Spotlight on Teaching: Critical Challenges and Possibilities for the post-Covid era

10:30-15:45 GMT
 
In this one-day online conference three international speakers will highlight certain challenges facing teachers in schools today.

Speakers:

• Professor Andreas Bonnet (University of Hamburg, Germany)
• Mary Osei-Oppong (Secondary School teacher, Scotland)
• Professor Sheron Fraser-Burgess (Ball State University, USA)

This conference aims to make challenges facing teachers today visible, so that they can be collectively addressed. Participants are invited to discuss what each of these challenges might mean for the possibility of teaching in schools as we look beyond the Covid era, and how taken together, they may impact the future of democratic education.
 
Free and Open to the public. Registration is required. Participants can register for one or more talks in the series (see Eventbrite links below).
 
Talk 1 of 3:  “Monsters We Breed? – Why Uncertainty is Crucial to Teaching and Learning, How Conceptualisations of Teacher Knowledge Deal With It, And Why We Shouldn’t Be Astonished”
 
Professor Andreas Bonnet, University of Hamburg, Germany
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Abstract
The existential threats coming with global warming and the COVID-pandemic have made us painfully aware of how naïve the modern belief in human omnipotence was, and what a challenge the uncertainty is that comes with this realization. This challenge showed for example in how the general public seems to expect that research delivers facts and secure knowledge rather than conflicting hypotheses or models and ongoing critical discourse. So, if human beings learn throughout their entire life, and if this learning necessarily entails dealing with uncertainty, why is it so difficult for us to endure uncertainty, openness, perplexity, or disorientation? There are at least a psychological and a sociological angle to this. I will take the latter. In the talk, I will briefly mention some theorisations of learning that support the claim of uncertainty being uncircumventable in, or even constitutive of learning and education. The core of the talk will then be the presentation of different theorisations of teacher knowledge and the discussion, in how far they account for, highlight, downplay, or deny that dealing with uncertainty is a, if not the crucial challenge that professional teachers have to deal with. To conclude with, I will cast a rather critical look at teacher education in Germany where the Bologna process seems to have driven us towards a practice that is fairly hostile to uncertainty, and that operates on an undercomplex and shortsighted concept of practical experience. So perhaps, taking into account research into classroom interaction and teacher knowledge, and in view of our own practices of teacher education, my initial astonishment at the challenge that uncertainty poses, is all but rhetoric. It’s the monster we breed, and if we don’t do anything about it, we just get what we deserve.

Biography
Andreas Bonnet is Professor of TEFL at the University of Hamburg, Germany and is currently Visiting Researcher at University of Edinburgh. He has done extensive research in the areas of content and language integrated learning, co-operative learning and multilingualism in the foreign language classroom. His empirical research comes from a qualitative angle and uses interpretative techniques, such as the documentary method. He is particularly interested in research on teacher knowledge and classroom interaction and holds broad expertise as a teacher educator, having run professional development courses in Germany, Switzerland and other European countries.
 
Talk 2 of 3:  “For The Love of Teaching; The Anti-Racist Battlefield in Education”
Mary Osei-Oppong, Secondary School Teacher (retired), Scotland 
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Abstract:
In this talk, Mary Osei-Oppong will discuss her book, and provide a short story about her experience of racism in the education system as a secondary school teacher and why she wrote the book. The session will provide some opportunity for participants to share their stories if they wish to.

About the Book: For the Love of Teaching gives an account of experienced teacher Mary Osei-Oppong in her quest of fighting Institutionalised Racism and her relentless campaign for Diversity in The Teaching Profession. The hard work she put in to encourage and promote Multiculturalism, Equality and Inclusion in her classroom at a higher level and she shares her experiences with all readers. This book offers help and advice to educators at all levels and urge all of us to work together to bring about change and harmony in the workplace and to make the world a better place for all!

Biography
Mary Osei-Oppong is a qualified secondary school teacher of Business Studies, Computing Science, Religious Education, and also a qualified Chartered Teacher.
She taught for twenty-two years in Scotland and took early retirement on 10th August 2020. She has lived in Scotland for 40 years. She was an activist from a young age, throughout her career and will continue to fight for equal opportunity issues until it is not physically possible for her to do so. She made an impactful contribution to Scottish Education and integrated well in Scottish society.
 
Talk 3 of 3:  An Ethic for Keeping the Republic: Teacher Citizenry’s Promise & The Moral Heart of Democracy
 
Professor Sheron Fraser-Burgess, Ball State University, USA 
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Abstract
A growing genre of research about practicing K-12 teachers detail the profession’s challenges in the context of neo-liberalism. Santoro (2018) describes disempowerment in the loss of freedom to make pedagogical judgments (S1=Disempowerment). Mawhinney & Rinke (2019) highlight the growing fatigue from constantly shifting administrative demands and evaluation (S2=Fatigue) and McCorkle & Rodriguez (2021) detail the presence of profound ideological conflicts between political and religious beliefs and the curriculum (S3=Politics). In this paper, I argue that these are situationist threats (S1-3) to the moral work of teaching (Osguthorpe and Matthew Sanger, 2013). By its very rationale, MWT does not allow for alternate reasoning (in not teaching morally or teaching morality) because it situates its ethic within the profession itself. In a philosophical/theoretical methodology, I argue that framing the teacher’s moral agency within a democratic morality holds potential for overcoming S1-3 by defining the teacher’s responsibility as being one of being a citizen/creating co-citizens. This paper also draws on Ricoeur’s (2000) conception of responsibility within a democratic society to argue that reframing teaching’s moral responsibility as fundamentally one of being a co-citizen on a virtue account can activate the teacher’s ability to reflect on the broad and overriding moral determinations of democratic virtue in fulfilling teacher citizenry. The paper concludes that teacher citizenry warrants revisiting democracy and the overriding moral framework structuring teaching practice and therefore an imperative for social foundations in teacher education.

Biography
Sheron Fraser-Burgess is Professor of Social Foundations and Multicultural Education at Ball State University where she is also director of the Ph.D. in Educational Studies in the Department of Educational Studies. Her research concerns the meaning of identity group membership and social positionality for citizenship, praxis, and the subject. She explores a cluster of related political, ontological, and epistemological questions in the context of schools as deliberative and inclusive spaces. A normative presupposition of her work is that a democratic society rightly gives pride of place to diversity, critical thinking, and equality of opportunity. She has published in The Pluralist, Journal of Thought, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Philosophical Studies in Education, with forthcoming work in Educational Studies. She is co-editor with Jessica Heybach of the book Making Sense of Race in Education: Practices for Change in Difficult Times, with Myers Press. She has also edited an anthology for social foundations courses, Society as School Context: In the Mindset of Emergent Teacher and Democratic Subject, with Cognella Press.
 
Organised by: Dr Andrea English, University of Edinburgh,
Sponsored by: The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain Edinburgh Branch, The University of Edinburgh’s Moray House School of Education and Sport Philosophy of Education Research Group and the Race Equality Subgroup.
Any queries please contact: Marion.Linden@ed.ac.uk