The equity work of activist teachers: Navigating educational policy on gender -based violence in neoliberal times

In the last fifty years, the transnational re-organization of the economy has similarly re-structured education in the West to reflect a focus on standards, assessments, accountability systems, and performance indicators (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). Social democratic notions of equity in education have been reframed through a discourse of economism (Ball, 1999; Rezai Rashti, Segeren & Martino, 2017). Critical policy studies informed by Foucauldian notions of discourse have provided key insights on changing global governance relations in education mediated largely by texts - and the impact these relations have had on local equity discourses of gender, sexuality and race embedded in various policy texts. However, less prevalent are empirical studies that show how these complex relations operate on the ground in schools to (dis)organize the equity work of teachers and the impact these broad trans-national policies have on teachers and students in particular localized settings. My dissertation project builds on this existing literature by applying the theoretical insights of Dorothy Smith (1987, 1990, 1993, 2005) in order to better consider how neoliberal forms of educational governance and extra local relations of ruling are shaping equity policies on gender-based violence and the work of activist teachers who actualize these policies in schools. Drawing on G. Smiths (1990) theorizing of standpoint from the perspective of people who occupy places and spaces outside politico-administrative relations, I begin from the experiences of activist teachers to explore the equity work that they do to address gender and sexual (in)equities arising in classrooms and schools throughout the Toronto District School Board. In so doing, my work illuminates the contradictions, complexities and inconsistences (Larner, 2001, p. 16) inherent in notions of gender and sexual equity emerging through neoliberal projects in Ontario public education. I illustrate how first, global relations of power constrain teachers work on gender and sexual equity projects in particular ways and also how activist teachers creatively and strategically disrupt the coherence of these relations. By applying these theoretical insights to my particular project, my work suggests new sites of intervention in critical equity endeavors to re-enliven democratic public education and move beyond the constraints of a contemporary and predominant neoliberal imaginary of schooling.