Living and narrating neoliberalism: an autoethnographic bricolage exploring a lifetime of learning, teaching and teacher education

This autoethnographic study explores my experiences of learning and working within what I broadly characterise as a neoliberal education system, from the 1990s as a school pupil to the late 2010s as a teacher and teacher-educator in England. I document experiences of learning and teaching my specialist subjects – Mathematics and Statistics – within educational and professional spaces that I have found to be counteractive to attributes that I hold in high regard: an inquisitive and sceptical disposition towards quantitative measures in education, and a desire and freedom to understand, develop and assert one’s own epistemological perspective.
The thesis is structured around a bricolage of written vignettes, each followed by reflective re-readings and analyses with reference to various theoretical frames such as socialisation as a professional teacher, empowering forms of knowledge, and power relationships within communities of practice in education.
Themes within the vignettes and analyses include the narrative construction of: conflicts between my conceptualisation of critical scholarship and statistical literacy; teaching and assessing in highly quantified, anti-critical educational contexts; claiming aspirations towards a moral-ethical orientation to education within the constraints and pressures of neoliberal performativity; reflections on affective aspects of teacher identity and conceptualising notions of success as a learner and educator.
A second level of analysis draws threads from across the bricolage to explore how I have learned to understand and frame my experiences through a lens of neoliberal ideology despite efforts and assertions to the contrary. Analyses also incorporate a methodologically reflective element, contemplating the development of my vignettes and approach to narrative expression as a potentially self-defensive, confessional or cathartic response to troubling, conflicting experiences. The thesis concludes with summative consideration of threads arising from the preceding bricolage of analyses, identifying facets and implications of neoliberal ideology, and the irreducible complexity of affective subjectification across my life course, which emerge through the layers of analysis and narrative structure of the research thesis itself.