Extreme teaching and the politics of teachers’ working conditions at the peripheries of the Mexican education system

Abstract

The term ‘extreme teaching’ refers to a combination of working conditions that appear to make teaching impossibly difficult for indigenous teachers’ at the periphery of the Mexican education system. An attention to the reality of teaching conditions ‘on the ground’ creates a counterweight to the theoretical universalisms of education policy, and more specifically to the discourse of teacher quality that position teachers as autonomous professionals, ‘free’ to become fully competent if motivated and ‘incentivized’. A broad overview of the characteristics of indigenous teachers’ experience and working conditions is followed by a discussion of factors inhibiting all-important communication and critical dialogue between teachers. I argue that in the diminished professional environment of extreme teaching the teacher quality discourse and its contemporary policy technologies become particularly dissonant, if not surreal. By way of conclusion I argue that the neo-liberal agenda can be better contextualized and understood by paying greater attention to teachers’ working conditions, especially at the margins of education as they become increasingly permeated by its discourses. Such an attention would help avoid a bad fit between policy and reality and help create a more teacher centred agenda for educational change.