Anne M. Phelan

This book critiques the humanist legacy in education, arguing that it frames our thoughts, imaginations and conceptualisations of what education means and can be about. It offers an alternative perspective, unburdened by this legacy, and grounded in a ‘weak ontology’, as a means of opening up new possibilities for the educational imagination. The authors argue that by embracing humanism’s values of rectitude and redemption as foundational, education becomes nothing more than a means to “social hygiene and economic productivity” (Bojesen, 2020). The authors offer a repertoire of concepts that begin to affirm educational experience, each chapter exploring the potential and challenges of these concepts. Those concepts include subjectivity and inclination, conversation, natality and the event, finitude and death, and indeterminability. These are used to challenge the dominant educational drives for progress and economic growth and offers a bold and timely vision for education that truly matters in an age of relentless expansion and mounting global crises.

Feeling Obligated combines theoretical insights with the first-hand experiences of Canadian teachers to illustrate the impact of neoliberalism – the installation of market norms into educational and social policies – on teachers’ professional integrity. Anne M. Phelan and Melanie D. Janzen illustrate the miserable conditions in which teachers teach, their efforts to navigate and withstand those circumstances, and their struggle to respond ethically to students, especially those already marginalized economically and socially. Exploring how educational policies attempt to recast teachers as skilled clinicians, the book revitalizes a conversation about teaching as a vocation wherein the challenge of obligation is of central concern. Haunted by what has already happened and threatened by what may yet occur, Feeling Obligated foregrounds the challenge of ethical obligation in teaching and makes a strong case for the revitalization of teaching as a vocation, involving commitment, resolve, and trust in a future yet to come.

Feeling Obligated combines theoretical insights with the first-hand experiences of Canadian teachers to illustrate the impact of neoliberalism – the installation of market norms into educational and social policies – on teachers’ professional integrity. Anne M. Phelan and Melanie D. Janzen illustrate the miserable conditions in which teachers teach, their efforts to navigate and withstand those circumstances, and their struggle to respond ethically to students, especially those already marginalized economically and socially. Exploring how educational policies attempt to recast teachers as skilled clinicians, the book revitalizes a conversation about teaching as a vocation wherein the challenge of obligation is of central concern. Haunted by what has already happened and threatened by what may yet occur, Feeling Obligated foregrounds the challenge of ethical obligation in teaching and makes a strong case for the revitalization of teaching as a vocation, involving commitment, resolve, and trust in a future yet to come.

If teacher education, as a field of study, is to contribute to the revitalization, re-moralization and re-politicization of Education, this book argues that it needs to be alert to questions of teachers’ intellectual and political freedom and to concerns about the legitimacy of what we do in teacher education, in the name of Education. Anne Phelan demonstrates how curriculum theorizing can serve such an educational project by engaging concerns about subjectivity (human agency and action), society, and historical moment, thereby widening the field of insight in teacher education and informing debates about new trajectories for policy and practice. Exploring teacher education through ethical, political, aesthetic vocabularies, drawn from the Humanities, is vital at a time when the dehumanizing influences of performativity, standardization and accountability are evident in education systems across the world, and when we are in danger of losing the things that we most value and are the least measurable - relationships, independent thought, and ethical judgment. Curriculum Theorizing and Teacher Education will be of interest to teacher educators who are practicing, researching, or (re)designing teacher education, as well as policy makers who are curious about new possibilities for framing the "problem" of teacher education at provincial, state and federal levels.

If teacher education, as a field of study, is to contribute to the revitalization, re-moralization and re-politicization of Education, this book argues that it needs to be alert to questions of teachers’ intellectual and political freedom and to concerns about the legitimacy of what we do in teacher education, in the name of Education. Anne Phelan demonstrates how curriculum theorizing can serve such an educational project by engaging concerns about subjectivity (human agency and action), society, and historical moment, thereby widening the field of insight in teacher education and informing debates about new trajectories for policy and practice. Exploring teacher education through ethical, political, aesthetic vocabularies, drawn from the Humanities, is vital at a time when the dehumanizing influences of performativity, standardization and accountability are evident in education systems across the world, and when we are in danger of losing the things that we most value and are the least measurable - relationships, independent thought, and ethical judgment. Curriculum Theorizing and Teacher Education will be of interest to teacher educators who are practicing, researching, or (re)designing teacher education, as well as policy makers who are curious about new possibilities for framing the "problem" of teacher education at provincial, state and federal levels.