Can we Think (about) Teaching?

Friday, December 15, 2017 - 15:00 to 17:00
SE010, School of Education Building, North Campus

Can we Think (about) Teaching?

Simone Galea

Faculty of Education

The University of Malta

simone.galea@um.edu.mt

You are invited to a very exciting lecture and seminar by Prof Simone Galea from Malta University. 15th Dec. 3.00pm - 5.00pm in room SE010.

This lecture refers to the recent ontological turn in education and the call for a rediscovery of teaching in educational contexts that are solely concerned with the effectiveness and certainties of learning towards predetermined outcomes. I parallel this abandonment of the interest in the question of being a teacher with Heidegger’s writing about the abandonment of the question of Being in the Western world in order to open a discussion about the extent to which teaching can be thought. 

This call for thinking about being a teacher draws our attention to various ways of thinking teaching. Given the importance of reflective practice in teacher education I shall identify its limits to being a teacher and refer to Heidegger’s work on poetry and language in an attempt to renew thinking about teaching.

Simone Galea is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Education at the Department of Education Studies, the University of Malta. Her main current research project focuses on concepts of teaching and their relation to teacher education and processes by which teachers make themselves subjects.  This builds on her previous publications on teachers and teaching that have mostly drawn on feminist philosophical thought and their bearing on philosophy of education and other educational practices. Her other important research projects and publications focus on educational issues and concepts related to migration and entitlement of migrant children in schools.