Elizabeth Pittard

Paper presented April, 2014 at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
This paper analyzes the (im)possibilities of performing the good enough teacher within the current neoliberal educational landscape. Through a narrative of her own teaching experiences, the author discusses how exposure to and understanding of poststructuralism proved to be transformative in her daily life and served to influence her pedagogy as a classroom teacher. This paper contributes to the literature in three ways: It (1) responds to the critique of poststructuralism as inaccessible and inapplicable to daily life, (2) argues that teacher educators provide pre-service and practicing teachers with opportunities to deconstruct ways they are produced in their daily lives, and (3) disrupts the privileging of practice over theory so pervasive in teacher education.

Over the past several years, an increasing number of feminist scholars have been theorizing what thinking data with Deleuze might look like (e.g. Alverman, 2000; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Jackson, 2012; St. Pierre, 2001; Taguchi, 2012). At the same time, studies investigating the impacts of neoliberalism on education have proliferated (e.g. Apple, Ball, 2012; Hursh, 2005; McLaren, 2007). However, these studies often view neoliberalism as a hegemonic structure impacting policy and ideology. Few studies exist that investigate the impacts of neoliberalism on the lives of teachers, and how teachers are actively resisting these structures. In this paper, I discuss the possibilities of becoming-teacher within neoliberal discourses and theorize how thinking data with Deleuze might bring micro-level understandings of resistance into conversation with macro-level seemingly hegemonic neoliberal educational structures.

Paper presented October, 2014 at the annual Bergamo Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice, Dayton, Ohio.
In this paper, the author uses new materialist feminist theory to investigate how women elementary school teachers intra-act (Barad, 2007) with the social media site, Pinterest for the broader aim of using data from interviews, news media outlets, and Pinterest itself to inform educational researchers about broader issues of gender, post-feminism and neoliberalism.

Paper presented April, 2013 at the bi-annual Gender and Education Association Conference, London, England.
In this feminist textual analysis (Baxter, 2003; Prior, 2003), I contrast the way teachers have been represented as agents in the reproduction of systematic inequities in the literature of critical pedagogy with their representation as change agents in recent American educational policy in order to argue that the overwhelmingly female teaching force described in both instances has been positioned simultaneously in this period of history as the cause of the reproduction of inequality and as the key to successfully combating inequities. My aim in this analysis is to consider the possibilities and constraints of feminist responses to this dual and contradictory positioning. Finally, in an attempt to reframe the work of teachers in combating inequality, I propose that teachers and teacher educators work both within and against newly theorized ways of enacting critical pedagogy (Anyon, 2011; Pacheco & Velez, 2012) to produce a more nuanced understanding of the work of teachers so that we might begin to construct a counter-narrative to postulations often inherent in the literature of critical pedagogy and in the assumptions intrinsic in educational reforms.

Paper presented April, 2013 at the bi-annual Gender and Education Association Conference, London, England.
In this paper, I draw upon Davies’ (Davies, Flemmen, Gannon, Laws, & Watson, 2002; Davies, 2005; Davies, Browne, Gannon, Honan, & Somerville, 2005; Davies, Browne, Gannon, Hopkins, McCann, Wihlborg, 2006; Davies & Saltmarsh, 2007) theories of the (im)possibility of female and neoliberal subjectivities to examine the ways in which a highly regarded professional development conference for educators in the American South can be read as a neoliberal assault on women teachers.  Using printed and digital conference resources and my own experiences of the event as data, and relying on Foucault’s concept of governmentality for analysis, I consider the marketization of teaching that produces the primarily female elementary teaching corps as subjects of human capital.  Furthermore, I address the new “grid of intelligibility” (Foucault, 1990) made available to me through feminist and poststructural analysis of my experiences as a teacher and conference participant. Finally, I describe how this reframing of my experiences opened up possibilities of resistance through pedagogical shifts played out in my teacher education class of college seniors.

Paper presented October, 2012 at the annual Bergamo Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice, Dayton, Ohio.
This paper analyzes the possibilities of performing the good enough teacher within today’s neoliberal educational policy initiatives. Through a narrative of her own teaching experiences, the author discusses what describes as a “new ability to see” using a poststructural feminist perspective, and how that serves to influence her pedagogy moving from classroom teacher to teacher educator. Finally, the paper offers conceptual and pedagogical implications for the doing of teacher education.

Paper presented October, 2013 at the annual Bergamo Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice, Dayton, Ohio.
Based on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) conception of the rhizome, rhizoanalysis does not seek to find meaning but rather seeks to investigate how things function. In this paper, the author argues that rhizoanalysis can be a useful and fruitful way to investigate the impacts of neoliberalism on the lives of teachers.

This post-qualitative research analyzes the spatialized practices of young people within a working-class community and how those guided the opening and facilitating of a local community center. Seeing place-making as a social and political act, the authors were inspired by Heath's classic study and argument that children's education might be better served if educators understood and built on their community-based language practices. Writing through theories of new materialism, spatiality, and children's geog-raphies, we build an argument for spatial justice by considering the ways educational scholars and educators might understand and build on child-ren's community-based spatial practices.

In this paper, I share data from a year-long study investigating the manifestations of neo-liberalism in the working lives of five women elementary school teachers in the United States. I discuss how gendered discourses of neo-liberalism construct what is understood as possible in the material-discursive production of the women’s subjectivities concerning a surprising market created by teachers for teachers that is largely promoted through the social media site, Pinterest©: Teachers Pay Teachers©. Utilising new materialist feminist theory [Braidotti, R. 2000. “Teratologies.” In Deleuze and Feminist Theory, edited by I. Buchanan, and C. Colebrook, 156–172. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; Dolphijn, R., and I. van der Tuin. 2012. New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press], I analyse how the teachers intra-act [Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Half Way: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] with curricular material actants [Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] that have the capacity to alter the course of events in women’s work and lives. I argue that these material actants further entangle the material-discursive, virtual-real production of subjectivity and influence women teachers in variegated but particularly gendered ways that ultimately reinforce emerging theories around the gendered nature of neo-liberal subjectivity [Gill, R. 2008. “Culture and Subjectivity in Neoliberal and Postfeminist Times.” Subjectivity 25 (1): 432–445. doi:10.1057/sub.2008.28; Walkerdine, V. 2003. “Reclassifying Upward Mobility: Femininity and the Neo-liberal Subject.” Gender and Education 15: 237–248. doi:10.1080/09540250303864].

In this post-structural feminist analysis, I review recent literature focusing on critical pedagogy to analyse the ways teachers are discursively produced within the sampled literature to ask: who does critical pedagogy think you are? Additionally, I extend earlier post-structural feminist critiques of critical pedagogy and underlying assumptions about power and subjectivity. In this sample of articles, teachers were more likely to be positioned as unable to engage in critical pedagogy than they were to be positioned as able to engage critical pedagogy. Given these findings, I argue that critical pedagogues reconsider how teachers are discursively produced in research articles and insist on a more nuanced understanding of teacher education students.