Conspicuous practice: self-surveillance and commodification in education

Teachers have always been watched; only more recently have they been surveilled, with senior leaders, peers, students and external stakeholders all collecting performance data. Yet contemporary surveillance in schools and colleges increasingly relies on watching the self, with teachers voluntarily participating in their own surveillance, making their practice visible for easy consumption by interested parties. This article builds on previous work on the surveillance of teachers to argue that this ‘conspicuous practice’ represents a convergence of surveillance and consumerism, with teachers being recreated as commodities, becoming both the ‘merchandise and the marketing agent’ in Bauman’s (2007) terms, embodying the entrepreneurial self to maximise employability. Through social media promotion such as Twitter and LinkedIn to exploiting open plan learning spaces, teachers engage in conspicuous practice for three main reasons: from fear, to avoid sanction; as a result of acculturation into commodified corporate environments; finally as a means of routine resistance, employing the dramaturgical self for personal gain, to avoid work or to re-appropriate professional practice.