Teaching for Democracy

This is my speech for the book launch of Empowering Teachers and Democratising Schools

In her book Teacher, Gabbie Stroud beautifully encapsulates what is happening by stealth to the teaching profession:

“Good teaching comes from teachers who know their students, who build relationships, who meet learners at their point of need and who recognize that there’s nothing standard about the journey of learning. We cannot forget the art of teaching – without it, schools become factories, students become products and teachers: nothing more than machinery.”

I had the privilege of writing a chapter with Meredith Gavrin, a school founder in the US with expertise in Facing History and Ourselves, an organisation that uses lessons of history to challenge teachers to stand up to bigotry and hate. It helps me to find my voice when I write with colleagues. The central argument of our chapter is that teachers’ professional freedom and creativity are essential to democracy’s survival, yet schools are increasingly threatened by controlling bureaucracies and driven by performative measures.

School education is becoming a much more bureaucratised system, asking more of teachers, and getting less in return. It has become harder to exercise pedagogical freedom, which has been consumed by standardisation. Overpowering bureaucracies impose stifling regulations. Teachers are losing control of professional decisions as their tacit knowledge and experience is diminished. Tacit knowledge is the subtle nuance that is invisible to the untrained eye; even the best teachers find it hard to explain. In Alex Wharton’s chapter, he calls it the “unquantifiable, invisible work that teachers do”.

Our educational tensions are well known: punitive accountability, a climate of competition, over-reliance on numeric data, the negative effects of over-testing, and an epidemic of anxiety. The student rite of passage of shovelling a mass of content, cramming syllabus dot points, and being drilled to answer exam-style questions seems rather pointless in today’s fluid, connected world. Schools are largely driven by performative measures. The inspiring Melbourne Declaration and the more recent Mparntwe Declaration have been totally overshadowed by NAPLAN. Teacher colleague Deb Netolicky writes, “Teaching should not be a profession without accountabilities, but education is not an algorithm”. Quality assessment is more a conversation, than a number.

Thank you, Keith and Steve for the honour of being a part of this compelling book. It has been inspiring to witness a TeachMeet morph into a book. Teachers can thrive within democratic structures, but this is difficult while we work within layers of hierarchy and administration. Thank you as well for your acknowledgement of the Flip the System book that I was lucky to edit with Deb Netolicky and Jon Andrews. I appreciate the way that you skilfully build on the theme of teachers talking to teachers about teaching – such a deceptively obvious approach. We learn more in the staff room, the carpark, and the pub than in any mandated professional development session.

Teaching is an extraordinarily rewarding career. It is an art, not a delivery system. Every day is exciting. One of the allures is that there are no absolutes, no clear-cut answers. It is not our job to prevent risks, it is our job to make it safe to take them. The goal is always to make kids independent learners for life.

At the Woodford Folk Festival a few weeks ago, Anthony Albanese warned that democracies are under threat from “corrosive, insidious forces”. Democracy is something we have to fight for. Schools play a central role in any robust democracy. This needs to be relentlessly reiterated amidst the noise of high-velocity capitalism. Democracy only works when citizens are aware of their own role in protecting democratic principles. For democracy to thrive, a well-informed and thinking citizenry must thrive as well. Teaching is a creative, political, human act.

Thank you

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