Being a Teacher

ISBN-13: 9789811973253 / Angielski / Miękka / 2023

Alison M. Brady

Opis

This book re-conceptualizes teaching through an engagement with Jean-Paul Sartre’s early existentialist thought. Against the grain of teacher accountability, it turns to the demanding account of being human in Sartre’s thought, on the basis of which an alternative account of teaching can be developed. It builds upon Sartre’s key concepts related to the self, freedom, bad faith, and the Other, such that they might open up original ways of thinking about the practices of teaching. Indeed, given the everyday complexities that characterize teaching, as well as the vulnerabilities and uncertainty that it so often involves, this book ultimately aims to create a space in which to reimagine forms of accounting that move from technicist ways of thinking to existential sensitivity in relation to one’s practice as a teacher.

Spis treści

Chapter 1. Introduction

1.1 Why I Write

1.2 Why Sartre and Why Now?

1.3 Overview of the book

Part I. Evaluating Teachers

Chapter 2. Self-Evaluation and the Technicist Logic of Teaching

2.1 The Neoliberal Turn

2.2 Neoliberalism in the Irish Context

2.3 School Self-Evaluation: Autonomy, Accountability and Evidence

2.4 Towards a New Account

References

Part II. Sartre, Existentialism and Education

Chapter 3. Navigating Vocabularies: Transitioning from Policy to Existentialism

3.1 The Origins of Existentialist Thought?

3.2 Common Themes in Existentialist Thought

3.3 Sartrian Existentialism

3.4 An Educational Focus

References

Chapter 4. Putting Oneself into Words: Sartre and the Production of Selfhood

4.1 Phenomenology of the Self

4.2 Transcendental and Material Conceptions

4.3 The Produced Self

4.4 Freedom, Responsibility and the Self

References

Chapter 5. Freedom and Facticity in the Classroom

5.1 Sartre’s ‘Phenomenological Ontology’

5.2 The Pursuit of Meaning

5.3 Freedom and Responsibility

5.4 Existentialism and Ethics

5.5 Freedom and Facticity in the Classroom

References

Chapter 6. Bad Faith, Sincerity and the Role of the Teacher

6.1 Uneasy Tensions

6.2 Bad Faith and Self-Deception

6.3 Sincerity and the Forms of Bad Faith

6.4 The Faith of Bad Faith

6.5 Being Who You Are in the Classroom?

References

Chapter 7. The Look of the Other and the Experience of Teaching: The Failure of Solipsism and the Pursuit of Vulnerability

7.1 From Being an Individual to Being for the Other

7.2 The Look of the Other

7.3 Our Embodied Relationship with Others

7.4 The Self and the Other in the Educational Context

7.5 Being an ‘Authentic’ Teacher?

References

Part III. Accounting for Oneself in Teaching

Chapter 8. Parrhesia, Bad Faith and Accounting for Oneself

8.1 Sartre, Foucault and Care of the Self

8.2 Care of the Self as Parrhesia

8.3 Parrhesia and Bad Faith

8.4 Autobiographical Writing as a Parrhesiastic Practice

8.5 The Beautiful Risk

8.6 Parrhesiastic Techniques in Teaching

8.7 Trusting Teachers

References

Chapter 9. Towards an Existentialist Account of Teaching

9.1 An Anecdotal Account

9.2 Technicist Accounts

9.3 Towards an Existentialist Account

9.4 Giving an Account of Oneself

References

Chapter 10. Concluding Thoughts and Reflections

10.1 Summary of the Text

10.2 Final Reflections

Appendices

O autorze

Alison M. Brady is a Lecturer at the UCL Institute of Education. She has been teaching on a range of undergraduate and post-graduate programmes there since 2015, specializing in the field of philosophy of education and public policy.

Alison completed her doctoral studies at UCL in 2020. Her research focuses on re-conceptualising how we account for educational practices through an engagement with 20^th century existentialist philosophy, particularly the early work of Jean-Paul Sartre. She has published on this and related topics in the Journal for Philosophy of Education, the British Journal of Educational Studies, the Oxford Review of Education, and has also contributed to several books including Philosophy and the Study of Education: New Perspectives on the Complex Relationship (Routledge, 2019) and Philosophical Readings of the Contemporary University: In Shadows and Light (Springer, 2021).

Aside from this, Alison is also an elected member of the Executive Committee of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, who generously funded the final years of her doctoral research. She is also working on a project with Warwick University that investigates the role of philosophy in promoting a wider understanding of mental health in schools. Recently, she has become interested in the intersection of literature, philosophy, and education, and in particular, how education might be re-imagined through an exploration of existentialist novels. She is currently working on a second book on this topic.