Understanding the Dynamics of Teacher Agency, Resilience, and Identity in the Neoliberal Age

Understanding the Dynamics of Teacher Agency, Resilience, and Identity in the Neoliberal Age foregrounds how the neoliberal educational reforms contribute to the (trans)formation of teacher agency, resilience, and identity through various theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches.

Understanding the Dynamics of Teacher Agency, Resilience, and Identity in the Neoliberal Age focuses on the complexity of teachers’ agency, resilience, and identity across various contexts. Neoliberal educational policy technologies have been constantly (re)shaping educational professionalism, subjectivity, teaching, and evaluation. Within this climate, teacher agency, resilience, and identity are vital factors for maintaining teachers’ well-functioning and well-being. Moreover, teacher agency, resilience, and identity do not exist independently but reinforce each other constitutively, which enable teachers to see beyond challenge and fluctuating confidence and withstand pressure.

The educational contexts in this book encompass rural, immigrant, preservice education, special education, internationalized school contexts, etc. Theoretically, this book disentangles the conceptual understandings and methodological considerations of teacher agency, resilience, and identity. Practically, the contributors from various countries and regions explore how various contexts influence teacher agency, resilience, and identity in the neoliberal age.

Foreword by Gert Biesta

Introduction: Examining the Dynamics of Teacher Agency, Resilience, and Identity in the Neoliberal Age: Contexts and Issues, Gang Zhu

Chapter One: Agency, Resilience, and Attribution: Examining the Disparate Challenges of Two Schools Interfacing with Neoliberal-based Policies, Ji Hong, Dionne Cross Francis, Kelly Chong, Laura Lewis, Alex Parsons, Crystal Neill, and Qian Wang

Chapter Two: Teach elsewhere - A sociocultural perspective on an immigrant teacher’s agency and perezhivanie during the process of learning to teach in Australia, Hongzhi Yang

Chapter Three: Encountering adversity and emotional challenges in teacher education: Pre-service teachers, agency, resilience and emerging teacher identity, Henrik Lindqvist

Chapter Four: Change in early career teachers’ professional agency in secondary schools in the Netherlands, Anna van der Want, Harmen Schaap, Paulien Meijer, Helma Oolbekkink-Marchand, Léonie Janssen, and Marleen Ensink

Chapter Five: Technologies of performativity in the Chinese internationalised school: Towards teacher (in)discretion, Adam Poole

Chapter Six: Teacher Agency and Identity in the Context of Secondary Special Education: How Schools Advance Neoliberal Notions of Adulthood, J. Christopher Wilt and Courtney L. Wilt

Chapter Seven: Teacher Disempowerment, Identity and Resilience in the Context of Neoliberal Education Reforms: The Case of Hong Kong, Kwok Kuen Tsang and Guanyu Li

Chapter Eight: A Post-structural Analysis of the edTPA as a Discursive Tool: The Neoliberal Apparatus in Teacher Development, Meghan A. Kesslerand Angela Masters

About the Contributors