Alison M. Brady

The teacher-student relationship, and how to define it, has often been an area of interest for educational researchers, perhaps because it seems to be so central to the very notion of education itself. Indeed, how might one conceive of the process of education without considering who it is that is being educated, and who it is that is educating? And yet, whilst there are various conceptions of what the role of the teacher is in relation to the student, there is arguably far less discussion around the lived experience of this relationship. Furthermore, the ways in which the teacher-student relationship is defined seems to rest on a somewhat rigid separation of the two seemingly distinct roles. But how are we to understand what a teacher is without the students she is teaching? And how are we to understand what a student is, in strict terms, without the presence of some form of teaching? These questions are central to understanding what constitutes the teacher-student relationship on the one hand, but also, in considering what it actually feels like to be in such a relationship, and what effects this might have for the ways in which we understand ourselves and our roles as either teachers or students.

The issue of casualisation in universities has received much attention in recent years, with strike action across the UK highlighting the extent of the issue in the sector. In this chapter, I look at the situation in Irish universities, paying particular attention to the anxieties that confront early career staff. Whilst wider neoliberal trends in employment practices has no doubt played a key role in the changing nature of the Irish university, this chapter intends to look at the issue from a slightly different angle. Ultimately, I argue that the crisis of casualisation is a crisis of bad faith, a term most closely associated with the French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre. Whilst it is useful to explore Sartre’s discussion of the individual’s role in relation to bad faith, this nevertheless fails to account for the institutional context in which casual academics now work. In response to this, I aim to show how bad faith is encouraged by the institution, who in turn profit from their employees becoming like ‘things-in-themselves’, and with the unguaranteed promise of a more authentic life in the future, those employees then serve – and become subservient to – the institution itself.

This paper seeks to reconceptualise the basis for trusting teachers in current educational discourses. It proposes moving away from trust based on ‘absolute accuracy’ to trust as encapsulated in the practice of parrhesia. On the surface, parrhesia appears to be the opposite of Sartre’s concept of ‘bad faith’. Paradoxically, however, our attempts to be sincere in our accounts are inevitably tainted by this. This paradox is especially evident in autobiographical writing, an activity that is both parrhesiastic in nature and susceptible to bad faith. This does not mean that we should abandon trust in these ways of accounting for oneself, however. Rather, parrhesiastic practices in autobiographical writing can offer a different understanding of how we account for ourselves and our practices, one that does not pertain to a narrow definition of truth as accuracy, but instead leads to a form of self-criticism where one situates oneself in relation to the ‘truth’ of their accounts in new ways. Towards the end of the paper, I explore three ‘parrhesiastic techniques’ and their relationship to accounting for oneself as a teacher, to reimagine these techniques from technicist to existential ways of relating to our practices.

Effective teaching is often connected to reflective practice. Reflection not only involves recording thoughts about what went well (or not) after class, but also to consider examples of potential bias in (re)actions to certain situations, and indeed, to one’s own evaluations of educational activities. This relates to the drive towards greater objectivity in education, and an emphasis on making educational practices and their evaluation explicit. In ‘Transcendence of the Ego’, Sartre (2004) outlines a theory in which a ‘pre-personal’ self produces itself through reflection. This production is unavoidable, and yet dangerous in how it is conflated with a more fundamental ‘prereflective’ state of being. This ‘pre personal’ self, as the very foundation of consciousness, is only experienced in moments when one is fully absorbed in a task, conscious but unaware, uninterrupted by thoughts or reflections that might disrupt this ‘raptured’ state of being. Complete immersions in the task at hand find their place within educational settings, and thus, what Sartre deems as the move from the ‘pre-personal’ to the ‘produced’ self is relevant for teaching. But so too is what comes after that sense of exposure recedes. Such absorption in the task of teaching leads to might be called a ‘post-personal’ self and is often when moments of ‘good teaching’ can be found. But this proclivity for reflective action can disrupt the flow of such immersive events. This is dangerous for two reasons. Firstly, it frames teaching within a particular ‘temporality’ that fails to allow for the performance of teaching in the present moment. Secondly, it fails to account for what the experience of teaching entails. This paper attempts to argue for the space and value of such forms of suspension, and to call into question the overly metricised way in which teachers are expected to reflect.