Being a Teacher: In Conversation with Jean-Paul Sartre
Alison Brady (UCL IOE) with responses from Aine Mahon (UCD) and Alexis Gibbs (Winchester)

5.30-7.15 pm

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.
Alison will briefly talk through the main ideas in the book and what it aims to achieve, followed by responses from Áine Mahon (University College Dublin) and Alexis Gibbs (University of Winchester).

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

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, Studies in Philosophy and Education, the British Journal of Educational Studies, and the Oxford Review of Education. She has also contributed to several books including Philosophy and the Study of Education: New Perspectives on the Complex Relationship (Routledge, 2019) and The Promise of the University: Reclaiming Humanity, Humility and Hope (Springer, 2021).

Alison was elected as a member of the Executive Committee of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain in 2018, who generously funded the final years of her doctoral research. She has recently been elected as the Chair of the ‘Phenomenology and Existentialism’ Special Interest Group at the Philosophy of Education Society in North America. In 2020, she worked 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.

For your interest, the Introduction to the book as well as the final substantial chapter, Towards an Existentialist Account of Teaching are available from pesgb@sasevents.co.uk. The Introduction offers an overview of the book as a whole, whereas the final chapter offers a more succinct account of the general line of argumentation advanced throughout. The full text can also be found here.