Teachers as Agents and Policy Actors

Abstract

Professional engagement, agency, and autonomy of teachers have been imagined in specific ways through recent policy guidelines on teachers’ work in South Asia. This imagination is derived from empirical research that stresses the idea of teacher accountability through studies on teacher absenteeism, teacher unions, and the relative efficacy of private schools as compared to government schools. The new public management (NPM) discourse channelizing this imagination, through policies that can orient the work of teachers in government schools, suggests solutions such as contractual teachers, performance-based pay, increased monitoring and surveillance, and para-skilling of teachers – either explicitly or by implication.

This chapter, after examining the contours of the above discourse, draws attention to the institutional context of teachers’ work in South Asia and alternative approaches that have mobilized both teachers and teacher unions toward educational reforms. The imaginations of the professional identity of the teachers and their role as policy actors are seen to be distinctively different when explored through this lens: political beings endowed with critical, reflexive agency who are able to engage with their professional beliefs and practice in productive and transformative ways, as compared to the NPM imagination that regards teachers as willful deterrents of educational reforms.