•  1
    Teaching, Veering, Unlearning
    Paragraph 47 (1): 28-42. 2024.
    How does teaching veer? In what ways can we tell if a literature lesson veers constructively or otherwise? How do we determine its limits and the correlations between success or failure in our teaching when — individually or collectively — we veer in a novel, a short story or a poem? If veering, as Nicholas Royle argues, can offer us a more dynamic critical vocabulary for reading literary works by developing singular responses to risk, failure, uncertainty and difficulty, then surely it can also…Read more
  •  15
    Love Foolosophy: Pedagogy, parable, perversion
    Educational Philosophy and Theory 45 (6): 625-636. 2013.
    Popular filmic and literary stereotypes of teachers from Brodie and Chips to Keating and Schneebly have not only reflected a public desire for radically innovative and perverse teaching practices, but also created those paradigms in ways that are not always readily identifiable or traceable. This article seeks to analyse tensions between traditional institutional protocols and contemporary populist opinion on the role of the effective teacher. In doing so, the article takes Peter Weir’s Dead Poe…Read more
  •  19
    What do we mean when we talk about events? Can we even (really) say we know what an ‘event’ is? To begin thinking about teaching in terms of the event is to begin thinking about all of those things that happen in our classrooms that we don’t and can’t control. Thinking the event means thinking about the unthinkable, the unforeseeable and ultimately the unknowable. It is about letting go of a concept – almost impossible to relinquish – that teaching and learning are transparent entities: understa…Read more
  •  16
    Untology
    Philosophy and Rhetoric 49 (4): 571-588. 2016.
    What does it mean to be un? This is not my question; it’s Jacques Rancière’s. In what follows I assign myself the simple task of explaining this turbulent little prefix and of recounting what this un connotes in Jacques Rancière’s work. More specifically, I tease out what it means in view of his prodigious writings on the politics and practice of education, of what it means to teach, to learn, and to fail to do either, of the aftermath of knowing what it means to know that one does not know what…Read more