The Expendable Teacher in COVID-19 Times: A Poetic Inquiry into the Reconfiguration of Governmentality in Victorian Schools

The actualization of a neoliberal rationality has been widely explored in global education policy and Australian schools. This paper draws on engagements with neoliberalism as rationality made 'real' through government practices, specifically those that reify the teaching profession into one of risk-management and problem-solving at the expense of deliberation about purposes. In this paper, redacted policy poetry and participant-voiced poetry are employed in parallel to explore the COVID-19 crisis as it emerged in the State of Victoria, Australia with a specific focus on the reconfiguration of risk-management discourses through blanket policy directive. This paper identifies and explores three themes highlighted by this reconfiguration of risk discourse and shifts in modes of governance during this time that are magnified by a teacher's affective and practical responses to the situation. They are: (1) collective teacher response to overt policy decisions that compel the teacher to embrace risk; (2) contradictions of expectation for schools to continue as usual; and (3) an explicit shift away from instrumental evidence-based pedagogies toward new purposes, pedagogies, and community engagement with little guidance.