Irresolvable Tensions: The Impossible Work of Teaching

EDU T050 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

What does it mean to teach? Is a teacher fundamentally a professional, a street-level bureaucrat, a transmitter of knowledge, a guide on the side, a designer of learning environments, a (co-)liberator, a caring mentor, or something else? Do teachers reproduce the social order, interrupt it, repair it, or open alternative worlds? Should they?

This course explores teaching as a relational, ethical, and fraught practice. We will examine the tensions that shape educational life: authority and freedom, care and control, embodiment and intellect, affect and reason, preparation and presence, transformation and stability, constraint and possibility. Drawing from philosophy, anthropology, educational theory, critical pedagogy, and teacher education, we will study what it means to teach and to be a teacher. This course will be a reflective space for exploring different visions of teaching, sharpening our understandings of pedagogy, and dwelling with the unresolved questions at the heart of education.