ABSTRACT
This chapter takes as its starting point the belief that a new publicness of education can be best understood through a better consideration of language and the importance of relationships in education discourse and daily practices. This chapter considers the school as a workplace and not just as a place of output and employs the three concepts of publicness, performativity, and gender to discuss how best to (re)conceptualise the teacher, teaching, and working conditions. The worlds and words of five teachers are used in this chapter to help guide the reader through the lived experiences of neoliberalism for teachers and to make visible the ways in which language and relationships are involved in the everyday negotiations of discourse and practices. This chapter examines teacher subjectivities in relation to the teacher as a commodity and as a passive agent whose value in education is bound largely to knowledge-commodity-market relations. Overall, this chapter pursues the interplay of global inflected changes on schooling and on teachers’ professional lives and, in doing so, acknowledges the role that teachers’ specialised knowledge can play in shaping possibilities in a new future of publicness in education.
