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Performing Substitute Teaching

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Abstract

Formal education is both a right and an obligation bestowed on young people in most all nations of the world. Teachers (adults) and students (youth) form a co-present dyadic contract that must be maintained within the classroom. Substitute teachers fill a role in sustaining the integrity of this teacher-student link, whenever teachers are absent. This article describes one ethnographer’s quest to use strategies from performative ethnography to better function as a substitute teacher and, more generally, to adapt techniques from auto-ethnography to find a purpose while doing subbing in public schools of a Borderlands county in the Southwest.

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Correspondence to Keith V. Bletzer.

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Bletzer, K.V. Performing Substitute Teaching. Urban Rev 42, 403–421 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-009-0137-y

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