Being a Teacher

This book re-conceptualizes teaching through an engagement with Jean-Paul Sartre’s early existentialist thought. Against the grain of teacher accountability, it turns to the demanding account of being human in Sartre’s thought, on the basis of which an alternative account of teaching can be developed. It builds upon Sartre’s key concepts related to the self, freedom, bad faith, and the Other, such that they might open up original ways of thinking about the practices of teaching. Indeed, given the everyday complexities that characterize teaching, as well as the vulnerabilities and uncertainty that it so often involves, this book ultimately aims to create a space in which to reimagine forms of accounting that move from technicist ways of thinking to existential sensitivity in relation to one’s practice as a teacher.