Academics anonymous: study group methodology as an antidote to performativity

Rawlings Smith, Emma, Elton-Chalcraft, Sally ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3064-7249 , Clarke, Matthew, Heimans, Stephen, Robertson, Ann and Ocriciano, Michelle (2024) Academics anonymous: study group methodology as an antidote to performativity. In: TEAN (Teacher Education Advancement Network) Conference 2024, 22-23 May 2024, Manchester, UK. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Education and teacher education worldwide has been increasingly subjected to the instrumentalised and competitive pressures of performativity and accountability, which are monitored and maintained by quantitative technologies of individuation, measurement and comparison (Ellis, 2023). Consequentially, there has been a growing sense of professional demoralisation, reflected in a loss of touch with the moral purposes of teaching (Santoro, 2018), and subsequent alienation among teachers and teacher educators, characterised by feelings of "indifference, instrumentalisation, reification, absurdity, artificiality, isolation, meaninglessness, [and] impotence" (Jaeggi, 2014, p. 5).

We report on our work as members of an international teacher education research collective (ITERC) and discuss how a reading group set up to explore Biesta’s (2021) World-centred Education has provided us with an antidote to the alienation of being an academic in today’s narrow world of higher education, via a collaborative space to do enjoyable scholarly work while thinking ‘internationally’. Our reading group was a self-selected collective of scholars working in multiple countries who met weekly online to discuss a chapter in Biesta’s book. This practice held members to account for reading the key text and supported individuals to think deeply and develop their scholarly knowledge on the purposes of education. Yet, perhaps paradoxically, and in an attempt to enact a study group methodology, there is no intended outcome from this activity. A study group intentionally resists our contemporary universities’ capture by capitals logics of commodification - antagonistic to the productivist, instrumentalization of what we might do together. A study group is a ‘we’ without entry requirements - anyone can be a part of a study group - you do not need to be an academic or ‘in’ a university. A study group is committed to ‘free use’ (Lewis, 2020) subverting university infrastructures for work with no necessary ends.

In the study group, we have glimpsed the possibilities for a fragile, yet tangible sense of solidarity - a tentative unfolding collective work ‘above’ the nation state. We feel to be bundling trajectories (Massey, 2005) together while seeing the tangents of these as possible lines of flight forming spatio-temporalities of our own unplanned design. What has emerged is a nascent desire to become involved in and create an internationalising scholarly practice. The other Biesta reading group papers detail the impact of critical, diffractive analysis of our practice encompassing ITERC’s broader concerns such as alienation, non-hierarchical teacher education, pedagogies of care (collectivist/ community) and counter-performativity.

Key References:
Biesta, G. (2021). World centred education: A view for the present. London: Routledge.
Ellis, V. (2023). Teacher education crisis: The state, the market and the universities in England. London: Bloomsbury.
Jaeggi, R. (2014). Alienation (Trans. F. Neuhouser & A E Smith). New York: Columbia University Press.
Lewis, T.E. (2020). Profaning the University Apparatus: A Plea for Study Groups. In: Hodgson, N., Vlieghe, J., Zamojski, P. (eds) Post-critical Perspectives on Higher Education. Debating Higher Education: Philosophical Perspectives, vol 3. Springer, Cham.
Massey, D. (2005). For Space. London: Sage.
Santoro, D. A. (2018). Demoralized: Why teachers leave the profession they love and how they can stay. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Departments:	Institute of Education > Primary PGCE Learning Education and Development (LED)
Additional Information:	Presentation 60 at this conference.
Depositing User:	Anna Lupton
Date Deposited:	21 Jun 2024 11:01
Last Modified:	21 Jun 2024 11:15
URI:	https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/7755

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