Being a Teacher

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 20th 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.

1. Introduction.- Part I. Evaluating Teachers.- 2. Self-Evaluation and the Technicist Logic of Teaching.- Part II. Sartre, Existentialism and Education.- 3. Navigating Vocabularies: Transitioning from Policy to Existentialism.- 4. Putting Oneself into Words: Sartre and the Production of Selfhood.- 5. Freedom and Facticity in the Classroom.- 6. Bad Faith, Sincerity and the Role of the Teacher.- 7. The Look of the Other and the Experience of Teaching: The Failure of Solipsism and the Pursuit of Vulnerability.- Part III. Accounting for Oneself in Teaching.- 8. Parrhesia, Bad Faith and Accounting for Oneself.- 9. Towards an Existentialist Account of Teaching.- 10. Concluding Thoughts and Reflections.- Appendices.