Testing

How do educators build metacognitive pictures of their teaching practices, and honour the singularity of their approaches – without remaining rigidly tied to a particular set of methods? This session explores how to build a flexible, experimental approach to teaching throughout a career, adapting to students’ ever-changing situations and interests, and continually testing new approaches and ideas. We consider how some key works in critical pedagogy (by Paolo Freire, bell hooks, Jacques Rancière, and others) might help educators construct their own narratives of teaching’s long-term concerns, which in turn can guide everyday teaching practices toward adaptability. We question what it means to learn from our students – and consider how listening deeply for intergenerational and other differences in the classroom can produce synergies between research and teaching. Developing frameworks for understanding classrooms as sites of address and exchange can encourage educators to continually dialogize their teaching methods – both at the very small scale (such as building ‘level checks’ into everyday classroom teaching), to the larger scale (such as revising programme specifications). Developing teaching philosophies – compelling narratives of how and why we teach – is inextricably bound to that which changes most in our teaching: the moments when we encounter the limits of what we know as educators.