Abstract
I begin the final chapter with an account from my own experiences of teaching. The purpose of this account is not to provide an ‘accurate’ depiction of teaching, nor to generalise the experiences of all teachers. Rather, it should serve as a point of resonance that demonstrates how and in what way Sartre’s ideas make sense in the classroom. Following this, I explore two ways in which this – and indeed any – account of teaching might be understood. Firstly, I discuss ‘technicist’ forms of account-giving that, with the aim of cultivating evaluative dispositions perpetuate an underlying assumption that connects accountability with accuracy. In contrast to this, I introduce what might be termed as ‘existential’ forms of account-giving, garnered from an engagement with Sartre. Ultimately, this can be thought of as an ongoing project of engagement with one’s responses in the classroom, with the commitments made manifest in these responses, and with one’s responsibility in light of this. Notwithstanding the complexity that this latter form of account-giving involves, new understandings of accountability and account-giving in teaching are invited, not as an imposed requirement or a skill, but as a way of being in the classroom.
“Look,” he said, with sudden vehemence, “why don’t you put yourself into your writing? You’re more interesting than all these Renées and Lisas.” The blood flushed up in my cheeks; it was a hot day, and as usual the place was full of smoke and noise. I felt as though someone had banged me hard on the heard. “I’d never dare to do that,” I said. To put my raw, undigested self into a book, to lose perspective, compromise myself – no, I couldn’t do it, I found the whole idea terrifying. “Screw up your courage,” Sartre told me, and kept pressing the point.
Beauvoir (1994, p. 380) on a conversation with Sartre prior to ‘Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter’.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
‘Tough Young Teachers’ follows the lives of trainee teachers undergoing their ‘Teach First’ placements in the UK.
- 2.
It is important to mention that Claudenia is not just a young, inexperienced teacher but also a black female in a subject that, traditionally, both women and BME teachers are underrepresented in. The fact that Mr McDonald is a white older male might also have something to do with the automatic respect he seemed to generate. This is, of course, a belated explanation for the students’ behaviour, but it nevertheless points to the idea that our relationship with others in part depends on the ways in which we are characterised by virtue of our race, gender, and ‘place’ within a particular subject area.
- 3.
Of course, my use of Sartre might be thought of in the same way – because of Sartre, I now focus on aspects of my practice that would have not been brought to light had I engaged with another thinker. I do not wish to deny that the anecdotal account I offer is latent with existentialist underpinnings. But as mentioned, Sartre serves as a ‘touchstone’ for engaging with my practices, and not for explaining them.
- 4.
Of course, this is not to suggest that we should never be concerned with accuracy in accounts, nor that all accounts are of equal merit along these lines. It does not suggest that accuracy cannot be ‘approached’, nor that accounts should not be open to interrogation, particularly when there are high stakes involved. But for such concerns to be part of the conversation, the instrumental value of those accounts needs to be considered – i.e. what those accounts are for, and what they seek to capture in light of this. In the case of accounting for teaching, perhaps accuracy is not the ultimate aim.
- 5.
This is perhaps also true of the waiter in Sartre’s (2018) example of ‘bad faith’. Indeed, the waiter was also already exposed as a person, despite his attempts to suppress this through enacting exactly what he believed his ‘role’ required. This is what makes the role so difficult to sustain – for example, when confronted by a rude customer, it is difficult to maintain composure in the way that waiters ‘are supposed to’. Waitering also involves a sense of vulnerability, one that Sartre does not seem to appreciate in his example.
- 6.
Poetry might also do this, but one would not necessarily be fazed if a poet decided to write in a non-committal way. Sartre argues that poets use language in a different way than prose writers – e.g. they are less concerned with being directly intelligible, or with sending a clear message to their readers.
- 7.
Choice in this sense does not mean that I am always ‘choosing’ to offer an account of myself or not, but rather, it relates to the ways in which situations are brought to light by virtue of our (freely chosen) fundamental projects, a choice that is therefore embedded both in situations where one feels compelled to offer an account on their own accord as well as in situations where one is forced into offering an account because they are ‘answerable’ to another (e.g. their superior).
- 8.
This is often linked to the Aristotelian concept of ‘phronesis’. In the literature on professional accountability, however, phronesis is often narrowly defined as a ‘skill’ or a ‘technique’ (e.g. Jos & Tompkins, 2004).
- 9.
The authors also locate this line of thinking in what we might consider to be the more ‘noble’ justifications of education, such as the emancipatory aims that you find in thinkers such as Freire or Rancière.
- 10.
I am not fully convinced by this account of immanence, however, given that any description of teaching that we might call ‘immanent’ involves implicit norms and expectations that ‘transcend’ the given moment that is described. Indeed, descriptions involve explanations that are implicitly normative in that they relate to the meaning-making of those offering the account – i.e. their own values that transcend the interpretations of each given moment itself. Whilst I disagree with the overly sharp distinction between transcendence and immanence, the discussion is nevertheless useful in situating the current focus of accountability on external justifications rather than the ways in which a teacher is ontologically accountable in the classroom.
References
Atkinson, P., & Delamont, S. (2006). Rescuing narrative from qualitative research. Narrative Inquiry, 16(1), 164–172.
Biesta, G. J. J. (2009). Good education in an age of measurement: On the need to reconnect with the question of purpose in education. Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability, 21, 33–46.
Biesta, G. J. J. (2014). The beautiful risk of education. Routledge.
Biesta, G. J. J. (2017). The rediscovery of teaching. Routledge.
Blake, N., Smeyers, P., Smith, R., & Standish, P. (2000). Education in an age of nihilism: Education and moral standards. Routledge.
Brady, A. M. (2016). The regime of self-evaluation: Self-conception for teachers and schools. British Journal of Educational Studies, 64(4), 523–541.
Brady, A. M. (2019). Anxiety of performativity and anxiety of performance: Self-evaluation as bad faith. Oxford Review of Education, 45(5), 605–618.
Brady, A. M. (2020). Response and responsibility: Rethinking accountability in education. Journal of Philosophy of Education. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.12501
Calvino, I. (1992). If on a winter’s night a traveller. Minerva Books Ltd. Originally published in 1979.
Camus, A. (2005). The myth of Sisyphus and other essays. Penguin Classics. Originally published in 1942.
de Beauvoir, S. (1994). The prime of life: The autobiography of Simone de Beauvoir 1929–1944. Da Capo Press.
Department of Education and Skills (Ireland). (2016a). SSE update 8. Stationary Office.
Department of Education and Skills (Ireland). (2016b). School self-evaluation guidelines for post-primary schools. Stationary Office.
Fraser, H. (2004). Doing narrative research: Analysing personal stories line by line. Qualitative Social Work, 32(2), 179–201.
Grek, S., & Lindgren, J. (2015). In S. Grek & J. Lindgren (Eds.), Governing by inspection. Routledge.
Halliday, J. (1998). Technicism, reflective practice and authenticity in teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 14(6), 597–605.
Johnson, J. A. (2014). The ethics of big data in higher education. In: J. Britz and M. Zimmer, eds. The Digital Future of Education Special Issue: International Review of Information Ethics, 21, 3–10.
Jos, P. H., & Tompkins, M. E. (2004). The accountability paradox in an age of reinvention: The perennial problem of preserving character and judgement. Administration and Society, 36(3), 255–281.
Josselson, R. (2007). The ethical attitude in narrative research: Principles and practicalities. In D. J. Clandinin (Ed.), Handbook of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology. Sage Publications Ltd.
Josselson, R. (2012). Narrative research. In N. J. Salkind (Ed.), Encyclopedia of research design. SAGE Publications Ltd.
Kraatila, E. (2019). Conspicuous fabrications: Speculative fiction as a tool for confronting post-truth discourse. Narrative Inquiry, 29(2), 418–433.
MacBeath, J. (2006). School inspection and self-evaluation: Working with the new relationship. Routledge.
McNamara, G., & O’Hara, J. (2008). Trusting schools and teachers: Developing educational professionalism through self-evaluation. Peter Lang.
Moen, T. (2006). Reflections on the narrative research approach. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 5(4), 56–69.
Mooney Simmie, G., & McKenna, D. (2017). From dialogue to governance: A critical analysis of the school completion programme in the Republic of Ireland 2002 to 2016. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 15(2), 304–324.
Mulgan, R. (2000). ‘Accountability’: An ever-expanding concept? Public Administration, 78(3), 555–573.
Peterson, B. R. (2016). The development of a disposition for reflective practice. In A. G. Welch & S. Areepattamannil (Eds.), Dispositions in teacher education. Sense Publishers.
Phillips, D. (1997). Telling the truth about stories. Teaching and Teacher Education, 13(1), 101–109.
Polkinghorne, D. E. (1988). Narrative knowing and human sciences. State University of New York Press.
Polkinghorne, D. E. (2007). Validity issues in narrative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 13(4), 471–486.
Sartre, J. P. (2001). What is literature? Routledge. Originally published in 1947.
Sartre, J. P. (2008). The man with the tape recorder. In J. P. Sartre (Ed.), Between existentialism and Marxism. Verso Books. Originally published in Les Temps Modernes in 1969.
Sartre, J. P. (2011). Transcendence of the ego: A sketch for phenomenological description (S. Richmond, Trans.). Routledge. Originally published in 1937.
Sartre, J. P. (2018). Being and nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology. (S. Richmond, Trans.). Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Originally published in 1943.
Schön, D. A. (2008). Reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic Books. Originally published in 1983.
Sinclair, A. (1995). The chameleon of accountability: Forms and discourses. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 20(2–3), 219–237.
Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self: The making of the modern identity. Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, C. (1991). The ethics of authenticity. Harvard University Press.
Thynne, I., & Goldring, J. (1987). Accountability and control: Government officials and the exercise of power. Law Book Co.
Tough Young Teachers (2014). [TV programme], 3: BBC.
Vlieghe, J., & Zamojski, P. (2019). Towards an ontology of teaching: Thing-centred pedagogy, affirmation and love for the world. Wiley.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Brady, A.M. (2022). Towards an Existentialist Account of Teaching. In: Being a Teacher. Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education, vol 19. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7323-9_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7323-9_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-19-7322-2
Online ISBN: 978-981-19-7323-9
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)