Teacher-entrepreneurialism: a case of teacher identity formation in neoliberalizing education space in contemporary India

Abstract

This article examines the processes underlying the formation of the identity of teachers as entrepreneurs in neoliberalizing education landscape in contemporary India. Drawing on interactions with 38 schoolteachers at two private schools in Dehradun, this article explores why and how educators adopt specific entrepreneurial strategies to navigate precarious, competitive market conditions. It subsequently illustrates how, in their pursuit of career advancement, educators commodify their knowledge and skills and promote the market logic of choice and freedom. By elucidating the mechanisms through which educators reproduce the processes and practices that nudge their search for promising career opportunities in the formal education system and the tuition industry, this article argues that teacher-entrepreneurs are both products and carriers of the neoliberal agenda. It introduces the concept of teacherentrepreneurialism, a manifestation of neoliberalism, which shapes educators' entrepreneurial dispositions; it suggests that teacher-entrepreneurs sustain neoliberalization in its varying forms and bolster its legitimacy. By illustrating the variegated, processual existence of neoliberalism, this article makes a case for investigating education as a neoliberalizing space in the increasingly profitcentric, market-driven, and performance-oriented schooling sector that prevails across societies, particularly in contemporary India.

Should Shadow Education Stay as a Shadow or Exist as Co-curricula Alongside Mainstream Education?

“…Brehm (2015) observed teacher-students' behavior in shadow classrooms in Cambodia, and noted that teachers appeared to have a friendly relationship with students attending their tutoring classes, which was very different from the rules and etiquette in mainstream schools that restrict the behavior of teachers and students. Studies in other countries, such as Egypt (Hartmann, 2013) and India (Gupta, 2019), have reached similar conclusions. In fact, the prevalence of shadow education reflects the inefficiency of mainstream schooling.…”

Preschooling in India: Readying Children for a Race?

“…This active process of what they call ‘neoliberalising space’ develops, they claim, ‘a profound antipathy to all kinds of Keynesian and/or collectivist strategies’ (Ibid., p. 8). Applying this analytical trope, Gupta (2019) examines how education increasingly emerges as a neoliberalised space and how some of its core constitutive activities of teaching and learning get infused with the ideas of entrepreneurialism and consumerism. Scholars like Nussbaum (2010) and Sandel (2012) advance a compelling normative argument against such forces of marketisation in the field of education, explaining, respectively, why education is ‘not for profit’ and why this is something that ‘money cannot buy’, but if it does, how it corrupts education’s intrinsic value.…”

“…In this climate, it is worth asking who wants the right to preschool education for all and who wants equity in this regard. Teachers seem to act more and more as entrepreneurs (Gupta, 2019); parents seem to opt more and more for competition (Bray & Kwo, 2013); and the education market seems to be hyperactive, while the state remains rather under-active. There is a need, however, to bring politics and the state back into the discourse and practice of early childhood education.…”

“…Thus, preschool teachers in their world views and doings seem to oscillate between being just an employee (or even a profit-maximising entrepreneur in their double-role as tutors and teachers in an increasingly commercialised education landscape; Gupta, 2019) or an overburdened educator–worker, lacking autonomy in a scheme in which they are both neglected and controlled by higher officials. And yet, we also find a creative counter-practice of teacher initiative and involvement against every spell of indifference on their part.…”

Exposing the “shadow”: an empirical scrutiny of the “shadowing process” of private tutoring in India

“…In other contexts, parents may invest in tuition to provide their children with a competitive edge (see the Hong Kong case in Kwo & Bray, 2014) or to supplant the poor quality of education delivered in formal schools (see the case of Bangladesh in Hamid et al, 2018). Furthermore, teachers have been reported to offer private tutoring in instances of de-professionalisation of educators' role in formal schools (see, Popa & Acedo, 2006) or in the form of the neo-liberally produced entrepreneurialism among schoolteachers (Gupta, 2019).…”