Abstract
For this study I utilized auto-ethnography to examine the way neoliberal rhetoric impacted my early teaching experiences as a white, middle class, female teacher in two racially and ethnically diverse high schools: one urban, the other suburban, and both receiving Title 1 Federal funding based on familial socio-economic status reporting. In a field overrepresented by white women (Feistritzer, 2011), my personal experience contributes to the body of research about race, gender, and class in education. Specifically for the auto-ethnographic recall I employed an intersectional lens to consider how my curricula and instructional choices either affirmed or denied race, class, and gender differences. From this self-study, I crafted fictional vignettes with four character composites: Neve Bianco a white, female first year teacher; Marcus Jones a black, male mentor and Pathways program director; Luis an adolescent, male Puerto Rican student; and Melanie a biracial, adolescent female. Each character's story offers insights about the effects of neoliberal discourse in the fictional urban school and community of Clinton and provides alternative perspectives to the events. The distinction between mainstream creative fiction and fiction-based research (FBR) is the author's attention to research objectives. These FBR novels called "social fictions" (Leavy, 2013) are the result of research used to create novels, plays, novellas or short-story collections that have wide appeal and raise awareness about social issues. To clarify that fiction is created and not used in the research, I refer to my fictional vignettes as research-based fiction (RBF). I created RBF because of my beliefs about the need to make social research accessible outside of academia as well as the innate empathic quality of literature. I postulate research-based fiction provides an underutilized medium for engaging in critical, empathic dialogue necessary for teachers to achieve conscientization about white supremacist capitalist patriarchy's oppressive silencing.