Teaching to Labour and Social Reproduction: Pedagogical Relics of The Factory Model in 21^st Century Structures of Schooling

This qualitative case study examines whether the social ideologies of secondary school teachers about the future employment prospects of their Mexican American working-class students influence the pedagogies they deploy in their own classrooms. Drawing from social reproduction theory and earlier studies that have addressed social stratification through schooling, we explore how teachers understand their academic duties to students, how through their pedagogical labor teachers serve as social exemplars, and whether they engage their students in learning through their labour. Findings suggest that teachers’ beliefs about students are contradictory and problematic, as are the associated pedagogies they use with them. Though largely unconscious, teachers enact a de facto social reproduction in the way they frame students’ economic opportunities as bleak but inevitable. The authors suggest that teacher preparation programs engage teacher candidates about the history of factory model schooling and the normalized inequities that such a model continues to reproduce.