Since the 1990s, numerous teachers have suffered different kinds of negative emotional experiences like stress, depression, and burnout in the neoliberal context of education across the globe. A typical sociological explanation is that teachers are technically disempowered by the entry of neoliberalism into the institutional environment of education leading to inabilities to exercise control over their labor process in teaching. However, this presentation will suggest that technical disempowerment is only one dimension of teacher disempowerment resulted from neoliberal education environments. Another important but overlooked dimension is what I call ideological disempowerment, which is the deprivation of power to identify the instructional meanings of teachers’ work. The presentation will illustrate the ideological disempowerment that stems from neoliberalism’s tendency to ideologically value the managerial purposes of teachers’ work over its instructional purposes. This leads teachers to break away from ‘non-instructional work’ and devote themselves only to work that appears to be directly related to teaching. Accordingly, ideologically disempowered teachers may have a narrowed concept of teaching, resulting in them being discouraged from performing various tasks that are likely to be conductive to the whole-person growth of students. By explaining neoliberalism in both technical and ideological terms, this presentation would like to advance the sociological explanation and contributes to a better understanding of the process of teacher disempowerment that results from neoliberalism.

Authors:
Kwok Kuen Tsang, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Kwok Kuen Tsang is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Education Policy and Leadership at the Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK). Before joining the Education University of Hong Kong

See this presentation on the full schedule – Thursday Schedule

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