"Its Influence Taints All": Urban Mathematics Teachers Resisting Performativity through Engagement with the Past

Abstract

In England, globalisation and neoliberal political agendas have created an environment in which teachers are constantly measured and ranked and subjected to a discourse of marketisation, managerialism and performativity. The effect is to erode their sense of independence and moral authority and to challenge their individual and collective professional and personal identities. The need to understand the current policy environment, to step aside and look on critically, becomes more important even as it becomes more difficult. Many teachers are engaged in re-storying themselves against this audit culture. We argue that it is possible, through excavating the past, to offer current day teachers stories to support this process of re-envisaging what they are, might be and might become in their professional lives. Here we offer a response from a currently serving teacher to the experience of performativity and illustrate some ways in which she is able to mobilise such stories in her resistance to dominant, neo-liberal discourses.