On the impossibility of being a good teacher: a journey in three acts
Creators: name: Barker, Matthew
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 390101
subject: Creative arts, media and communication curriculum and pedagogy

description: This thesis is framed by an ontological question of how can a good teacher exist when being good feels impossible? The question will be explored as a narrative journey in three acts that investigates theoretical understandings of the possibilities of a teacher’s being in relation to contemporary standardised professional practices. The journey will make hermeneutical readings of a diverse set of texts including from philosophy, educational policy, artworks, films, and literature to speak to many unspoken dimensions of being a good teacher.  Throughout the journey, personal stories will also be shared as voiceovers that narrate and lead the reader through the project. As a form of philosophical non-linear deconstructive phenomenology, the structure and content of the thesis resists conventional academic structures and embraces an entangled attitude. Each Act reflects on discrete experiences in an experimental manner that attempt to elucidate an implicit interconnectedness.  The Acts are polychronomorphic, in the sense that they overlap, coexist, and change in relation to each other in asynchronous arrangements. The Acts present a diffused and gaseous causality where the journey leaps and bounds around its logos in a playful and intuitive manner. 

The thesis presents a philosophical reflection on the educational experience of teachers during the transition to the 21st Century within the Western context and of potential pedagogical futures.  Along the journey, the thesis investigates philosophical and religious historical origins that have left traces on teachers, and then considers how contemporary educational policy and theories, including neoliberalism and feminism, contribute to metaphysical understandings of being good. It also considers and acknowledges the gendered, raced, classed and colonialist attitudes embedded within these traces that have constructed ideals about who a good teacher can be, which have, typically, privileged the figure of the white, affluent, rational and cis-gendered male. 

This thesis responds to Ahmed’s (2014) not philosophy that ‘aims to create room within philosophy for others who are not philosophers” (p.15). I am not schooled as a philosopher and have no formal educational qualifications in the discipline of philosophy. I am a Visual Arts teacher. Having taught for over 20 years for me, the question of being a good teacher has become more than a technical question of asking how to teach well. It is a philosophical question of why educational experience is presented by institutions in a particular way and what, on a metaphysical level, does it mean and, what in turn can I do to be good after this investigation.  

My experience of the lack of time to think and speak about teaching in professional settings has prompted this investigation in which, following Roland Barthes (1977) “writing begins at the point where speech becomes impossible” (p.190). The thesis is an attempt at writing a not philosophy for education to bring teaching into deeper philosophical questioning than otherwise permitted by the instrumental and institutional regimes that seem to govern professional practice. In doing so, it seeks to make visible some of the difficulties of being a good teacher as a 21st Century professional and to develop other ways of understanding being good.