In this narrative, combining elements of autobiography and of argument, I set out to do three things. First, I tell a story of one young person's journey into teaching (and, in due course, into teacher education). It's my story of my journey, but I hope it can shed a little light on others' journeys and on the possibilities for such journeys.…

This paper analyzes academic identities and academic agency in the context of knowledge management and production that permeate the contemporary university. A practical argumentation on the meaning of teaching activity seeks to propose, in contrast to traditional approaches, that identity and meaning are constitutive dimensions of present…

This article considers different views of what it means to act as a professional and relates these to teaching. The traditional, covenantal one described by Shulman which emphasises autonomy and trust is contrasted with the contractual one associated with neoliberalism based on compliance with externally set standards. Restricted and extended…

What can one person teach another about living meaningfully? Recent discussions about the relationship between education and finding meaning in life have tended to focus on institutional and curricular matters and, as a consequence, have sidelined the importance of the vocation of teaching. Drawing on Raimond Gaita's philosophy of education, I…

A lot of attention has been devoted in the last 30 years to understanding nativeness and what has traditionally been called non-nativeness. While many studies have attempted to problematize the dichotomic division between so-called native speakers and non-native speakers, several others have specifically focussed on the language teaching…

In this article, David Hansen works with two conceptions of "being with." The first is Jean-Luc Nancy's ontological version as found in his "Being Singular Plural" (1999). The second is Hansen's ontic formulation as expressed in his recent book, "Reimagining the Call to Teach: A Witness to Teachers and Teaching"…

Increased interest in teaching has been evident in recent decades, accompanied by heightened activity in promoting teaching quality. Programs about teaching and learning in higher education are one strategy adopted for this purpose. This article is concerned with reflecting upon, and theorising, the experience of teaching in one such accredited…

Talcott Parsons did not leave us with a global and consistent sociology of education. Instead, different aspects can be found in Parsons's oeuvre in different theoretical contexts. This paper summarises these different parts of Parsons's sociology of education -- his writings on the concepts of education and socialisation, the university, the…

This philosophical and field-based article draws together two conceptions of teaching that have not been linked, as yet, in the scholarly literature: teaching as a calling or vocation, and teaching as the enactment of care ethics. We draw upon Hansen's extensive work on calling and juxtapose it with Quek's recent work on care ethics in teaching.…

In 2009, John Hattie's book Visible Learning: A Synthesis of over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement brought big data to education. In the decade and a half since Visible Learning was originally published it has been aggressively marketed and has now grown into a large suite of branded books, tools, and products. Visible Learning continues…

In this article, we examine Emmanuel Levinas' understanding of ethics through a conceptual analysis of ethics as 'mise en question'. We contribute our perspective to the conversation on the Levinasian approach to education provoked by Alistair Miller, Soyoung Lee and Paul Standish. Through a systematic reading of Levinas' texts as well as his…

We have become well-familiar with how unpoetic teaching can be. The prevalence, furthered by much recent reform, of a systematic school culture focused on accountability, standardisation, and learnification often renders teaching dehumanised work. This paper theorises a poetics of teaching. We begin considering poetics, focusing on figurative…

When confronted with the ineffable, poets turn to metaphor. Similarly, philosophers of education often employ metaphors and analogies to explain the functions of education (e.g., schools are families, machines, prisons, etc.), and, more specifically, the role of educators. Teachers have been described as prophets, liberators, and midwives, which,…

Concerned with European Union (EU) governance of teachers since the mid-2000s, this paper makes an empirical as well as theoretical contribution to education policy studies in the context of EU governance. Drawing on neo-institutional field theory and an empirical material of policy documents and interviews, the paper analyses the consolidation…

This work is an Indigenous Métissage weaving together poems, stories, scholarship, and images. It suggests that the distress, educational struggles, changes in traditional educational pathways, and other behaviors of current youth in response to social challenges offer ways out of these crises rather than being symptoms of them. This work offers…