Anxiety of performativity and anxiety of performance: self-evaluation as bad faith

Self-evaluation, a devolved, rigorous form of teacher inspection, has increasingly been promoted in educational circles as a way to balance both teacher autonomy and accountability. Such balancing acts help to alleviate anxiety around inspection, for the teacher who would otherwise face a visit from an inspector, and for the public who are concerned about self-evaluation being less objective. Using the Irish policy of self-evaluation, this paper will first explore the evidence-based approaches and the appropriation of a ‘language of evaluation’ that are inherent to so-called low-stakes accountability systems. In part, such mechanisms are used in order to alleviate anxiety. The anxiety that self-evaluation focuses on, however, corresponds only to aspects of teaching that are conducive to measurement, and therefore refers solely to what may be called an anxiety of performativity. Furthermore, its attempts to repress an anxiety of performativity ironically fails to acknowledge a more fundamental form of anxiety that teaching as a ‘performance’ involves. Using Sartre’s idea of ‘bad faith’, this paper will ultimately argue that teaching inevitably involves an element of anxiety that should not be repressed but rather should be lived and worked with well, something which self-evaluation in its current form fails to capture.