Resistance within a performativity discourse: Learning from an analytic autoethnographic perspective

Abstract

Can beginning teachers teach against the grain? In this article, the author studies the self when he was a teacher in the school system, teaching with an approach that was antithetical to the school's pedagogic norm. By analysing the author's self in the context of the larger political, historical and structural contexts of the teaching situation, the author highlights the struggles of going against the pedagogic discourse, and the accommodation that was enacted to ensure his survival. While the autoethnographic self-study is essentially grounded in the lived experience of the author, it reveals the broader issue of how performativity pressures in school systems socialize its teachers.