Reconfiguration of teacher’s work: an examination of the introduction of pedagogical intervention programs

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes the changes in the work of elementary school teachers in public schools of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, after the introduction of a pedagogical intervention program developed from 2007 to 2010. The concepts of disqualification, requalification, intensification, and performativity, based on the work of Michael Apple and Stephen Ball are mobilized in the research. The interviews with teachers, the observations, and the materials from the Alfa and Beto Institute – the program which was implemented – were analyzed through the theoretical focus of these concepts. The text characterizes the transformations that educational policies, based on managerialist configurations of the state – embodied in this program – generate in teachers' work. In the field that was studied, teachers are transformed into executors of a preconceived program and lose their autonomy at the same time that new tasks, dealing with the control of the contents and rhythms, have to be learned. In this transformed work, the choreographed measurement of teachers' actions becomes more important than the content of this action.

KEYWORDS
elementary school; educational work; managerialist Estate

RESUMO

O artigo analisa as transformações no trabalho de professoras dos anos iniciais do ensino fundamental de escolas estaduais do Rio Grande do Sul, a partir da implantação de um programa de intervenção pedagógica desenvolvido de 2007 a 2010. Para tanto, faz uso dos conceitos de desqualificação, requalificação, intensificação e performatividade, construídos por Michel Apple e Stephen Ball. Entrevistas com professoras, observações e materiais do Instituto Alfa e Beto – o programa implantado – foram analisados pelas lentes teóricas desses conceitos. O texto caracteriza as transformações que as políticas educacionais baseadas em uma configuração gerencialista do Estado – corporificada no programa – provocam no trabalho das professoras. No campo estudado, as docentes transformam-se em executoras de um programa preconcebido e perdem parte de sua autonomia, ao mesmo tempo em que novas tarefas, voltadas ao controle dos conteúdos e ritmos, precisam ser aprendidas. Neste trabalho docente transformado, a mensuração coreografada da ação docente passa a ser mais importante que o conteúdo dessa ação.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE
ensino fundamental; trabalho docente; Estado gerencialista

RESUMEN

Este artículo analiza los cambios en el trabajo de las maestras de los primeros años de la educación primaria en las escuelas del estado de Rio Grande do Sul, a partir de la implantación del programa de intervención educativa Instituto Alfa e Beto (IAB), desarrollado de 2007 a 2010. Para tal, se utilizan los conceptos de descalificación, recalificación, intensificación y performatividad, construidos por Michael Apple y Stephen Ball. Las entrevistas a las maestras, las observaciones y los materiales del IAB fueron analizados a través de las lentes teóricas de dichos conceptos. El texto caracteriza las transformaciones que las políticas educativas basadas en una configuración de Estado gerencial –corporeizadas en el programa– causan en el trabajo de las profesoras. En el campo estudiado, las profesoras se convierten en ejecutoras de un programa pre-diseñado y pierden algo de su autonomía, al mismo tiempo en que deben aprender nuevas tareas destinadas a controlar el contenido y el ritmo de las clases. En ese trabajo docente modificado, la medición coreografiada de la acción docente se vuelve más importante que el contenido de dicha acción.

PALABRAS CLAVE
educación primaria; trabajo docente; Estado gerencialista

This paper analyzes transformations in the work of teachers in the initial years of fundamental education at public schools in Rio Grande do Sul State, which took place after the implementation of pedagogical intervention programs between 2007 and 2010. The central concepts in the construction of our analysis and argument are those of deskilling, reskilling, intensification and performativity, as developed by Michael Apple and Stephen Ball.

This paper is part of a broader study that examines the introduction of scripted teaching systems during Yeda Crusius' term as governor of Rio Grande do Sul. Adrião et al. (2009). Scripted teaching systems are defined as interventions that offer services and products to schools, such as didactic materials including textbooks and CD-ROMs for teachers and pupils, as well as teacher training and monitoring of the use of these materials.

With this policy, each school had the option to adopt, a pedagogic intervention program in the first and second elementary school grades,. The programs offered were: Instituto Ayrton Senna (São Paulo), Instituto Alfa e Beto (Minas Gerais) and Grupo de Estudos sobre Educação, Metodologia de Pesquisa e Ação (GEEMPA -Study Group on Education, Research Methodology and Action, Rio Grande do Sul). The goal of these policies, according to the Secretariat for Education of Rio Grande do Sul State, was to implement programs of demonstrated efficacy in literacy, and build a matrix of skills and competencies for the initial years of elementary education through the curriculums offered by the programs. The program studied in our broader study was the literacy program of the Instituto Alfa e Beto - IAB. Teachers working in schools that adopted this program received manuals on how to work with the phonic method (the basic method used by the Institute in the literacy process), textbooks created by IAB with all the activities to be undertaken in the classroom, and a schedule to be followed with the lessons from the books that should be presented on each school day. In addition to these materials, teachers also received ready-made tests to be given to the pupils throughout the year.

The data presented in this paper, which focuses on the impact that these programs had on the work of elementary education teachers, were collected from semi-structured interviews with six teachers from the first and second years of elementary education in three state schools in the city of Porto Alegre, in classes that had adopted the IAB Literacy Program. Additionally, weeklong observations were also carried out in the classrooms of each teacher, allowing the researchers to see the use that was being made of the program. Materials from this Institute adopted by the schools (manuals for teachers and pupils, training DVDs for the use of the program and books prepared for the Secretariat for Education) were also analyzed to understand the basic assumptions of the IAB method.

THE ADOPTION OF PEDAGOGIC INTERVENTION PROGRAMS AND THE CONTROL OF TEACHING

Pedagogical intervention programs are a clear example of a new form of state – the managerial state (Clarke; Newman, 1997) –, which has as one of its central tenets "dispersal." According to Clark and Newman (idem, p. 29): Dispersal has meant the simultaneous shrinking of the state and the enlargement of its reach into civil society […]. As a strategy of state reconstruction, dispersal […] has sought to discipline and transform the old institutional sites of power in the state. The managerial state involves a new way of thinking and executing social policies, and presupposes that the state is not the provider of social policies, but rather their manager or regulator. What results from this action is a state that strives to be shaped and even to have its performance evaluated by actions conducted by nongovernmental organizations in fields that until recently were dominated by state operations. It is important to emphasize that this form of state has not eliminated the previous forms, such as bureaucracy and even clientelism; managerialism combines with other practices and conceptions, and what results is a hybrid model whose empirical manifestations must be studied.

The adoption of proposals of pedagogical intervention in state schools is related to managerial assumptions, because the goal is to guarantee increases in the quality indexes of education and that pupils benefit from the insertion of "corrective" actions by private institutions into public schools. The pedagogical intervention programs adopted by Rio Grande do Sul schools during the Yeda Crusius government were developed by non-state institutions under entrepreneurial or market logics. Thus, when public schools adopted them, they adopted a private sector logic, which according to managerial assumptions generates greater efficiency and quality, and transforms the state from within, improving its action.

The adoption of pedagogical intervention programs reinforces the role of the state as a manager, since it transfers its responsibility to an institution of civil society. Here one can observe two forms of privatization, according to Clark and Newman (idem): the first is the blurring of the boundaries between the public and the private, and the second is the change in the state's responsibility towards private sectors. The state comes to only manage the established public policy, and is no longer its provider. Management by the state takes place chiefly through evaluation policies to measure the efficiency of the process. The state uses tests applied by non-state institutions to check the efficiency and quality of school programs. The importance of evaluations in the development of a policy of adoption of these programs is clear, since they are the instruments that measure the efficiency of the program, the policy, the school, and teachers themselves.

Pedagogical intervention programs must also be seen as actions directed at controlling the work of teachers, which became evident in this study. When a pedagogical intervention program is introduced, important transformations occur in the work of teachers. The seminal work by Michael Apple (Teachers and Texts, 1995) on the issue of teachers' work is fundamental to understanding this process. In this book, Apple examines how control over the curriculum produces deskilling, reskilling, and intensification of teachers' work.

The deskilling within education consists in a process in which teachers have their attributions redefined, and where the results and the procedures used to achieve these results are pre-established by those who control the work process. The deskilling of teaching produces a considerable loss in the relative autonomy that teachers have constructed historically. There is a decrease in the intellectual work associated with curricular construction and the planning of pedagogical activities, and a substantial reduction in their capacity to control the timing and rhythm of their teaching actions in the classroom. When pedagogical intervention programs such as those examined in this work are introduced, teachers lose most of the control over their work, becoming dispensers of a curriculum and methodology conceived elsewhere by other agents.

One of the major contributions of Apple's work (idem) is to show that not only does a process of deskilling occur when teachers' work is controlled via curriculum, but also that there is a reskilling of teachers. At the same time that teachers lose certain abilities hitherto essential to their work (the deskilling process), they are reskilled to exercise other abilities. In the case of the pedagogical intervention programs in schools, reskilling implies training teachers to exercise control over students' rhythm of response and, more importantly, self-control over their own work. In this case, the deskilling process is related to the loss of capacity for planning and autonomy; and reskilling is associated to the conduction and management of this new work. Both processes occur concomitantly, as described by Apple (idem, p. 161):

As the procedures of technical control enter into the school in the guise of predesigned curricular/teaching/evaluation "systems," teachers are being deskilled. Yet they are also being reskilled […] While the deskilling involves the loss of craft, the ongoing atrophication of educational skills, the reskilling involves the substitution of the skills and ideological visions of management.

Deskilling and reskilling can also be seen, according to some authors (see, for example, Apple, 1999; Ball, 2004), through the processes of intensification and proletarization of teachers' work. As programs external to the school are adopted, teachers are deskilled, since they no longer exercise skills that were previously essential to their profession: planning, development of curriculum, teaching to specific groups based on close knowledge of the people, amongst others.

Thus, the planning (conception) and the practice in the classroom (execution) are eventually separated. The process of intensification, according to Apple (1995, p. 39), is "one of the most tangible ways in which the work privileges of educational workers are eroded." When these programs enter schools, teachers need to incorporate new skills, which are much more related to execution than to planning. From then on, it is expected that these skills will be exercised, which in addition to deskilling -since teachers no longer plan their work -also intensifies, to the extent that more tasks are now attributed to them. The intensification occurs through new tasks related to the conduct of the work itself: systematic application of tests, reading of the didactic material, completing pupils' performance control charts, class control charts, and so on. Eventually, teachers no longer have time to keep up-to-date in their specialty, and often not even to perform simple tasks related to their daily work in the classroom, such as going to the toilet during classes or grading students' papers at work.

Although it is central to understanding how teachers' work is transformed by the introduction of pedagogical intervention programs, Apple's contributions need to be complemented by an analysis that explains the consequences to schools of the managerial practices of the contemporary state. To do so, we used the concept of performativity as described by Stephen Ball (2010, 2004), which is a contribution that improves the understanding of modifications in teachers' work. Performativity implies a new way of understanding education, and what it means to be a teacher, where this new understanding is profoundly related to the notion of a managerial state, which has been gaining space, as analyzed above.

According to Ball (2010, p. 38), "performativity is a technology, a culture and a mode of regulation; performances (…) serve as measures of productivity or results, as forms of presenting quality or moments of promotion or inspection." Unlike the certainty of being always watched, as in the Foucauldian panoptic, performativity establishes "the uncertainty and instability of being judged in different ways, through different means, and by different agents" (idem, p. 39). Ball highlights that performativity is exercised both from the outside inwards and from the inside outwards. The constant evaluations and the requirement that schools must have good productivity indexes help to bring about a new form of social and moral regulation, which "profoundly and immediately affects the practice of professionals in the state sector, reforming and re-forming meanings and identities, producing or feigning new professional subjectivities" (idem, ibidem).

With the requirements established concerning teacher productivity, teachers acquire a degree of awareness of the visibility of their work, and wind up not only feeling controlled, but begin to conduct vigilance over themselves. This generates what Ball (idem) calls "rigor of performance." More than the content of their practices, what matters is to present something that is spectacular, that causes an impression, and demonstrates that there is commitment, even if indeed it is not materialized.

ANALYSING THE TRANSFORMATION CAUSED BY THE INTRODUCTION OF THE IAB METHODOLOGY IN THE SCHOOLS STUDIED

One of the ways to control teachers' work that evokes the previously mentioned concepts is the introduction by the pedagogical intervention programs of books that are used as scripts for teachers' performance. Pupils receive didactic books to be worked with throughout the year, and teachers are given materials that explain how to work with the books that children have received, what contents are to be taught and how to teach them. Indeed, the books conduct the role that previously belonged to the teacher, effectively planning the classes and the interventions that must be made. It is up to the teacher to conduct the activities, which represents a sharp loss of autonomy by teachers.

In the books of the pedagogical intervention program examined, the "how to teach" is very clear: in addition to having manuals that establish the days on which classes must be proposed, with an annual schedule, the books also display a step-by-step guide of how each class should be given. When analyzing the IAB material, the "how to teach" aspects become evident. In one of the books for teachers, which works with textual interpretation, there is a didactic sequence related to "The Ugly Duckling." The first session of the sequence prepares the teacher to use this text in the classroom. In this session, the teacher will read about what she will teach, what the objectives of that class are, its contents, what materials should be prepared for the class, the vocabulary to be presented, the actions that the teacher must perform (showing the book to the children, underlining certain parts of the text, showing the illustration etc.) as well as the questions that she must ask the pupils. Another session serves to let the teacher know what interventions should be carried out during the reading of the text. The manual also shows what the teacher should do after the reading, showing the questions and activities that children should carry out:

Firstly, ask questions to allow pupils to demonstrate their overall understanding of the text:

• • What is this story about?

• • What happens to the ugly duckling in the end?

• Next, explore an aspect of the reading – in this case, we suggest exploring the development of the story:

• • Shall we recall what happened in the life of the duckling?

• After pupils have spoken, suggest that together they should draw a timeline to record what they said.

• Draw a horizontal line on the blackboard and ask: what happened first? And afterwards? And so on. Children will recall the facts and you should record them on the blackboard. (Oliveira, 2008, p. 60-61, emphasis in the original)

The manual also reminds the teacher that the pupils, at the point of the year in which the text is being worked with, will still not be reading or writing, therefore, the sentences written on the timeline must be short, and thus suggests the use of drawings. Finally, there is a session proposing a closing activity to be conducted with the story.

It is possible to observe in the example above the deskilling of the work of the teacher when a pedagogical intervention program is adopted by the school, since the teacher does not conduct activities (definition and selection of contents and concepts, planning of the methodology etc.) that were previously essential to her work. The excerpt from the manual described also affects the issue of planning, which after the implementation of the pedagogical intervention program is understood in differently. The usual understanding of planning in schools consisted in developing activities, organizing the timing of these activities, ensuring the logical continuity of the contents throughout the year, etc. However, with the adoption of these programs, it is no longer necessary to create the activities, which are readily available in the books, nor is it necessary to organize the logical sequence of the contents, since the program already defines a schedule for the lessons in the manuals. It is important to clarify, however, that teachers still have some room for planning, but much more related to the forms of execution and management of the program. A statement by Roberta¹ – one of the administrators in the Secretariat for Education responsible for implementing the program in the state public schools in Porto Alegre – revealed this aspect when she was asked about her thoughts regarding the statement that the IAB material was "teacher-proof" and that, therefore, the teacher no longer needed to plan:

Roberta – No, the planning has to exist, this is what we always tell the girls. It's a material that comes ready, but the teacher cannot come to the classroom without knowing what she will be doing that day. The planning is part of the teacher's class. Without this planning: "Oh, this week I'm going to work with them on the /m/ phoneme, I'm going to work with the /m/", but the teacher needs to organize what activities from the "Learning to read" block she will be working with, which activities from the right block, because they do not work with them in sequence, this is the orientation that we give them, that they do not work one block, say "Learning to read" on the first day, then the "Correct" one on the second day… No, they have to mix the blocks to learn all the skills that are worked with, the abilities that each block works with.

What can be observed in this statement is a new understanding of the idea of planning as the organization in sequence of pre-defined activities that must be conducted in a given week. In this situation, processes of deskilling and reskilling are taking place (Apple, 1989). Deskilling appears in that teachers no longer need to plan their classes, an activity that used to be a basic requisite of teaching work before the introduction of these programs. Reskilling occurs when teachers need to learn new forms of planning that are related to the management of the program.

With the use of the IAB methodology, teachers need to read the theoretical manuals, watch the DVDs, and organize the activities of the books with which they work during the period prescribed by the Institute. For example, in the second year, for the weeks from June 7 to June 18, teachers needed to work, according to the schedule, with the first lesson of book A, lessons 1 and 2 of the science book, and lessons 1 and 2 of the math book. From that point onwards, according to the statements of the administrator responsible for the IAB in the Secretariat for Education, teachers needed to look up the activities for these lessons and determine the sequence in which they would be worked with during the week. That is, the teacher may choose to begin the morning of June 7 with book A, and then work with something from lesson 1 in math. That is the planning Roberta is referring to.

The intensification occurs with the increase in the tasks to be carried out by the teachers, engendering intellectual deskilling, because when these programs are adopted teachers are removed from their specialties, such as planning and individual intervention with pupils. This process tends to diminish the quality of services offered (idem, 1995). In the case of the adoption of pedagogical intervention programs, this process deserves special attention.

With the adoption of pedagogical intervention programs, the work of teaching intensifies because in addition to their pedagogical activities, teachers also become responsible for classroom management. Teachers thus need to learn new skills to which they were not accustomed, such as managing the scripted program. Another form of intensification is related to receiving many tasks to be executed, which accelerates teachers' working rhythm so they can comply with all of the program's determinations.

One example of intensification related to the need to exercise other skills is the teacher preparation to work with the lessons in the books. The reading of materials is necessary to allow teachers to know about the content to be worked with and how. This demands time, because they receive various materials from the Institute as part of the program. Apart from the pupils' materials (handwriting and calligraphy, block letters; handwriting and calligraphy, cursive letters; Learning to read; Sciences first year; Mathematics first year), the first-year teachers receive the following books: Learning to Read – Teachers Manual; SciencesFirst Year – Teachers Manual; Guidelines of the Alfa and Beto Program; Teachers Schedule; Manual of Phonemic Awareness; The ABC of the Literacy Teacher; Literacy of Children and Adults: New parameters; and Learning and Teaching. The school receives the School Manual. Second year teachers receive the pupils' materials (Book A; Sciences second year; Mathematics second year) and the following materials: TeachersMmanual for book (A, B, C or D); Using Texts in the Classroom; Guidelines - ABCD; The ABC of the Literacy Teacher; Literacy of Children and Adults: new parameters; and Learning and teaching.

The materials also require a different form of relationship with the work itself, which is not that of planning and not of reflection about content and how to work with it. Hortência, a teacher, speaks about the need to read the material:

Hortência – […] to teach this class we have to know what's coming ahead. I cannot get to the middle of the lesson only to find out that there was something that I should have thought of before. This drains the work of the teacher, because she has to be prepared for what is coming, and she has to organize herself beforehand, and not on the run, as classes are taking place, you would take a suggestion from a colleague, work on a handout here and there, you had a project to develop but not that specific thing that will be demanded. I have to follow it because at some point I will be held accountable for it. Mariana, the supervisor here at school, will ask: "What lesson are you working on with your class now?" And the Secretariat is asking her to hold us accountable, so there is this demand, and you end up working more.

Here we have what Apple notes as being the intrinsic link between intensification and greater control over the work of teachers. One can notice in Hortência's discourse that she understands that she needs to work more, that she needs a faster working rhythm because later her supervisor will ask her about the lesson she is working on. Therefore, much of the intensification is employed to gain control over the work that teachers carry out in the classroom. But this also illustrates how control and intensification are maximized by the need to constantly perform according to a standard. Here we have what Maguire (2013, p. 81) points out in her work on the conceptions proposed by Ball: "a plethora of techniques was developed to monitor, analyze, and evaluate the degree to which teachers fulfil these responsibilities, especially through testing of children and of the pupils they teach." In this and in other examples presented, it is visible that the performativity required in the pedagogical action leads these teachers to "concentrate more on the testing than on the understanding" (idem, ibidem).

With respect to the classroom work, teachers identify that they have changed the way they work because of the demands of the methodology. For example, Isadora, a first-year teacher, when questioned about changes in her work, said that she now needs:

Isadora – To speak much more, see many pages. The work is almost at the student's side, one-on-one, whereas in the syllabic method it was not like that. We used the blackboard a lot, lots of drawing, many handouts… It was much easier to work with, but not with this method. This is a method that strains you, because you have to use this book, you have to tell the story, you have to make this sound, make them distinguish the sounds, and you have tasks and deadlines to follow.

This statement indicates that she needed to adapt to this new form of teaching, no longer making so much use of the blackboard or of handouts. By observing this teacher, it became clear that she really needed to do a lot of talking in the classroom, since the method is based on sound and the children are young, which requires close attention by the teacher. However, it is important to emphasize that this action was not homogeneous: it was observed that the teacher still makes substantial use of the blackboard and of copying in notebooks, something that should not be done when using the program.

One of the elements of the Alfa and Beto program that creates intensification of the work of teachers is a timetable that needs to be followed. Of the three schools researched, only one did not need to review the timetable. School A and school C received a new timetable from the Secretariat for Education because they could not comply with the original one. In those schools, teachers needed to conduct fewer lessons with the pupils during the year. In school A, this occurred because the results of the first tests were unsatisfactory, and teachers needed, under recommendation from the First Regional Coordination of Education (the division of the Secretariat in charge of coordinating schools in Porto Alegre), to redo lessons that had already been worked with. In school C, pupils needed more time to carry out the lessons. According to the teachers from this school, this occurred mainly because of the socioeconomic situation of the children, since the majority of them did not attend early childhood education, meaning that for these pupils teachers have to work with contents that should have been studied before the first year.

The intensification process is often understood as professionalism. The fact that they are responsible for executing the work makes teachers consider that they are more professional, despite the fact that they are undergoing a proletarization of their work and a deskilling/reskilling. This fact can be better understood in the light of the discourses that commonly circulate in the general public about the teaching profession, according to which teachers are not competent, that they do not do a good job, that they are always on strike instead of working, that they complain too much etc. "Doing more," in this sense, even if it implies intensification of work, frequently appears dressed up as professionalization of teaching. The idea of professionalization is closely tied to that of responsibility, to the carrying out of endless tasks. Professionalism here does not involve exercising classroom functions in a more qualified way, but to simply conduct more functions, regardless of the fact that they are more bureaucratic and managerial.

The control over these programs represents a technical control of the teaching work (Apple, 1989). This type of control is less visible, that is, it is part of the structure of the work and there is no direct demand from anyone but the worker him or herself. In the case of the adoption of pedagogical proposals, the technical control is exercised when managerial strategies in the classroom and in school are made natural, as something typical and fundamental to the exercise of the work of teaching. In this way, the teacher winds up becomes a manager of a program that she did not create. In other words, the teacher controls the introduction of a pedagogical proposal, which, in fact limits her own work. The programs adopted require that specific results be achieved by the teaching staff. Therefore, the teacher has to ensure that their pupils are "efficient" within the logic of these pedagogical proposals.

Under this perspective, the teacher needs to reflect on her work and becomes an executor of specific actions for which she was not involved in the planning. The fact that the teacher carries out tasks that prevent her from thinking about what she is doing represents strong control over the work of the teacher, and a loss of autonomy. Thus, some of the historical features of teaching are challenged, such as the fact that teachers are intellectuals who critically reflect on their work (Giroux, 1986), and the fact that the teacher is a civil servant, but does not perform bureaucratic work (Dale, 1989).

This control over teaching has other consequences. Ball (2010) says that the pressures that come from within, that is mainly the evaluations that establish a regime of competition between individuals and institutions, are often responsible for causing teachers to have "feelings of individual pride, guilt, shame and envy – which have an emotional dimension (status), as well as (the appearance of) rationality and objectivity" (idem, p. 40). This dimension can be seen in the declaration by Lívia, a teacher who was asked about a special pupil that was not able to follow the methodology:

Researcher – and how is the work with the pupil M., for instance?

Lívia – that's when we get a little concerned with children that fall far behind, who do not keep up with the group. And since the methodology -in this case it is Alfa and Beto -does not give you this extra material, you have to work to strictly follow the lessons and apply the tests… It is impossible for someone to manage to work with two things at the same time. So, these pupils suffer. Because either I dedicate myself to Alfa and Beto with the children or I dedicate myself to M. I am now giving tests and he did not take them. He did nothing.

In this statement, we can see that the teacher is not happy with the work she is doing with this pupil who has special needs. Nevertheless, she is unable to do separate work with him because she has the institute's timetable to follow, which means having the other children learn within a given deadline. Even knowing that the pedagogical work with M. is not going well, she assumes what Ball (idem) calls a position of rationality and objectivity, since she needs to follow certain rules. This teacher gave an exam collectively that should have been taken individually by the pupils. At first, they took the test individually. After grading the test and seeing that they got many questions wrong, she decided to review the exam, this time having the students retake it collectively. Therefore, the data sent to the Secretariat for Education with the pupil's performance in the test were those obtained after this collective review. When questioned about this fact, the teacher answered as follows:

Researcher – And the fact that you did the review with them, how does that stand in terms of the evaluation by the Secretariat for Education?

Lívia – The Secretariat for Education will not know. Because I think that my pupils have learned. The test is nothing more than seeing how they are doing. It is interesting for them to retake it so that they can learn those things they could not do. I had kind of taken the temperature because I saw the tests before.

Further in the conversation, the teacher was asked about how those data will stand with the Secretariat:

Researcher – And how do you evaluate this? Because all schools have the same test and the other teachers have the same guidelines that you have about how to grade these tests. Do these results stand for the Secretariat for Education? Do you think they are very different or not?

Lívia – At the other school they didn't need to pause, as we did here, to review, because the tests had been considered below average. So, I don't know to what extent… Because it's like this: at the same time that they give you the guideline, they also leave you very free to evaluate and to see what the profile of your class is. Because you don't really know if the pupils that did well really did well.

The excerpts from this teacher's discourse once again relate to performativity when she rationalizes and objectifies something that was done outside the requirements of the Institute. This resistance from the teacher occurred because of the IAB's demands about pupils' grades. At the teacher's school it was necessary to review previous lessons because of the pupils grades. This request was made by the First Regional Coordination of Education after the analysis of the first tests conducted with the second year students at this school. One hypothesis for why the teacher had her pupils take the second test collectively relates exactly to the pressure that she and the school could suffer if once again they had bad grades on the second test. From the teacher's perspective, the collective review would guarantee better grades and the teacher or to the school would not be questioned about it. The construction of a performativity in this case occurs in response to the competition that is established between the schools, which are now held accountable when they cannot reach the pre-established targets. This is what we see clearly occurring in the schools researched.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

It was possible to observe that processes of deskilling and reskilling (Apple, 1989) take place at schools in which the IAB methodology was applied. Deskilling appears mainly as teachers stop performing functions previously essential to their profession: teachers no longer plan class activities class, and they stop conducting tasks specific to pupils with different learning paces. Reskilling, which, as shown by Apple, often appears disguised as professionalization, manifests itself in these schools as the teachers' need to learn new skills, which relate to the ability to follow instructions, to fill in forms, and to constantly display results. Contrary to what could be expected, reskilling, which is presented as a professionalization of the teaching work, produces a process of intensification of this work, as demonstrated by the examples of the schools investigated here.

Performativity is not something that hinders "real" teaching work; it has become, as Ball (idem) says, the "real" teaching work itself. We are not saying that teaching work is reduced today to intensification, reskilling and performativity; we see, and we have shown in this article, ways that teachers find to create escape zones. However, what the investigation of the schools studied here has shown is that these processes are complex and not at all transitory. Understanding them is a precondition to facing them.

• 1
  Names have been changed in this work to preserve the identity of teachers.

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  Sept 2015

History

• Received
  Jan 2014
• Accepted
  July 2014