that leads my eyes to her hiding spot.
She’s under the table again, almost too big for the space. Tears fall and sobs shake her tight body. I crawl on hands and knees to her. Not sure what to do. Not sure what has led her here. I decide to just sit in this moment with her, in the pain. To let it all flow out until she is ready to speak. I reach and she grasps my hand in desperation. We crawl out from the table together, and she moves her head into my lap. In this moment I let her cry and I cry with her, feeling her pain even though I am unaware of the cause. The rest of the class has returned their focus to math sheets and centres, having lost interest in our interactions. I spend the rest of math with half my body under a table whispering in a child’s ear that she is loved.
She is enough.
While it might seem that in this moment my “teaching” has flown out the window I know I am doing something right. In this moment I feel purpose, even love, and yes enoughness.
The awareness of my own body, my emotions, and my physical presence with this child has produced something that could never be commodified. While I may not be “teaching,” learning is taking place: learning to feel, to express, to be, to connect, to give testimony to pain, and to be a critical witness in return. (e.g. Dutro, 2019)
Giving testimony and being witness to bodily presence and enough-ness: A call for a feminist project in teacher education
Bodies are consistently being disciplined within schools – stay in your spot, do not talk, walk in a straight line, use this curriculum, fill in these bubbles, read these instructions, say this not that – in a way that reinforces neoliberal, white-supremacist, patriarchal discourses (Foucault, 1995; hooks, 2008; Hughes-Decatur, 2011; Jones, 2010). These are the harmful traumas diffused in the everyday experiences and enfolded into the bodies of students and teachers that intensify with the increased use of neoliberal ideas in education. We stand with Dutro (2019) in arguing for the power – and healing – in giving testimony to and being a critical witness of these everyday traumas that are being inflicted upon us collectively in schools. Kali’s classroom narratives illuminate moments when a student and teacher experienced the outpouring of such traumas – and the reciprocal healing – on their bodies as they hid beneath a table in the classroom and cried. We do not mean that Kali and this child were healed, but rather that in their shared testimony and witnessing, they can be changed in some way for the better. In those moments, all the neoliberal tools made for controlling them were held at bay and they did something different.
To do – and be – something different in classrooms where standardized testing has become all-encompassing, can be really difficult. When we do recognize our bodies in the present moment and in relation to others, it is hard to know how to feel. We might want to sit in the present, soaking in the feeling of connectedness, but this feeling can be paralleled with a rush of discomfort that urges us to accelerate the moment. It whisks us back to a different reality that says we should be teaching something that ‘matters’ as defined through neoliberal discourses and standards-based curriculum. These dominant discourses that tell us that this is not an efficient or effective use of our time are not just words and ideas, they have a material affect on our bodies.
Hughes-Decatur (2011), a feminist education scholar who writes about young adolescent girls, undergraduate teacher education students, and teachers tells us, ‘all bodies in education have been historically narrativised as a “problem” or a “sin” rather than a “treasure”’ (p. 86). They are ignored, disciplined and told they need to be refashioned into someone new (e.g. Walkerdine, 2003). All the while, they are expected to maintain order and consume information in hopes they can regurgitate it later. Thus, taking the focus away from bodily presence and placing on the future success and production of the individual. But, what would it look like to change this narrative? And how do we hold on to those moments where we are present, and we do feel enough?
In this paper, we have attempted to use one teacher’s classroom narratives to expose how neoliberalism allows businesses and the ‘business model’ to consume education, diffusing the everyday traumas of neoliberalism throughout the classroom and enfolded into teachers’ (and students’) bodies.
Standardized testing is just one neoliberal tool in schools, used to measure a particular kind of human capital production. This dehumanizing process that teachers are often unknowingly a victim of and even replicate, creates tension within the body that is lived through a teacher’s inner world where she is in constant negotiation with herself and the world around her about if she is good enough, whether she can ever be good enough, and what being good enough even means to her personally when the system sets a target that requires an unethical push towards violent dehumanization.
The struggle against the everyday traumas of neoliberalism on women teachers’ bodies – the active rehumanizing of the teaching profession which is dominated by women – is a feminist project worth all of our efforts in 2021 and beyond. Feminist scholars are the ones who have given us the theory and the language to make sense of women teachers’ bodies in their work as educators, and they are also the ones who offer us a way out of the bind. Sometimes the way out of that bind might be in moment-to-moment lived experiences in the classroom with children where teachers can be present in their moments’ of enough-ness, as teachers, like Kali, engage in critical witnessing and testimony to resist neoliberal discourses within their most intimate working spaces. Perhaps practicing that bodily awareness and being present in difficult moments of resistance can offer another way out of this neoliberal bind and give teachers courage to resist neoliberalism beyond their classrooms to include their schools, districts and other spaces too.
But this is not only an individual struggle of each woman teacher’s body in the classroom; it must be seen as one that is systemically a part of what we call Teacher Education. More than 100,000 students – largely women – graduate from universities with an education degree every year. Teacher education can play a role in reproducing the everyday traumas of neoliberalism in teacher candidates (e.g. Jones and Woglom, 2013), or they can be intentional in their design of coursework and experiences and in their curriculum and pedagogy to openly confront neoliberal traumas that are already at work on their (mostly) women students and give those students access to theoretical and analytical tools to push back against dehumanizing forces and aim to be different in the world and in the classroom (e.g. Jones and Woglom, 2016).
Taguchi (2010) states that, ‘If practice is produced and emerges through all of us collectively thinking, talking and doing it into existence, we might also be able to collectively re-think, re-talk and re-do practice differently’ (p. 28). Thus, through a collective re-imagining of teacher education – a process that interrogates the neoliberal trauma inflicted upon women teacher bodies – we can better prepare women to enter classroom spaces. We can provide them with an understanding and awareness that allows them to feel, act, speak and collectively change the discourses of our educational spaces.
We have all been under the metaphorical table, both as student and teacher, with our bodies convulsing in response to traumas we do not even always understand because they are so intertwined with our everyday experiences. Many teachers are there right now, and too often they are alone in their feelings of failure or not-enoughness, internalizing the neoliberal lies that have been told to them both implicitly and explicitly. We can all – teachers, teacher educators and teacher education students – choose to do something different. We can stop what we are doing, reach under the table with our hands, be a witness to testimonies and explicitly work against neoliberalism and for the rehumanization of education for teachers, students and this thing we call education.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
