Chapter 17: Constructing And Constricting Teachers: RateMyTeachers.com as a Knotted Space of the Educational Imaginary

Colleges of education, and the scholars and research they produce, largely fixate on schools, school people, and the institutionalized process of schooling as the epicenter of educational activity, often to the exclusion of all other sites of learning and teaching. Whereas this emphasis finds its ground in the historical emergence of education as an academic field (Spring, 2005), it manufactures a synecdochical reduction of education as a broad human activity to a specialized, institutional form. Further, and more germane to this chapter’s argument, the bracketing off of schools from other cultural sites of education obscures the complicated structural reciprocity between schools and the culture in which they are embedded. That is, looking at schools as closed institutional systems ignores the ways in which dominant, extrainstitutional cultural notions of schooling and teaching work to re/create expectations, performances, and evaluations of school life, particularly from our students’ perspectives. From the Hollywood curricula of savior-teachers and savvy-slacker, miscreant students (Carpenter, Milam, & Lovett, 2006; Dalton, 2006, 2004; McCarthy, 1998; Trier, 2001) to the ubiquitous derision of post-Reagan educational policy discourse (Pinar, 2004; Spring, 2005), schools and their inhabitants are largely (over)determined for students via complex, often contradictory, public pedagogies. And, in ironic fashion, it is these very pedagogies that delimit teaching and learning to the activities found within a school, and even there, to a fixed range of acceptable performances and practices.