"Its Influence Taints All": Urban Mathematics Teachers Resisting Performativity through Engagement with the Past

In England, globalisation and neoliberal political agendas have created an environment in which teachers are constantly measured and ranked and subjected to a discourse of marketisation, managerialism, and performativity. This measuring, ranking, and subjection is particularly strongly felt in urban schools, where a discourse that recognised the systematic disadvantages that many urban children experience has been replaced by a discourse of "failing" students, teachers, and schools. The effect is to erode teachers' sense of independence and moral authority and to challenge their individual and collective professional and personal identities. The need to understand the current policy environment, to step aside and look on critically, becomes more important even as it becomes more difficult. Many teachers are engaged in re-storying themselves against this audit culture. In this article, the authors argue that it is possible, through excavating the past, to offer current-day teachers' stories to support this process of re-envisaging what they are, might be, and might become in their professional lives. Herein, they offer a response from one currently serving teacher, the third author, to the experience of performativity and they illustrate some ways in which she is able to mobilise historical stories from a previous urban teachers' curriculum project in her resistance to dominant, neoliberal discourses.