The Power of Affect: Teacher Activism as Resistance to Neoliberalism in Saskatchewan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With prevailing global neoliberal ideology, teachers and teacher unions must respond to market-driven governmental policies intended to undermine public education. In Saskatchewan, Canada, teacher activists feel compelled to both counter neoliberal discourses and proactively advocate for equitable, high-quality public education. To explore acts of resistance, semi-structured interviews with four teacher activists were employed to understand how teachers enact advocacy within their union and through grassroots activism. Harding et al.’s (2018) framework of alliances, assemblages, and affects informed data analysis, which included the creation of narrative vignettes characterizing teacher voice. This paper specifically discusses findings which suggest that affect, or how emotions do things, presented teachers with new potentialities for shaping educational policy. Keywords: narrative inquiry, teacher unions, grassroots teacher activism, neoliberalism, poststructuralism, affect Face à l'idéologie néolibérale mondiale dominante, les enseignants et les syndicats d'enseignants doivent répondre aux politiques gouvernementales axées sur le marché et destinées à saper l'éducation publique. En Saskatchewan, au Canada, les enseignants militants se sentent obligés de contrer les discours néolibéraux et de défendre de manière proactive une éducation publique équitable et de qualité. Des entretiens semi-structurés avec quatre enseignants militants ont été utilisés pour explorer les actes de résistance et comprendre comment les enseignants défendent leurs intérêts au sein de leur syndicat et par le biais du militantisme de base. Le cadre d'alliances, d'agencements et d'affects de Harding et al. (2018) a guidé l'analyse des données, qui comprenait la création de vignettes narratives caractérisant la voix des enseignants. Cet article traite spécifiquement des résultats qui suggèrent que l'affect, ou la façon dont les émotions font les choses, a présenté aux enseignants de nouvelles potentialités pour façonner la politique éducative. Mots clés : enquête narrative, syndicats d'enseignants, activisme des enseignants de la base, néolibéralisme, poststructuralisme, affect
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".