The Perspectives of Teachers and Administrators on the Long-term Effects of the Removal of Principals and Vice-principals from the Teachers' Unions in Ontario: A Foucauldian Genealogy if “US and Them”

The purpose of this study was to investigate Catholic secondary school teacher and administrator perspectives regarding the long-term effects of the Bill 160 removal of principals and vice-principals from the Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association (OECTA). To better contextualize the problematization of current circumstances, this project is presented as a Foucauldian genealogy divided into three epistemic periods separated by significant discursive “breaks.” Paying particular attention to the use of metaphor, I was interested in the ways that participants framed the role of the administrator, the teacher-principal relationship, and the work of the union within each of these “regimes of truth.” Prior to 1985, principals in partially-private Catholic high schools embodied a pastoral model of school leadership characterized by selflessness, duty, and individualized care. During this period, a spirit of volunteerism flourished, and collective agreements were notoriously thin. The completion of government funding for Catholic secondary schools represented an epistemic “break” whereby shared values of faith, sacrifice, and vocation were supplanted by employer discourses of organizational rationality countered by union discourses of solidarity and fairness. Nevertheless, as members of OECTA, principals were “disciplined” to resist managerial subjectivation, retaining their teacher identities and status as us. This episteme was characterized as a time when teachers and principals were one. In Foucauldian terms, the 1998 Bill 160 removal of principals and vice-principals from the teachers’ unions was a “dividing practice” through which the subjectivity/identity of the players in the “games of truth” would become fixed at opposite poles of a value-laden binary. Freed from the mutual restraint imposed by joint union membership, anti-union and anti-administrator discourse was allowed to surface, fortifying the discursive boundaries that delineated an emergent us and them relationship between teachers and administrators. More than twenty-five years later, participants acknowledged that the removal of principals and vice-principals from OECTA precipitated a significant shift in leadership paradigm such that the principal is no longer perceived as a lead/master teacher (one of us) but rather s/he is understood to be a manager (one of them), thus attracting individuals who are more positional and compliant to the role. No longer one with the teachers/union, to curb potential administrative abuse of power, trust has been traded for transparency as ever more prescriptive collective agreements are negotiated to clearly define the limits of teachers’ working conditions. Finally, as us and them discourse continues to pull teachers and administrators further apart, both sides have to work harder to develop relationships of mutual trust, respect, and collaboration across an ever-widening gap. Foucault allows that freedom is the flipside of power, suggesting that teachers and administrators may resist imposed us and them subjectivities/identities by learning to play the game of power “otherwise.” Thus, I conclude this project with a call to re-metaphor the gap as a space of possibility where shared values, openness, and learning animate the teacher-principal relationship.

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