Expertise: Keywords in Teacher Education

Description

This book offers an important and timely critique of expertise, showing how it is a 'keyword' shaped by social, historical, and political debates about what counts as knowledge and truth, and who counts as experts. Using teacher expertise as an illustrative case, Jessica Gerrard and Jessica Holloway reflect on recent events, including COVID-19 and the climate crisis, to examine how expertise is never neutral, objective, or fixed. They argue that 'getting political' is not just an inevitable part of teacher expertise, but a necessary basis of any claim to it. Across the chapters, Expertise explores how expertise is socially constructed in relation to governance, uses of data and evidence, understandings of ignorance and the unknown, and - ultimately - power. Using contemporary and historical examples from international contexts, the authors address the political positioning of expertise and how this creates boundaries between who is an expert and who is not, and what is (and is not) expertise. Gerrard and Holloway argue that ongoing policy debates about teacher expertise cannot be resolved by neutral definitions of 'good teaching'. Rather, expertise is unavoidably political in its expression.

Jessica Gerrard is Associate Professor in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at University of Melbourne, Australia. Jessica Holloway is Senior Research and ARC DECRA (2019-2022) Fellow in the Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education at Australian Catholic University, Australia.

Expertise provides a radical re-examination of the cultural politics of teachers' work. Taking stock of current attempts to govern teachers' work, and reflex responses espousing teacher professionalism, the book critically examines the concept of expertise, asking new and better questions about what teachers do and what education can be. * Meghan Stacey, Senior Lecturer, University of New South Wales, Australia * Gerrard and Holloway's, Expertise: Keywords in Teacher Education, thoughtfully explores the history and cultural politics of the construction of teacher expertise as a political tool in the context of social tensions, making it a critical contribution to the current debates among policymakers and the public about teacher knowledge and practice. * Wayne Au, Professor of Educational Studies, University of Washington Bothell, USA * This is timely, engaging and thought-provoking, challenging the notion of expertise as neutral, and framing it within its social, political and historical contexts. Vignettes and empirical evidence bring freshness and depth to the argument that expertise is contested, constructed and potentially dangerous. * Jane Perryman, Professor of Sociology of Education IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, UK *