The Teaching Excellence Framework: Perpetual Pedagogical Control in Postwelfare Capitalism

Authors

  • Conor Heaney Department of Politics and IR, University of Kent
  • Hollie Mackenzie Department of Politics and IR, University of Kent

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21100/compass.v10i2.488

Keywords:

TEF, Deleuze, postwelfare capitalism, pedagogy

Abstract

In this paper, we argue that Success as a Knowledge Economy, and the Teaching Excellence Framework, will constitute a set of mechanisms of perpetual pedagogical control in which the market will become a regulator of pedagogical possibilities. Rather than supporting pedagogical exploration, or creating conditions for the empowerment of students and teachers, such policies support the precarisation and casualisation of both. We develop these claims through a reading of these policies alongside Gilles Deleuze’s Postscript on the Societies of Control, and situating it in the context of what Gary Hall has termed postwelfare capitalism. We conclude by reaching out to others in the tertiary education sector and beyond to ask if this really is the direction we wish to take this sector in the UK.

Author Biographies

Conor Heaney, Department of Politics and IR, University of Kent

Conor Heaney is a PhD Candidate in Social and Political Thought in the Department of Politics & IR at the University of Kent, Canterbury. His PhD research attempts to creatively engage with Félix Guattari's Three Ecologies so as to confront the conditions of the present, and towards a reformulation of the concept of revolution. Further research interests include critical, democratic, and experimental pedagogy, popular culture, and the transformative social potential of cultural participation.

Hollie Mackenzie, Department of Politics and IR, University of Kent

Hollie Mackenzie is an artist and PhD candidate. Awarded a Kent 50th Anniversary Scholarship to study for a PhD in Political and Social Thought at the University of Kent, Hollie is supervised by Dr Iain MacKenzie and Tate Modern’s Director of Learning, Anna Cutler. Her research is focused on practicing a non-totalitarian relationship between art and politics through feminist and poststructuralist perspectives (predominantly drawing upon the literature by and on Deleuze, Guattari and Irigaray). Weaving together artistic practice, scholarly work and political engagement, she aims to both practice and explore a feminist philosophy of labial art - politics

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Published

05/15/2017

Issue

Vol. 10 No. 2 (2017): Compass: Journal of Learning and Teaching

Section

Opinion Pieces

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