Workshop report: Using data from a history of Smile to overcome 'historic loneliness'.

In England, the neoliberal political agenda has created an environment in which teachers are constantly subjected to a discourse of marketisation, managerialism and performativity. It is also part of the neoliberal project to cut us adrift from our past and to de-historicise our lived experience of the present. We are suffering from what John Berger has called a sense of ‘historic loneliness’. Many teachers are engaged in re-storying themselves against this audit culture. We are currently exploring using stories from the past – in this case, recollections of Smile, a teacher-led mathematics curriculum project with roots in inner London in the 1970s – to combat this ‘historic loneliness’ and to create a space in which to understand, interrogate and oppose the dominant discourses. We have conducted extended interviews with groups of Smile teachers from an earlier era and are now looking at ways to make these data perform this potentially transformative function. In this workshop, we presented a small part of the data in three different ways – as edited transcript, as story and as aphoristic fragment – and invited participants to compare and contrast the effectiveness or otherwise of these forms of presentation.