Critical Education Volume 6 Number 9 May 1, 2015 ISSN 1920-4125 Speaking Back to the Neoliberal Discourse on Teaching How US Teachers Use Social Media to Redefine Teaching Jessica Shiller Towson University Citation: Shiller, J. (2015). Speaking back to the neoliberal discourse on teaching: How U.S. teachers use social media to redefine teaching. Critical Education, 6(9). Retrieved from http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled/article/view/184931 An article in the Critical Education series The Media and the Neoliberal Privatization of Education Abstract Through mainstream mass media, neoliberal discourse has come to dominate all social policy realms in the United States. In education, the result has been a commodification of schools and teachers. Social media, however, has allowed individuals to speak back to neoliberal discourses by providing a space to critique media and to present a counter-narrative to what media has presented. Through an analysis of teacher-authored blogs specifically, this paper uses virtual ethnographic and critical discourse methods to analyze how teachers have been able to challenge the dominant frames about the quality of their own profession, challenge the urge to reduce teaching to improved test scores, and to dismiss the privatization of teacher preparation. In so doing, use social media as a tool for resistance and are able to re-frame teacher quality to the public. Readers are free to copy, display, and distribute this article, as long as the work is attributed to the author(s) and Critical Education, it is distributed for non-commercial purposes only, and no alteration or transformation is made in the work. More details of this Creative Commons license are available from http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. All other uses must be approved by the author(s) or Critical Education. Critical Education is published by the Institute for Critical Educational Studies and housed at the University of British Columbia. Articles are indexed by EBSCO Education Research Complete and Directory of Open Access Journals.