Reclaiming Teaching for Teacher Education with Professor Gert Biesta

QUT Teacher Education and Professional Learning Research Group invites you to a free seminar:

Professor Gert Biesta makes a case for a multi-dimensional view of the purposes of education and for teaching as an act of communication that always requires judgement about that ‘what’ and the ‘what for.’

ABSTRACT

Many policy makers and educational researchers seem to be convinced that teaching matters. Unfortunately, such a case for teaching and teachers tends to rely on a rather one-dimensional view of what counts in education – namely the production of measurable learning outcomes – and a rather mechanistic view of what counts as education – namely teaching as an intervention that is aimed at producing particular effects. Such views about teaching and education more generally are also affecting programmes of teacher education. In this presentation I raise some questions about such views about the significance of teaching, on the assumption that the future of teacher education needs to be informed by a different understanding of what teaching is and what it is for. I make a case for a multi-dimensional view of the purposes of education and for teaching as an act of communication that always requires judgement about that ‘what’ and the ‘what for.’ Placing such judgement at the centre of teacher education suggests that the structure of the curriculum for teacher education should be spiral rather than linear and cumulative. In my presentation I will discuss ideas from my latest book, The Rediscovery of Teaching (Routledge, 2017).

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Professor Gert Biesta

• Professor of Public Education [part-time], Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy, Maynooth University, Ireland
• NIVOZ Professor for Education [part-time], University of Humanistic Studies, the Netherlands
• Professor II, NLA University College, Bergen, Norway
• Professor II, University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway
• Associate Editor Educational Theory
• Co-Editor British Educational Research Journal

Personal website www.gertbiesta.com