As schools have become part of competitive free markets, pressures for teacher productivity have escalated. This chapter describes how critical speculative storying methodology can disrupt the anxious competition of teaching under profit-driven directives and offer educators an alternative spacetime to reimagine their lives. This chapter illustrates how Bianca used critical speculative storying in one qualitative study to uncover how six U.S.-based no-excuse charter school teachers experienced the fragmentation and acceleration of time into tasks, fragmentation of their identities, multiplication of timelines to manage, and impositions of surveillance. It then focuses on how Bianca reworked the experiences of one teacher, Aurelia, into a speculative fiction story featuring her as a cyborg challenging administrators’ manipulations. Restorying raised Aurelia’s sense of agency and desire to resist dehumanizing work demands. Critical speculative storying can interrupt the status quo of productivity by forging spacetimes where teachers can critically reflect, attune to their agency, and heal.

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Critical Speculative Storying: Returning Time and Agency to Teachers in Neoliberal Workplaces

  • Bianca Licata,
  • Nancy Lesko

摘要

As schools have become part of competitive free markets, pressures for teacher productivity have escalated. This chapter describes how critical speculative storying methodology can disrupt the anxious competition of teaching under profit-driven directives and offer educators an alternative spacetime to reimagine their lives. This chapter illustrates how Bianca used critical speculative storying in one qualitative study to uncover how six U.S.-based no-excuse charter school teachers experienced the fragmentation and acceleration of time into tasks, fragmentation of their identities, multiplication of timelines to manage, and impositions of surveillance. It then focuses on how Bianca reworked the experiences of one teacher, Aurelia, into a speculative fiction story featuring her as a cyborg challenging administrators’ manipulations. Restorying raised Aurelia’s sense of agency and desire to resist dehumanizing work demands. Critical speculative storying can interrupt the status quo of productivity by forging spacetimes where teachers can critically reflect, attune to their agency, and heal.