RE-TURNING TO ETHICS IN

PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE
Alex Kostogriz
Monash University
Standards-based reforms: Producing ‘social pathologies’
• Deviations in education and ‘moral panics’ – reforms as a means of managing
risks
• Neo-liberal ‘marketised’ solutions to educational problems
increasing market competition – public, private
increasing effectiveness – training and performativity
increasing quality – outcomes, evaluation, evidence
• Moral criteria – accountability
• Dynamic process of development
• Pathologies – alienated teaching and learning
 Reification
• alienation - separation of things that originally belong together
• commodity fetishism - social relations between people turn into relations
between objects
• rationalisation - replacement of actions based on traditions, values, and
emotions with rational and calculated actions.
• dehumanization of capitalist society –’second nature’
• authentic social life is replaced with its representation
YET
• reification provides a basis for critique of the everyday in which social
relations are premised on commodity fetishism
• the everyday harbours a mystery of social praxis
 Focusing on the everyday
• The everyday life as fashioning and self-fashioning, repetition and difference, as
the practice of the ordinary
The Groundhog Day
• Everyday matters in the living space we share with others and in the living time of
day-by-day experience.
“I possess nothing but the everyday out of which I am never taken. The
mystery is no longer disclosed, it has escaped or it has made its dwelling here
where everything happens as it happens.” (M. Buber)
 Between humanism and anti-humanism
• Focusing on everyday activities (what people say and do, how they make meanings,
how they know or do not know, how they relate to others and what ‘objects’ do they use
or how they are ‘used’ by them…)
Two approaches
• Marx, Lukács, Kracauer, Benjamin, Lefebvre… and also Simmel, Debort, de Certeau…
(alienation and appropriation)
• Ordinary lives (collectivity, commonality, governmentality, normativity and deviance,
different senses of the ordinary)
Everyday life is profoundly related to all activities, and encompasses them with
all their differences and their conflicts; it is their meeting place, their bond, their common
ground. And it is in everyday life that the sum total of relations which make the human –
and every human being – a whole takes its shape and its form. In it are expressed and
fulfilled those relations which bring into play the totality of the real, albeit in a certain
manner which is always partial and incomplete: friendship, comradeship, love, the need
to communicate, play, etc.(Lefebvre, 1991)
 The teachers’ everyday work in neoliberal conditions
The production of social pathologies in education
• In the modern world everyday life had ceased to be a ‘subject’ rich in potential
subjectivity; it has become an ‘object’ of social organization. (Lefebvre, 1984, p.
59)
• As far as standardized tests are concerned, the scoring units represent the
universal equivalent (the money indeed) in terms of which students, schools and
districts can be compared. (De Lissovoy & McLaren, 2003, p. 132)
• “Everything is about the data these days. And look, I don’t necessarily think
there’s anything wrong with being accountable. I’m fine with that. I’m also fine with
a school being judged by the Department on its data to a certain extent. But we’re
more than data. We’re a community. And so we need to keep it in balance with
other functions that we fulfil. And I think that … like the simplistic league tables
that are often quoted can do a lot of damage to schools … because we’re talking
about children and we’re talking about human relationships. So I think … you also
have to look outside the data, too … Our community [parents] have to learn to
judge us on more than that, and have some faith in the school, and also look at
schools as a whole picture – not just about data.” (School Principal, emphases
added)
 Accountability effects: Alienated labour
“We’re being pushed to provide data, documentation, through testing, that we can measure progress against…”
“It’s also what the school is being judged on. One becomes really uncomfortable with that. I find it really incredible to think that …
And despite the fact that we have statements that it won’t be used against the school, you know for a fact that it is part of it. So
whether it be a funding one or whether it be, you know… And now they’re talking about it all being available…”
“I think they’re overwhelmed by the whole thing. Especially the grade threes, the younger ones. They’re just overwhelmed by
these pages of questions. It’s just daunting. And even though we give them the, “It’s only a test,” and we go through it and we say,
“We’ll help you with it. We’re here to support you. We can’t give you the answers but we’re here to support you and we’ll help you
through it.” Some of them just sat there and they just sort of zoned right out.”
“And I think, also, not only the child’s frustration but also our frustration, because we know that the child can do it, and yet in a
NAPLAN situation, you can’t assist the child…”
“Even so, we still do our formal assessments, our ACER, our data, our TORCH, our PAT Maths, or whatever we use, at least we as
a school, as a group within the school, can moderate and say, “Okay, well, if the child’s score is this, what does this mean for us
and our school?” There might be some VELS translations and stuff like that. So we can talk about that. But particularly now that
NAPLAN is out of the school’s hands totally, whereas AIM, there was some teacher-assessed material, so there was a bit of a
balance there, we have no say…”
“Those tests are given for a purpose. We think that the tests we give are given for a purpose. So collectively, we sit down and say,
“Well, do we really need to do the test? Is it really giving us what we want? Why are we doing it in the first place?” And if we think
it’s useless, we allow ourselves to say, “Out with that. Let’s use something else that’s going to be really informative, so that then
we can see the overall picture and move on and teach these kids to get to the next level.” Whereas, the NAPLAN, as we all know,
we can see it’s question after question… And what is he going to get back from the NAPLAN? Nothing. He’s going to get nothing.
Whereas, from me, at least I can say, “Look, he did this fantastic story this year.”
 Affective labour
• Affective labour of teachers—the labour of interaction and social relations—
suggests that affect directs teachers’ power to act and their commitment to
practice that is governed by feeling, passion and the ethics of care rather than
by the ‘terrors of performativity’
• Affective labour of teachers produces value through a synthesis of social
relationships, knowledge, and physical work. It encompasses the fullness of
teachers’ professional lives
• It is difficult to determine when the affective labour of teachers begins or
ends, thereby rendering its value neither measurable nor manageable by
standards and performance indicators
• Attending to affect offers ways of understanding the genesis of ethics of care
in education, more broadly, and the origin of teaching as a ‘‘caring’’
profession, in particular.
 De-reification of work
Reification as forgetting
• “We’re used to it now. We get lots of kicks up the bum. We’re used to it. As
teachers, I think over the years I have learned that you get valued by your
children, you get valued by some parents, but overall, there’s not much in
teaching. And I don’t think we get much back from government. They don’t
care … So I get very disillusioned, personally. I love teaching. I really love
teaching. But … “(School teacher)
Recognition as remembering
• Recognitional stance at issue here represents a wholly elementary form of
intersubjective activity, but one that does not yet imply the perception of the
specific value of another person... In human social behaviour, recognition and
empathetic engagement necessarily enjoy a simultaneously genetic and
categorical priority over cognition and a detached understanding of social
facts... (Honneth, 2008, p. 51-52)
 The problem of ethics
• Teachers perceive this kind of imposed accountability as detached from their
situated practice and from the needs and the affective world of children:
I think they’re treating us more like a corporate company, rather than an
educational institution. And I think that the child is being ... lost in this. It’s
supposed to be about the child, and the child is not numbers. They’re
feelings, they’re emotions. They’ve got aspirations, they’ve got joy and
beauty, and they’re not just scores. (Sally)
• Affect is the power to be affected and the force that ‘‘increases or decreases our
body’s ability to act, and that which forces thought to move in a particular
direction’’ (Vygotsky 1993, p. 234):
We are trying to create the culture of sharing the responsibility for all the
children in the school. It’s not one individual teacher’s responsibility but a
collective one’’ (Melissa).
• Teachers perceive their collective responsibility to students and their families as
an obligation towards others, as both an ‘‘is’’ and an ‘‘ought’’ of their practice.
 The architectonics of ethical subject(ivity)
“Architectonics” - the unitary and unique event in light of which all values,
meanings and spatio-temporal relations are created and organised in an
essential asymmetry between the perceptual experience of I-for-myself, the-other-
for-me, and I-for-the-other (M. Bakhtin)
The origin of responsibility
A human being, experiencing life in the category of his own I, is incapable of
gathering himself by himself into an outward whole that would be even relatively
finished. The point here is… the absence in principle of any unitary axiological
approach, from within a human being himself, to his own outward expressedness…
A human being’s absolute need for the other, for the other’s seeing, remembering,
gathering, and unifying self-activity - the only self-activity capable of producing his
outwardly finished personality. This outward personality could not exist, if the other
did not create it” (Bakhtin)
Responsibility: one’s commitment to responsibility for others; to the pedagogical
event that is impossible to fulfil.
“One is never responsible enough” (J. Derrida)