Keeping Teachers Off Balance: Neoliberalism and Fragmented Subjectivity in Everyday Classroom Life

More than merely policy, neoliberalism shapes how teachers relate to their students and classrooms. This article seeks to make visible how neoliberalism functions to form and deform teacher’s subjectivities (and in turn their pedagogical practices) through an analysis of the experiences of two teachers within an accountability-constrained elementary school. Using data generated within an ethnographically-informed case study, we draw on discourse analytic and post-qualitative methodologies, in conversation with critical theorizing of neoliberalism, to examine how teachers’ subjectivities were fractured as they worked to simultaneously meet the demands of neoliberal accountability and the humanizing aims of their pedagogical philosophies. We describe three archetypes—the neoliberal pragmatist, the student advocate, and the humanizing pedagogue—constructed to represent the varied approaches taken by teachers in their attempts to reconcile these conflicting aims. Then, through two vignettes of classroom practice, we illustrate how neoliberal logics and policies compelled these teachers to balance competing subjectivities, resulting in those teachers enacting extensive test preparation that contradicted their pedagogical philosophies. Through this analysis, we argue that fragmentation of teachers’ subjectivities within neoliberalism functions to effectively keep teachers off balance in their attempts to both respond to and resist neoliberal educational reforms, resulting in a maintenance of the neoliberal order.