The call for papers for this special issue specified a theme of commodification, and we received a wide array of interpretations of the meaning and presence of commodification in education. Selecting the few contributions that we have was not an easy matter, since there were so many legitimately concerning variations on the theme that are playing out in education today—which, in our view, bolsters the need for this and future work on the topic. Our selections were ultimately determined by two rationales: First, we wanted to represent various genres of contribution, and to that end, we have two essays that are philosophical approaches, two that are case research papers, and one that is premised in autoethnography. Second, we wanted to build a coherent story, explaining how commodification is a form of rot that decays human education, how this phenomenon is playing out in schooling, and then offering means of resistance by which we might overcome it in the long run. We hope that the selections and sequencing give you that story.
Matt Hayden clarifies the meaning and application of commodification. He configures commodification of teachers and students as the result of technical interest combined with the capitalist logic that, to be meaningful, activity must result in products.
Katie Nagrotsky’s article demonstrates this commodification in action: how education is undermined by new graduate schools of educations’ operationalized version of teaching. What she points out is that the most profound, lasting impact is not to individual students or subjects, but to the entire assumptive framework of the teachers ensconced in this neoessentialist “parallel education structure” culture of pedagogy.
Greg Harman subjects definitions to conceptual analysis in order to propose that it is not merely neoessentialist reform that commodifies in the ways described by the other authors, but reform as an institution in and of itself. He asks that we retrieve a view of education that could allow us to escape reform.
Jewett, Yanez, and Medrano bring us in close to the questions and concerns of students and teachers uncomfortably aware of the artificiality of the commodified space of schooling. The teachers and the students both are sure that this is not of, by, or for them, but only is sustained in terms of their presence as objects to external ends, as resources and points of exchange—scores, statistics, laborers.
Schutz, Woodard, Diaz, and Peek document their effort to reverse these trends by means of better teacher preparation. They engage their pre-service teachers in humanizing pedagogies, showing how there are definite possibilities, answers to the very call that is made by the other articles in specific and careful ways. They are facilitating education in their pre-service teachers to enable them as teachers to do the same for their students.
Two of the articles within the issue remain skeptical of the possibilities of schooling transcending its commodifying ways, and Nagrotsky shows us how many teachers are being indoctrinated into the darkness of the neoessentialist paradigm that blinds them to the human purposes of teaching.
Yet there is little point in writing if the only end is no positive end. Jewett, Yanez, and Medrano provide detailed descriptions of means by which vital, emancipatory dialogues can become part of our teaching lives. Schutz, Woodard, Diaz, and Peek show us that our industry and attention can engage teachers in humanizing pedagogies that they will carry forward.
The hopeful end of this issue is a call to fight for decommodification and for humanization in various ways. Hope lies in the fact that schooling is not a monolith. It is comprised of teachers like Schutz, Woodard, Diaz, and Peek’s, and students like those whom Jewett, Yanez, and Medrano let us hear, who are quite aware of what they are enduring. Hope lies in sharing these stories and concepts, and in getting anyone who will listen to question the entire approach of reform and the defining of education in operationalized terms.
Hope includes, more immediately, using any means that the reader has in their own life to peacefully call out, resist, and close down the neoessentialist institutions and ideologies that are the most heinous and unapologetic promoters of commodification. As teachers, it calls us quite specifically to defy our role as producers of “progress” and claim our role as educators of human beings, helping students to construct meaning and facilitating their personal, self-actualizing journeys. This is what is just and right for people, what social justice for education demands from us all.
