An Analysis of Teacher Performativity as a Global Issue: A Perspective of Biopolitics

doi:10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2020.10.001

Abstract

Abstract: Michel Foucault invents biopolitics to illustrate how contemporary society exercises the art of governing through shaping subjects’ subjectivity. Its purpose is to transform people into self-regulators. This governmentality derives from market freedom through which social members can engage in free choices and practice democratic values. This rationalized automation embodies the mechanism of political economy that lets government change its subjects moving from society to population. Creating freedom enables the government to reshape their self-knowledge. Accordingly, neoliberalism becomes the gateway for accomplishing the art of governing. In order to administer their lifestyles, the state devotes itself to creating freedom. According to this principle, both public managerialism and performativity not only perform the ideas of free market logic but also secure the practice of governing technologies. Drawing upon biopolitics, this essay sets out to explore why performativity becomes a prevailing world issue and how it operates. Its analytical focus is how the government employs international competitiveness to broadcast the discourse of collective responsibility commanding teachers to become self-improvers. Considering the regime of performance management, it also sheds light on a related issue on how the state constitutes their self-consciousness through ethics, which turns teachers into the implementers of performativity. As self becomes the site of power struggle, this essay also explores why and how teachers enact education policies.

Key words: biopolitics, neoliberalism, international competitiveness, subjectivity, performativity

Chiang Tienhui. An Analysis of Teacher Performativity as a Global Issue: A Perspective of Biopolitics[J]. Journal of East China Normal University(Educational Sciences), 2020, 38(10): 1-20.

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