The teacher as double agent: performative compliance, allegiance and survival in the contemporary classroom

Abstract

In a context of increasing complexity and with serious challenges facing contemporary schooling, teachers regularly make strategic decisions about how they engage with policy reforms and system mandates. In this paper, we deploy the notion of the teacher as a ‘double agent’. The double agent is required to performatively demonstrate allegiance to education policies and practices, which sometimes sit at odds with the teacher’s professional commitment and responsibility to students. The teacher as double agent is produced through the contradictions of subjectivity, which are always present in the enactment of teacher agency. The reflective accounts from Australian teachers shared in this paper illustrate how their enactment of double agency can be deployed as an important survival strategy, which enables them to meet the policy demands of schooling systems, while also meaningfully engaging in curriculum and relational work with the students in their care. However, the tactics of compliance, allegiance and survival used by teachers also comes at a professional and personal cost, which need to be countered by more responsive and supportive education policy reforms