A Bootstraps Theory of Equity (and Why We Need to Change It) 

Abstract The discourses educators use have power. Teacher talk positions students and educators and builds storylines in speech acts which speak to larger cultural narratives and norms. This article explores educators positioning of equity throughout emergency online schooling revealing a cultural storyline where educators feel they carry the burden of increasing social inequity while simultaneously often positioning themselves helpless or extremely limited in a system which they view as unchanging and unsupportive. Resulting, often, to ascribing a neoliberal bootstrap’s theory of equity in online education where learners are expected to succeed through rugged individualism in a perceived meritocracy which only serves to further ingratiate inequities. Moreover, the storylines and positioning of educators’ selves illustrate another crisis in education which began well before the pandemic, the disempowerment and deprofessionalization of educators and burnout and shortages that it helps fuel.