Palgrave Critical Perspectives on Schooling, Teachers and Teaching – serie

This book advocates for teacher professional development done differently. The author introduces a process described as ‘crystallizing conscientização’, which restores agency to teachers. Looking beyond incremental improvements in teacher micro-skills promoted by neo-managerial approaches to professional development, the book considers the wider impact of teachers’ personal, professional and political identities on their work. This critical reflective practice combines crystallization as method with Freirean principles of conscientização, asking questions that reveal the impact of whiteness in schools and the role that education performs in replicating whiteness and perpetuating injustice. The book will appeal to academics in the diverse fields of sociology of education, critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, curriculum and pedagogy and teachers’ work, as well as providers of initial teacher education programs and pre-service teachers.

This book advocates for teacher professional development done differently. The author introduces a process described as ‘crystallizing conscientização’, which restores agency to teachers. Looking beyond incremental improvements in teacher micro-skills promoted by neo-managerial approaches to professional development, the book considers the wider impact of teachers’ personal, professional and political identities on their work. This critical reflective practice combines crystallization as method with Freirean principles of conscientização, asking questions that reveal the impact of whiteness in schools and the role that education performs in replicating whiteness and perpetuating injustice. The book will appeal to academics in the diverse fields of sociology of education, critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, curriculum and pedagogy and teachers’ work, as well as providers of initial teacher education programs and pre-service teachers.

This open access book explores schooling from the perspective of children via data from a longitudinal life-history study. It questions whether schooling creates an environment where all children to flourish; or whether a policy focus on attainment in mathematics and English hinders some children’s wellbeing and learning. By drawing on the children’s life-history narratives and their ideas, the chapters also portray children’s realistic suggestions for practices that meet the needs of diverse children and strengthen their comprehensive wellbeing and learning within schooling.

This open access book explores schooling from the perspective of children via data from a longitudinal life-history study. It questions whether schooling creates an environment where all children to flourish; or whether a policy focus on attainment in mathematics and English hinders some children’s wellbeing and learning. By drawing on the children’s life-history narratives and their ideas, the chapters also portray children’s realistic suggestions for practices that meet the needs of diverse children and strengthen their comprehensive wellbeing and learning within schooling.

This edited book seeks to address the impoverished culture of emotional discourse in the teaching profession and teacher education. Teachers across the world live out emotional experiences in their professional lives (in the classroom, in the staffroom, online) yet the language available for talking about these experiences is fragmented and often inadequate. The book draws on a broad range of theories including psychoanalytic, critical, feminist, sociological and poststructural to expand a rich conceptual language for talking about teachers’ emotional experiences, originating from the authentic voices of teachers themselves. The book is unified by the inclusion of unpublished, first-hand accounts of teachers, drawn from the editors’ own empirical research interviewing a diverse group of teachers over many years. Each chapter includes a direct voice of a teacher telling their own story, in their own words, about an experience they found to be emotionally significant—the challenging, the sublime, and the downright distressing. Scholarly responses to each of these interviews weave a novel imagining for teachers’ emotional discourse within schools. The chapters discuss the complex contexts of teachers’ professional-emotional lives, such as neoliberal school systems, fraught relationships with leaders, contractualisation, toxic positivity, intractable behaviour problems and datafication. The book will be useful for education researchers, scholars of teachers and teacher education as well as teachers themselves, their families, and those who wish to work with and understand the complex dynamics of the teaching profession.