Performing Substitute Teaching

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.