Abstract:
The business strategy of ‘rolling intake’ (or continuous enrolment) defines the lived realities of teachers and academic managers in private language schools. Embedded deeply within institutional processes, it becomes an unquestioned systemic feature. As an operating principle, it serves as the catalyst for an organizational culture of perpetual crisis management, characterized by short-term thinking. Pedagogically suspect, ‘rolling intake’, at best, complicates the professional practices of teachers and academic managers. At worst, it is a major contributor to the job insecurities of language teachers in the private sector. Founded on two research periods collectively spanning one year, this “at-home” ethnographic study (Alvesson, 2009) sought to investigate how five teachers and four academic managers negotiated the professional challenges they faced, individually and as a community, while working in a private training establishment (PTE) in Auckland, New Zealand. On a certain level, the research project represents an examination of the relationships between stakeholders’ professional identities, the people they teach, and the working environment. More profoundly, as arrived at through grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006), the study implicates ‘rolling intake’ and other systemic ‘innovations’ as instrumental in rendering teachers and their pedagogic concerns invisible. In this thesis, I demonstrate how, despite an inherently anti-social system subordinating pedagogic concerns to a commercial ethic, teachers keep on teaching, and learners keep on learning. They do this through individual acts of resistance which defy the cold rationality of a profit-oriented system, while also avoiding the myopic gaze of audit regimes that cannot capture the complexities of educational practices.
