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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.
About the author
Alison M. Brady is a Lecturer at the UCL Institute of Education. She has been teaching on a range of undergraduate and post-graduate programmes there since 2015, specializing in the field of philosophy of education and public policy.
Alison completed her doctoral studies at UCL in 2020. Her research focuses on re-conceptualising how we account for educational practices through an engagement with 20th
century existentialist philosophy, particularly the early work of Jean-Paul Sartre. She has published on this and related topics in the Journal for Philosophy of Education, the British Journal of Educational Studies, the Oxford Review of Education, and has also contributed to several books including Philosophy and the Study of Education: New Perspectives on the Complex Relationship (Routledge, 2019) and Philosophical Readings of the Contemporary University: In Shadows and Light (Springer, 2021).
Aside from this, Alison is also an elected member of the Executive Committee of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, who generously funded the final years of her doctoral research. She is also working on a project with Warwick University that investigates the role of philosophy in promoting a wider understanding of mental health in schools. Recently, she has become interested in the intersection of literature, philosophy, and education, and in particular, how education might be re-imagined through an exploration of existentialist novels. She is currently working on a second book on this topic.
Report
The presence of parrhesia in the book seems to be the one exception to other instances in which Being a Teacher does an incredibly effective job of reintegrating a Sartrean vocabulary of being, responsibility, of commitment, of good and bad faith, of authenticity into the discourse of teaching practice (and potentially policy also), a welcome and expressive tonic for those that are tired of the technicist regimes Brady wants us to eschew. (Alexis Gibbs, Studies in Philosophy and Education, Vol. 44 (4), 2025)
