As my research interest in the educational prospects of the metaverse grows, I’m interested to explore new and innovative ways that users are engaging with VR/AR to think education differently. So far, on the contrary, most mainstream education platforms in metaversal spaces are conservative in their reproduction of very traditional educational spaces, like the school and the university campus. I expand on this point of inquiry in the above talk [from about 40mins in) given at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference in 2023.

“I know Kung Fu”: Educational Misadventures in the Metaverse

If you know kung fu, how do you know it? In the 1991 Hollywood film The Matrix, the plot revolves around characters who live in a visceral and dystopian reality, having awoken from the sedation of a computer-generated reality in which all other humans unknowingly exist. The main character, Neo, regularly enters into this virtual reality world, The Matrix, in order to do battle with Mr. Smith, the generic, algorithmic agent intent on reproducing the domination of the human race at the hands of a complex, networked computer. In one scene, as Neo becomes more adept at fighting the powers of computer simulation, he must fight Agent Smith. One of his team members simply uploads into his brain the capacity to engage in complex martial arts, marking the beginning of Neo’s role as ‘the one’ who will turn the tide for humanity. His brain swells in the simulation. Suddenly aware of his new capacity, Neo announces definitively, “I know kung fu”.

Why am I telling you this? Hopefully it will become apparent by the end of this blog. Thanks to the funding offered as 2023 Fellow of the British Journal of Education and Technology, I have embarked on a project to explore the educational prospects of the Metaverse. The project involves scoping existing youth-led educational practice in metaverse worlds, and then experimenting with an entirely youth-led educational encounter in the metaverse involving around 40 young people from across the planet.

Not a million miles removed from The Matrix, the Metaverse is a conceptual alternate reality landscape, defined by the use of so-called virtual, augmented or extended reality technologies. Derived from Neil Stephenson’s scifi novel Snowcrash, the term metaverse refers to a digital reality that is persistent (ie it exists even if you’re not in it), it is shared among users, it is decentralised in its organisation, and it offers users a sense of presence or visceral togetherness not offered by other digital interfaces. Metaverse-like experiences have existed for some time via closed virtual reality experiences, or in wildly popular interfaces like Second Life, World of Warcraft, Minecraft, and Roblox. However, the concept of was not familiar in the broader popular imagination until, in October 2021, eternal tech wunderkind Mark Zuckerburg announced the transformation of Facebook into Meta, and subsequently hitched his wagon to the launching of a metaverse world and the technology necessary for this world to become a regular household feature. His MetaQuest2 headsets did the rounds of more affluent households the following Christmas season, but it was hardly a revolution. Slightly overshadowed by the explosion of generative AI in late 2022, the future of the metaverse remains a technological question mark, even though there is general consensus that eventually Web 3.0 or an interactive, 3D version of our existing internet is something of an inevitability. For education, the metaverse promises a truly exciting spectrum of horizon-expanding opportunities. In the metaverse, in theory, teachers and students can be transported to any place and any time, and interact in any way imaginable. Human hearts can be modelled and dissected; young people can fly into virtual classrooms represented by avatars; school trips can take place in exact mirrors of Ancient Rome or Machu Pichu or Mars, offering individuals a visceral, direct experience of the very things they are learning about. What’s not to like about such an expansion of educational horizons? On the surface this seems like a vast opportunity for education, and the EdTech landscape is littered with new start-ups and tech entrepreneurs looking to corner the market on metaverse learning.

While I am not a specialist in EdTech, the educational prospects of a new and truly open social context for education are exciting to me as an anthropologist of education. The opportunity for educational freedom in the metaverse has led me into this new and unusual world, and the prospects are exciting because the metaverse offers the means of transcending the enduring trappings of mass education as we know it. Following Ball and Collet-Sabé, I have written elsewhere about the established and compelling grounds for recognising traditional modern approaches to schooling as ‘interolerable’ and therefore in need of replacement. Drawing on Foucault and other scholars of critical pedagogy, Ball and Collet-Sabé suggest school is intolerable for the following reasons:

 1) school is imagined as a self-evident and unproblematically positive and progressive mode of education;

2) school is the means by which binary discourses of the enlightenment and of modernity are reproduced (including the seemingly self-evident benefits of school vs not-school);

3) school reproduces ethnocentric discourse of universality of human experience (largely aligning with capitalist subjectivity)

4) schooling regularly reproduces the inequalities of contemporary society, in spite of laudable progressive discourse to the contrary;

5) schools reproduce a universal discourse of individualisation (currently, in the mode of neoliberal capitalism); and

6) school serves to reify particular forms of professional and technical knowledge (of teachers, psychologists, educational researchers) as superior to other forms of knowledge.

While this is an uncomfortable assessment for those of us who have spent whole careers attempting to redeem the practice of schooling to make for a more socially just world, the argument remains compelling. It is also an idea that has been percolating for at least a century (almost as long as we’ve had mass schooling), via Ferrer’s escuela moderna, or the Deschooling movement of Ilich and others in the 1970s. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith suggests, schooling is only second to genocide in terms of its powerfully negative impacts on indigenous communities. Similar critiques might be made of schooling in terms of its impacts on many minoritized and marginalised communities, including working-class communities, for whom historically schooling was explicitly not designed. This provocation begs the question: what might mass education look like if it not trapped by the conceptual straightjacket of the modern school? This is where the metaverse comes back in. Might we imagine a new kind of educational ecology in the metaverse, based not on the architectures of discipline inherent to the traditional modern school, but instead based on notions of an educational commons where all have an equal and engaged role to play in re-imagining a shared collective endeavour for the future?

Given the infinite scope of the metaverse for creating new worlds, you would hope that this would be one of the vibrant possibilities at our fingertips. However, my early misadventures in the metaverse have proven exhilarating and bemusing in equal measure. There is no question that the metaverse offers up thrilling new worlds that offer up new engagements with reality. I have flown through space, visited virtual movie theatres, concerts, and casinos, and traversed multiple social worlds, often encountering young people quick to give me a friendly dig for being a grown-up fish out of water. This is not a reality that can be usefully described in relation to a default, ‘real-world’ reality to which all other realities must be subordinated through the nomenclature of the ‘virtual’, or ‘augmented’, or ‘extended’. Presuming the inviolate nature of a ‘real’ physical or face-to-face reality would discount several decades of scholarship that suggest, compellingly, the enduring mediation of modern reality. Without resorting to the pseudo-metaphysics of The Matrix, it’s important to recognise the work of Baudrillard, Guy Debord, and many others in establishing that our reality long ago ceased to only refer to those things that are viscerally real to our experience. If an Instagram user doesn’t have their phone but watches a tree fall in the forest, this doesn’t mean that the experience is free from the unrequited desire to immortalise the falling tree in a future social media post. Similarly, there is no reason not to assume that the modes of educational interaction demanded by the pandemic – through masks, seated rows, safe distances, and rigidly agreed modes of exchange – didn’t represent a much more virtual, almost-but-not-quite embodiment of education than was experienced in the intimate, face-to-face educational interactions in Teams, Meet, or Zoom.

Rather, this might be a reality defined by velocity, by slower and faster experiences of reality that transcend various ecologies (what have been called virtual or real-reality) existing as palimpsests, laminated atop one another. There may be times when you are walking your dog, in nature, relatively alone, and in a slow engagement with reality. Later you may experience the voracious space-time compression of lurching into a work Zoom meeting with colleagues across continents and time zones, or float through a metaverse space while your haptic controls buzz away, reminding you of the textures of spacelessness.

All of this is quite exciting in terms of what it might mean for the parameters of education in the future. EdTech companies will promise that the metaverse offers a kind of accelerated experience of learning, a familiar trope of the industry. If one can transport to the ice rings of Saturn and throw some rocks around, one can suddenly surmise the nature of astronomy. This is a kind of rapacious educational reality – one where the subject of education can derive its outcomes without the hassle of the process. As in the case of Neo in The Matrix, on can simply and suddenly know kung fu without having to learn it. This is outcomes-oriented education in its purest form, the distance between intention or desire and reward made vanishingly, atomically, infinitely small. Indeed, with the incursion of generative AI, we might imagine a scenario where Neo would obviate the experience of suddenly knowing that he knows kung fu, instead accepting that an algorithmically tailored educational experience would simply predict and provide him with the skills long before he was aware that he wanted or needed them.

This all sounds very efficient. But after a few weeks of exploring metaverse worlds, and specifically searching out examples of explicit educational contexts in the metaverse, I found myself confused. Where were the handsome, other-worldy avatars effortlessly learning things they didn’t even know they needed to know? Surely, I was missing something. Surely there was more out there than what I could find? This, I truly hope, is the case, because the overwhelming majority of educational contexts in the current Mateverse offering are deeply unimaginative, and, by extraction, quite troubling. Given the opportunity of infinite spaces, worlds, and contexts for education, what have developers decided to recreate? The Victorian school. The 1950s American high school classroom. The haunted vacuum of the uninhabited university campus, given a space-age facelift.

There are a number of ways of theorising why the metaverse response to education would be so reproductive of previous educational forms. Put simply, the shadow of the modern school (and the modern university) is simply too dense and absorbing of light for other imaginings of education to become visible. EdTech developers, perhaps not surprisingly, have taken as their starting point the assumption either that a) metaverse education should emulate forms of learning already existing in schooling and university (even if the geography lesson takes you to Mars, it’s still a geography lesson); or b) that the metaverse should be bent to the yoke of learning as it already exists in schools and universities (i.e. that the best use of this infinite landscape is to reproduce the lecture theatre or rows of seats in a classroom). This reflects a number of conditions. Firstly, it reflects the conflation of education with schooling, rather than recognising that schooling is an historically anomalous and relatively peculiar mode of mass education that we can think beyond. Secondly, it essentialises specific forms of learning, assessment, pedagogy and curriculum. In one Meta advertisement, a grandma and granddaughter float around a planet to learn about its structure, only for the grandmother to ask without irony, ‘So you think you can write that paper now?’ The notion that we might so deeply enrich the learning process while retaining existing, arcane forms of assessing ‘learning’ is, frankly, absurd. Thirdly, and with reference to the work of Foucault, this approach entrenches the governmentality of existing educational systems as disciplinary technologies, anticipating docile educational subjects who are not only willing to engage in this reproduction of traditional modes of schooling but who are also thankful for the proposed benefits they will gain from the richer educational immersion that metaverse worlds will afford. In reflecting responses to the question, ‘how can the metaverse serve the school?’ we can also see how its development can be used to ever more scrupulous surveillance, as even at Machu Pichu there will be a clear and undeniable data trail of who has done what where and when, for what outcome.

At present, then, the educational prospects of the metaverse appear deeply curtailed by the discursive power of the modern school episteme to make unimaginable any other exciting and liberating alternatives. Where young people have been left at the helm, metaverse-adjacent worlds like Minecraft are filled with frivolity, irreverence, and play, with the acephalous structures of such worlds meaning that no-one is in charge, and no-one gets to decide what the point of it all is. While such worlds might therefore seem pointless, or, alternatively, appeal to those who seem gameplay as a gateway to the development of ‘soft skills’ for employability (resilience, team work, creativity – you know the drill), young people appear decidedly uninterested in the latter possibility. Where young people are creating explicitly educational encounters in metaverse spaces, a comprehensive scroll of Roblox will show that they are also quite unimaginative, reproducing high school classrooms and lunch halls, albeit more often with a focus on the informal intricacies of school life, like playground politics or how to hide from teachers.

There remains, then, much room for finding ways to re-engage this truly exciting space with educational ideas that open up, rather than closing down the horizon of educational freedom ahead of us. How might this be done? There are few existing examples of practice that move in a more empowering, enlightening direction. While not necessarily reflecting a pure kind of critical pedagogy in the vein of bell hooks or Friere, there is evidence of how the metaverse might be used for transgression and transformation. One source of widening horizons is the use of metaverse contexts to re-engage with indigenous forms of knowledge, language, and meaning making. In xxx, for example, Xxxx professor has helped to devise Biskaabiiyaang, an indigenous metaverse world. The welcome message reads as follows:

Welcome to Biskaabiiyaang: Imagine a world where Anishinaabe culture thrives, where anyone can go on adventures or sit by the fire and listen to the Elder’s teachings. A world where even the trees, plants, fish, and birds all have something to teach through quests, stories, and the language itself. Imagine a place where you can connect with others and learn how to be well in the world. Welcome to Biskaabiiyaang. By fusing virtual metaverse technologies and traditional Anishinaabe storytelling practices, Biskaabiiyaang provides inclusive, sustainable, high-quality intercultural learning materials produced by and in support of Indigenous Peoples.

While still gamified and cinematic in its style, nowhere in Biskaabiiyaang will you find a classroom, or an activity relating back to a traditional from of assessment. Instead, in this world it is nature and storytelling that form the substance of the educative experience. What other prospects could there be for this kind of re-engagement with history, education and culture? In the spirit of Arathi XXX’s framing of reparative futures and reparative history, the world of Biskaabiiyaang allows young people to ask the question what if the colonial encounter were different? What forms of education and knowledge would have persisted? This kind of anticipatory work is exactly the kind of futures-thinking that might allow young people to begin to see and shape in new ways their lived experience of the future as a reality enacted in the present. A slow, thoughtful, critical engagement with thinking about the world could be expanded through a more radical, critical, youth led proliferation of new realities. This is the truly revolutionary educational possibility of the metaverse, and something that I hope to pursue as this project, Virtual Ecologies of Learning, continues. We just need to know kung fu to make it happen.

Follow the links below to explore a series of articles that I wrote for the International Schools Network on how intellectual wellbeing can positively impact teaching and learning in international contexts. The key is to link practice and practice architectures in a critical way that leads to transformation. Start by becoming attentive to practice and your place in practice. Then progress to analysis and critique before identifying a locus of change and a route to transformation. These ideas a deeply influenced by Stephen Kemmis’ work in this field and his excellent new book, which can be found (free!) here.

Hope you enjoy!

Part 1: http://bit.ly/3YBfA6C  

Part 2: http://bit.ly/3ZW486m

Part 3: http://bit.ly/3ZO9Ozo

​Part 4: http://bit.ly/3T0rpCa

Part 5: http://bit.ly/3J5gu5o  

Patrick Alexander

Jacques-Olivier Perche

What does it mean to teach well? What does it feel like to be a good teacher? In this short article, we wish to pose these questions as a way of exploring the concept of intellectual wellbeing, which we define as the positive sense of self derived from an authentic engagement with the ethical, theoretical, and practical challenges of one’s professional domain. Drawing on concepts from philosophy and social theory, and particularly on the work of Simone de Beauvoir, we argue that there is much to be gained in rescuing the concept of intellectual wellbeing from its cruder psychological framing as a checklist of self-help activities or mental aptitudes to nurture. Applied to the teaching profession, we suggest that prioritising intellectual wellbeing is nothing short of a challenge for schools to reconnect with the essence of what an ethical approach to education should be, and to move away from outdated practices and policies that promote a simplistic idea of personal ‘growth’ measured through assessment, audit, and foregone educational outcomes. Against the late-covid, early-recession backdrop of December 2022, schools are faced with teacher burnout, attrition, retention and recruitment crises, and above all by the mental ill health of teachers and students. Current approaches to physical, emotional, and psychological wellbeing, while obviously important, are not attending fully to the intellectual sphere. We argue that refocusing on intellectual wellbeing may just bring the teaching profession back from the brink and bring warmth and light, or Henri Bergson’s notion of élan vital, back into the classroom. We begin by setting the scene for research into teacher professional identity before describing the concept of intellectual wellbeing in detail. We then offer an example of how intellectual wellbeing may be nurtured through simple, practical steps at the school level.

Teacher Professional Identity: a tension between theory and practice

In the well established field of scholarship on the professional learning of teachers, there is a rich and flourishing vein of literature that explores the relationship between theory and practice in how teachers frame a sense of professional identity. In the UK context, the debate about how teachers theorise their practice is closely linked to the work of Laurence Stenhouse, first president of the British Educational Research Association, and to the work of Donald McIntyre on practical theorising. Most recently, Trevor Mutton and colleagues at the Department of Education, University of Oxford, have published a 2022 edited volume that reinvigorates debate about the relationship between theory and practice in the professional lives of teachers. Continuing in this long tradition, the latest research in this field remains focused on how teachers can engage in the deeper philosophical, sociological, and psychological questions of education while doing so in a way that attends to the practical realities and demands of the job. In a sector where evermore teachers are training in situ, and where the training period is rarely more than the vanishingly short period of 12 months, there remains and enduring tension between being trained in the techne of teaching — in the practical and technical skills that allow teachers to administer an existing curriculum or behaviour management system — and phronesis, or the practical wisdom that is derived both from experience in the classroom and from thoughtful, intellectual engagement in the underpinning theoretical and ethical propositions of education. From Stenhouse to Mutton and colleagues, there is a consistent scholarly argument that teachers who hold both theory and practice together are capable of far deeper engagement with the essence of their professional lives, and may endure in the profession much longer as a result. Acting as public intellectuals in this way — as visible, audible voices willing to celebrate innovation and critique ill-informed policy or practice — teachers may find a deeper, more profound connection with a sense of professional identity that is both practically and ethically grounded. It is perhaps the framing of teachers as intellectuals that gives them greater social status in contexts such as Finland where, incidentally, education is seen as world-leading in terms of outcomes for children and young people.

Given the focus in the scholarly literature on the tension between theory and practice in the teaching profession, and given the strong claims for the benefits merging these two essential qualities of what it means to be an authentic teacher, it is surprising that this literature gives scant attention to the potential impact on wellbeing of an approach to teaching that is both practical or technical, and intellectual, ethical and theoretical. Wellbeing is, of course, an extremely well-travelled landscape in the world of professional development and learning. Research into wellbeing is extensive and extraordinarily broad in terms of scope, including everything from the more obvious domains of physical, emotional, relational, and psychological wellbeing through to more specific fields such as, for example, human-animal relations or seeking wellbeing through interactions with AI. As much as there is an extensive literature defining the ‘what’ of wellbeing, there is an equally if not larger trove of information available about how to do wellbeing well. One need only search the pages of Medium to find a host of helpful how-to lists of activities that will help to create sustainable habits for greater wellbeing. These are often task- and time-oriented, in terms of helping individuals to find more peace through building a world around them that is ordered and organised around achievable goals. Reflection is another core aspect of the kinds of wellbeing practices promoted in the public discussion about how we might create better, calmer, more centred versions of ourselves. Reflection on failure as well as success, for example, helps to focus on the immediate activities of one’s life rather than creating anxiety around future goals or a fear of missing out on opportunities already passed. This suggests that many guides for how to effectively achieve wellbeing are often focused on individuals, and often focus on one’s actions in the present (it is worth noting here that humanistic psychology, particularly the work of Kaufman and colleagues reflects a more nuanced position on the relationship between individuals through what they might describe as an existential-humanistic approach to psychotherapy).

It is interesting, disturbing even, that among more popular framings of wellbeing the specific field of intellectual wellbeing has received far less attention as a means of finding, if not balance, then greater fulfilment in one’s life. This is not to say that intellectual wellbeing or wellness is not on the wellbeing radar — on the contrary, there are many public scholars who are beginning to expand this field by exploring how ‘feeding your mind’ is an important part of feeling better about yourself and the world around you. Whether labelled as intellectual ‘wellbeing’, ‘wellness’ or otherwise, the concept of remaining intellectually active is also a mainstay of psychological research into physical and mental good health in older age. As such, the current public discussion around intellectual wellbeing or wellness seems to frame intellectual activity as the pursuit of enjoyable activities and hobbies that are intellectually engaging, and which as a result produce feelings of happiness and wellbeing.

In the world of education, Carol Dweck’s concept of growth mindset is perhaps most frequently deployed to engage in questions of what it means to be intellectually well. As opposed to a ‘fixed’ mindset (or as Sartre might put it, facticity in an existential framework) , the lay interpretation of a ‘growth’ mindset is one that encourages individuals to feel confident and optimistic about about their capacity to grow and develop, especially in the face of challenge or adversity. The temporal framing of this mindset is always oriented to some future point of achievement that is not yet quite here, but that will come one day. Initial or continued failure is framed as a positive experience in this sense because it is not seen as the end of the process (as may envisioned, one imagines, with a ‘fixed’ mindset) but rather as a bump in a much longer road towards future success and fulfilment. While Dweck does not employ the concept of intellectual wellbeing, it is clear how being intellectually well is essential to the ‘growth’ disposition that she and may others are championing.

While there are elements of this concept that appear intrinsically positive for thinking about intellectual wellbeing (for example, the idea of perseverance against adversity), it is also possible to see how growth mindset and similar concepts (for example, character education promoting ‘grit’ or ‘resilience’ or ‘good struggle’) may be misused in educational contexts in a way that detriments the intellectual wellbeing of school communities. Specifically, the individual focus of growth mindset and related concepts makes it very possible for individual students or teachers to lay blame solely on their own shoulders when they feel unable to achieve a given skill or master the teaching of a particular class. An individual, and predominantly psychological framing of intellectual wellbeing in this sense can merge with broader discursive qualities of late neoliberal capitalism, within which the goals and achievements that build towards the ‘good life’ are also individually acquired, often in sharp competition with one’s counterparts or colleagues over the scarce resources of success. Trapped in the cage of the individual human mind, a psychological framing of the concept of intellectual wellbeing fails to attend to the world outside, including its discursive and structural influences, to say nothing of its cultural and historical variation. Engaging individuals as collectives in this wider world of thought may help to move the discussion about intellectual wellbeing beyond metaphors of individual growth and resilience, and into a new and exciting realm where the nurturing of authentic selves can only be achieved in concert with others, and with the ideas of others. In diametric opposition to self-help, intellectual wellbeing may in fact be a matter of helping selves, joined together by an ethical pursuit of making a better world beyond the limits one’s own narrow personal telos, or trajectory through the life course.

Intellectual Wellbeing

This brings us on to the components of the concept of intellectual wellbeing. In order to approximate a state of intellectual wellbeing, we propose that it is first necessary to engage in an authentic consideration of self. By this, we do not mean that individuals (in this case teachers) should stare into the dark pool of consciousness in search of essential version of themselves which, once discovered, should serve as the image in which they will work. Doing so is at best spurious, and at worst narcissistic and symbolically violent in the arrogant assumption that within us all rests dormant an ideal version of the human condition, waiting to be animated. Rather, echoing the recent work of Skye Cleary and following Simone de Beauvoir, authenticity may be considered more productively as an intention towards deep reflexivity and self-making, through which one recognises the characteristics of one’s condition and context, one recognises what one can and cannot change about one’s condition, one recognises what one should change or act on to alter this condition, and then one goes about putting these ethical, philosophical, and sociological considerations into practice. Only through action, as Beauvoir might suggest, is it possible to transform an inert portension towards authenticity (one’s inclination towards or vocalisation of the qualities that one believes to reflect authenticity) into authenticity itself. It is not enough to think about a better world: one must, to paraphrase a cliche, become changed action in order to make a better world. In the context of teaching, this would mean that one’s professional essence is not a set of ethical qualities — what it means to be a ‘good’ teacher — but rather an ongoing flow of ethical dispositions articulated through action. To complicate the picture slightly further, we might also suggest that authenticity is derived not only from recognising what one can change about oneself and one’s context, but also recognising what structural forces are in place to inhibit change or constrain action. Clearly, the adaptation of the self is far less simple for those in minoritised or marginal positions from whose vantage point it is clear that the structure of society itself is predicated and reproduced not through facilitating change but through the brutal imposition of stasis. Recognising how sharp and unflinching are the rusted cogs in this machine offers a means not only to be authentic in one’s reflections on the self, but to be active and authentic in one’s reflections on the self-in-the-world. Doing so might be framed as a shift from thinking about individual resilience to productive, collective resistance. Such a shift is particularly important for those in positions of privilege, from whose vantage point the rusted cogs of the wider system are purposefully obscured, or are less regularly in the line of sight, or are simply easier to put out of focus. As Angela Davis put it, one must refuse to accept what one cannot change, and change the things that one cannot accept. We might add here that one might always need to see change as a process in concert with others, where the privileged can only experience an authentic sense of self if they are also willing to admit complicity in making others smaller, and then do something about it — what the French social theorist Michel Foucault might call parrhesia — the act of speaking openly to confront the reality of power. The Indian philosopher Kaustuv Roy articulates this as a change in the angle of vision: if we are able to tear ourselves away from our current view of the world, to refuse to be trapped like a deer in the headlights, then a new reality can be perceived. But we must look into the darkness in order to achieve this new angle of vision — and that is where intellectual wellbeing dwells.

What does all of this have to do with teachers? The feminist thinker bell hooks might argue that this framing of intellectual wellbeing is essential to what is feels like to be a good teacher, because ‘good’ teaching should be about transgression. Counter to the proposition that intellectual wellbeing is derived from feelings of sanctuary, or calm, or order, we suggest that true or authentic intellectual wellbeing must provide shock and uncertainty instead of consensus and the warm feeling of being on time or on task. The philosopher of education Gert Biesta has described this essential quality of intellectual wellbeing as an experience of transcendental violence — a rupture in one’s view of the world that allows one to glimpse beyond the horizon of one’s established knowledge, even if one must bloody one’s knees to scramble to a new vantage point. Authentic intellectual wellbeing is achieved through the challenge of remaining awake and alert to new ideas, even or especially when they do not leave you with a greater sense of calm, order, or tranquillity. Thinking through uncomfortable ideas, grappling with difficult truths, and uncovering new intellectual landscapes is hard work; but, we contest, it is hard work that has a deep and lasting impact on overall wellbeing.

Clearings

In the final part of this article, we would like to offer some suggestions of how intellectual wellbeing can be nourished in school settings and specifically in professional learning provision for teachers. We conceptualise of these spaces as clearings, because they are intended to evoke thinking through ecological metaphor and to link this particular shift in practice with the wider ecologies of learning in which teachers work. Again invoking the work of Kaustuv Roy, clearings can be seen as a connection between the self and one’s position in an ecology that is historical and discursive, or made up of ideas from the past swirling together in the shifting meteorological patterns of human society in the present. Finding clearings from which one can view these messy, broiling systems of ideas can be helpful in order to make sense of one’s own context, beliefs, ideas, and practices. It can also offer the space for using educational theory to interpret one’s condition, and to reflect on what one can or should do to emancipate oneself and/or others from the rain and the cold outside. In short, we have intended to devise clearings within which teachers can experience professional learning which facilitates intellectual wellbeing through a deep consideration of professional authenticity.

For teachers working in school contexts that increasingly demand adherence to very specific means or techniques of instruction, or prescriptive approaches to what is learned and how, intellectual wellbeing can be difficult indeed to seek out. Through our work with teachers in international schools, since 2020 we have endeavoured to create spaces where intellectual wellbeing can flourish. Our challenge has been to find ways of engaging with teachers who are overworked and battling to keep up with the new and emerging demands of their jobs. The reactive mode of teaching to increasing stress makes finding time for professional learning extremely difficult. In devising professional learning activities for teachers during this time, we were acutely aware of these pressures, and expected low turn-out and unengaged participation. However, what happened was different. While sessions focusing on technical skills or problem-oriented workshops (how to develop more effective strategies for assessment, or dealing with behaviour, for example) remained less well attended and were evaluated as less impactful for teachers, we saw an upturn in the interest of teachers in sessions that were aimed to be more philosophical, critical and intellectually challenging. We offered regular seminar sessions with leading figures from the world of educational research, including Bev and Etienne Wenger-Trayner, Gert Biesta, Stephen Ball, and others including the anthropologist Tim Ingold and the developmental psychologist John Coleman. Connecting teachers directly with these scholars was a means of breaking the artificial wall between the professional learning landscape of teachers (so often associated primarily with ‘fixing’ practice through changes of technique) with the world of educational theory and research. We also offered a series of professional learning programmes where teachers were given the time and space to read research and theoretical academic scholarship, and to engage in thoughtful discussions about this literature as it relates to their own professional practice and sense of self. Professional learning sessions where we confronted more abstract, ‘big’ questions were far better attended and received than sessions that, on paper, were more directly relevant to the problems emerging each day in the classroom. What, we wondered, could explain this seemingly incongruous engagement with the least practically applicable sessions, in a moment when teacher’s time was at a particular premium?

The feedback from teachers was revealing: what they were getting from the sessions was an increased sense of intellectual wellbeing — a sense of brain ‘space’ or brain ‘food’ that reconnected them with the original reasons for their engagement with the teaching profession. Another way to frame this would be a reconnection with telos, or one’s sense and pursuit of an authentic version of one’s narrative arc through life. We may add to this the notion of aidos, or a sense of failing to live up to one’s ideal path through existence. Aidos — a fear of missing out on what one should really be doing to live authentically — may be the wake-up call to readjust one’s relationship to telos. Choosing to engage with deep thinking about professional life in the context of ‘clearings’ may be one way to start this process. While open discussions of theoretical or philosophical questions may in the short term seem like an inefficient use of time, particularly when daily stresses are mounting, we found that teachers instead found more intellectually challenging sessions to be a necessary pause and reset that was also an affirmation of professional identity. If teachers are not intellectuals, then they are merely technicians in the classroom. Reconnecting with a sense of intellectual identity was for these teachers an empowering and enlivening experience. This realisation prompted a reconsideration of what intellectual wellbeing can be in contexts of professional learning.

Conclusions

Developing an authentic sense of professional identity requires an active rather than a passive approach to discovering who we are as professionals. Rather than discovering professional identity as innate or essential, it is more valuable to think of how we actively shape the boundaries of our professional lives. Thinking in these terms offers us the opportunity to think clearly and carefully about what we can and can’t choose about our professional selves, and what we can and can’t change about our wider context. In becoming attentive to these conditions, it is possible to intentionally choose how our professional selves are shaped, and to make active decisions about our professional lives. In doing this, it is possible to develop a more authentic sense of professional identity, and this intellectual process yields a deep sense of wellbeing and empowerment. Linked to authenticity is the understanding that intellectual wellbeing comes not from being a ‘consumer’ of professional learning activities, but rather from participating in the production of professional learning and with an awareness of one’s responsibility to participate actively in this process. Encouraging a productive approach to professional learning means championing the existing experience and expertise of teachers, but it also involves the challenge of developing new skills and knowledge that allow teachers to engage in collaboration and co-production. The sense of ownership over professional learning that comes with this process is another important part of intellectual wellbeing.

While wellbeing is often thought about as something that relates to individuals, intellectual wellbeing is created through dialogue between individuals. Linked in this way to relational wellbeing, intellectual wellbeing is about fostering relationships and community that encourage engagement and critical thinking about teaching, learning, knowledge, theory, and practice. Becoming an active participant in a professional learning community also encourages a greater sense of visibility in this community. Intellectual wellbeing can come from being recognised and seen by others as an important voice in a professional learning community. In this sense, teachers can be encouraged to become ‘public intellectuals’, or individuals who are respected and regarded for their intellectual expertise in the public domain of a school organisation. Intellectual wellbeing is closely aligned with a sense of stability in terms of professional expectations, trajectories, and outcomes. Intellectual wellbeing can be derived therefore from creating safe, sustainable spaces where teachers can refocus on the central challenges of the profession in terms of subject or disciplinary knowledge, questions of pedagogy, and broader ethical concerns about the purpose and future of education. Stability can be difficult to establish in times defined by volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (or VUCA) conditions. Where stability is elusive, it is equally vital to develop strategies for dealing with uncertainty. Moving beyond resilience, the practice of intellectual wellbeing through professional learning fosters productive resistance, because it provides teachers with the knowledge and confidence to respond critically, actively, and constructively to change.

Acting with authenticity means being attentive to who you want to be as a professional, and what actions will reflect this more ideal version of professional self. This is not a process of perfecting one’s actions or completing the process of authentic self-making. Attempting to reach the end of the process is in fact a distraction from the fact that the process itself is the means to nurture and habituate “professional elegance”. By this, we mean a disposition towards actions that are not premeditated or strategic in kind but rather reflect one’s professional essence or the ethics of one’s professional practice.

This leads us to consider how it is possible to establish a new way of thinking more profoundly about professional learning in a time of uncertainty and change. Authenticity is achieved by first reflecting on one’s relationship to the ecology of one’s professional life. Where do you dwell in your professional landscape? How do you travel through it? What is your purpose in it? Ethically, how do you feel about what you add, or take away, from your professional environment? Secondly, one might consider the nature of one’s professional context, and what one wishes to change about one’s context in order for it to better resemble a more ideal world for professional action. Finally, authenticity can only be experienced in acting on one’s reflections about professional identity. In the carrying out of actions that reflect personal and professional ideals, we may see the representation of professional elegance, or a combination of ideals, beliefs, dispositions and habits that form a way of being that becomes instinctive, unthinking, and more than the sum of its parts. Contrary to the current tendency towards focusing only on reflexivity in professional practice, this dispositional articulation of what it means to be an authentic professional necessarily requires that we do not think before we act. Our actions should themselves already show our deep engagement with what it means to be a professional in any given field, and this should be reflected in the elegance or refinement of our practice. It is important to note here that we are not using elegance and refinement as terms that give value to a particular aesthetic of practice — or, put differently, that professional elegance can only be seen in what at any given time is considered to be tasteful or even fashionable in practice. This speaks to a more superficial understanding of elegance that places form over function. Rather, professional elegance speaks to an aesthetic of beauty-in-motion — of the refinement of a craftsman or an artist at work, comfortable and confident in the messiness of the process. In this sense we can see elegance as articulated in the project of crafting one’s professional essence as an artform, or as poetry, rather than as a more simple matter an end product defined by skills acquisition or by painting by the numbers of today’s educational, technical, or professional fashions. The truly authentic professional self is an artform never quite completed. Recognising this about professional learning can nurture a deep sense of intellectual wellbeing because it reminds us that it is the human process of professional learning that should drive our practice.

If it is in the process of authentic professional self-making that the art of professional learning is revealed, then we may also think about how this process is made visible to others, rather than existing as a backstage or a footnote to the more refined public performance of professional identity we may be accustomed to. This is where it is important to consider again the role of teachers as public intellectuals — that is, as inspiring, critical, intellectuals in their respective fields who have something important to say to the public of their classroom, their school, or their community. Engaging with others in intellectual dialogue can be a force for hope and positive change because it highlights that teaching is never either a solitary act or an action solely directed towards its outcomes. In dialogue and discussion, in disagreement and in dissonance, in deep engagement with the philosophical drivers of our actions, it may be possible to move closer to an authentic professional sense of self, articulated through professional practice, and always in visible, public dialogue with others.

Here’s a recent talk I gave for the Oxford Brookes ‘Brave New World’ seminar series. In the talk I explore what new possibilities there may be to re-imagine schooling after the coronavirus pandemic. In particular, I argue that it’s time to move away from age- and phase-based schooling limited to assessed curricula and the physical space of the school. This model of schooling is out of step with the reality that young people experience in their everyday lives. I also suggest that we can get rid of the traditional boundaries between phases of education and think instead about learning for life. Finally, I argue that we can radically rethink the transmission model of learning (and of culture) that pervades mass education. In short, to quote Alice Cooper: School’s Out Forever. Have a look!

https://www.brookes.ac.uk/school-of-education/staff-and-students/academic-staff/?wid=&op=full&uid=p0076922

https://www.educationonfire.com/education-on-fire/145-schooling-and-social-identity-with-dr-patrick-alexander/

I had a great time recently chatting with Mark Taylor of Education on Fire about Schooling and Social Identity. It’s an important time to be asking critical questions about schooling and socialisation.

Is the current age-based system of organising learning in schools in need of radical change?

Dr. Patrick Alexander from Oxford Brookes University shares his thoughts based on his new book – Schooling and Social Identity: Learning to Act Your Age in Contemporary Britain.

Patrick Alexander is a social anthropologist specialising in education, childhood and youth studies. Patrick’s research and teaching interests include the sociology of schooling, youth and youth subcultures, gender, ethnography, and social theory.

 

My new book with the above title is now out (Feb 2020) with Palgrave Macmillan. You can access the book here: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137388308 – get your librarian to buy a copy!

Here’s an outline of what the book is about:

School’s Out, Forever

My new book Schooling and Social Identitysuggests that the current age-based system of organising learning in schools is in need of radical change. If the so-called ‘Youthquake’ led by Greta Thunberg and others is challenging adult authority, then schools are next.

 

Why are schools organised according to age?

This question raises important issues about generational relations in contemporary society and about the nature of schooling. While society continues to change dramatically, schools are still organised much as in the 19th century. Drawing on a year of in-depth research in an English secondary school, I argue that age remains the last ‘grand narrative’ of modern society: we still hold on to outdated ideas about how the life course works, imagining it as a straight line from development in childhood and youth to stability in adulthood. While most people’s experiences of growing up and growing old are more complicated than this, schools socialise us into steady progression, year-by-year, into the future. Young people reconcile this message about future certainty with their experiences of life in the era of post-truth, fake news, and ecological crisis, where the future appears more complicated, unpredictable and uncertain now than ever. From lesson to lesson and day to day, as well as in their imagining of what the future holds, young people have to navigate a minefield of different expectations of how they should act their age. I use the entirely new concept of ‘age imaginaries’ in order to make sense of the complicated experiences of young people becoming adults in today’s world.

 

The tension between a linear picture of growing up and the complex, blurred lines between age categories in the present raises significant questions about mental health and wellbeing, and suggests that more can be done to effectively prepare young people for the future. There is a ‘cruel optimism’ to a school system that promises future stability (in work, family, ecology, politics, etc), while the world becomes less and less likely to deliver on these certain prospects. Instead, schools could be radically reorganised to become more dynamic and inclusive and to better reflect the complex world in which young people live. An important part of this reorganisation would be to move away from grouping according to age. While some schools in the ‘democratic education’ tradition have been experimenting with this idea for decades, it remains to be seen how a move away from age in schooling might be achieved through steady change to the mainstream system of state schooling. Individuals like Greta and youth movements like that in Hong Kong suggest that if schools don’t change, young people will lead the change themselves.