An interview with Susan Groundwater-Smith about her edited collection, Hope, Wisdom and Courage: Teaching and Learning Practices in Today’s Schools and Beyond

Q: What is this edited collection about?

At this time in history school education is confronted with the domination of the corrosive actions of neoliberalism through the drivers of the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM). The term was coined by Pasi Sahlberg, to embody hyper-managerialism as it swept across the world. Reforms, under the umbrella of organisational domination, descended upon teachers and their students alike in the form of a narrowing of practice; all in the interests of measurable results.

Thus, in spite of different structures and physical environments, schools in the Anglo-Sphere are following similar policy trajectories, the most notable being external testing regimes. Teachers are placed under considerable pressures, facing burn-out. Retaining them after only a few years in the field is becoming more and more difficult. At the same time, young people are experiencing curricula and pedagogies that place limits on creativity and curiosity.

The title of this book speaks to a more optimistic agenda with contributors addressing the many ways in which educational practices can be more fulfilling. It is possible to generate conditions of hope that can free practitioners from these many constraints. Not as empty words, but based in the exercise of wisdom and underpinned by courage to imagine a more liberatory form of schooling, giving greater agency to teachers in exercising their professional autonomy and learners as they develop excitement, engagement and exploration in relation to their learning.

Q: What made you initiate this volume?

In my Harold Wyndham memorial address to the New South Wales Institute of Educational Research (NSWIER) 2022^[1] I commenced with an extract from Emily Dickinson’s fragile and delicate poem on ‘hope’: “Hope” is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul / And sings the tune without the words / And never stops / At all. It is a salutary reminder, in an era where policies and practices in education are under unceasing assault, that we should see hope as an existential force that can enable these challenges to be faced with vitality and energy.

All the same, “Hope,” the great Czech dissident playwright Václav Havel wrote,

"is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed” (1986, pp. 181 – 182).

Here Havel distinguishes hope from superficial optimism.  Hope is grounded in the goodness of what is desired. It rests upon wisdom, a specific form of discursive ethical discourse. In education those who have hope yearn for a change from the circumstances where teachers are poorly paid and overworked and teaching is overgoverned. Instead they wish for conditions that respect and reward the most complex conditions of practice.

To do ‘good’ is to re-energise practice, in the words of Santoro (2018) to “remoralise”, to recognise the moral centre of practice. In her investigations of the demoralisation of teachers Santoro argued that demoralisation occurs when teachers “can no longer engage in what they consider good work” (p. 175). Doing ‘good work’ is not a solitary charitable activity and is not in the possession of one individual but is in the context of the practice, governed by practitioners as members of communities functioning collectively: able to enquire and reflect upon the conditions of practice; to identify where it may be possible to ‘do good’; and, to celebrate circumstances where this may happen.

As an illumination of one educational practice built upon ‘the good’ I choose to cite the work of a young Australian school teacher, Sarah Donnelly (2022) who took an appointment, as a primary school teacher, in a remote country town in New South Wales. It is a town that has been characterised as dangerous and dysfunctional, to be avoided, rather than visited. In her time there Sarah built up a remarkable relationship with her students by making deep connections with them, their families and Indigenous elders. She centred her teaching and learning based on the local environment and its history in ways that enhanced and embraced local knowledges that too many had sought to efface. She explored sites of memory, local triumphs and tragedies.

Her mantra with her students was that mistakes are expected, respected, inspected and corrected. Her fortitude and courage contributed to many innovations that supported learning during the difficult years of drought and later the isolation of all during the COVID years of on-line learning. Sarah used the full capacity of her creative potential by re-inventing her teaching self as one with agency, in contrast to being a mere factotum, a functionary, carrying through the will of others. Nowhere does the account, rich and informed as it is, refer to test results, performativity, teaching standards – all common parlance in the writing of teachers’ work.

With ‘hope’ at our backs it is now incumbent upon us to survey what lies beneath today’s educational landscape, including its surface features and its morphology. We need to explore further teacher agency in these tumultuous times and some of the challenges and vicissitudes teachers face in relation to the adoption of particular forms of research evidence and the ways in which it can undergird or undermine professional practice and influence the ways in which teaching is seen and the ways in which teachers see themselves.  Teachers such as Sarah Donnelly, are their own best ‘inspectors’ relying on reflexive self-insight, employing evaluation and action research as a powerful force for their professional learning that, in turn, should inform the esteem in which they are held.  All of this takes a particular kind of courage. For to be ‘good’ is not only to be wise, but to have courage.

Courage is inevitably related to risk. In effect, as a disposition, it is to do with volitional behaviour, a willingness to be audacious under the veil of uncertainty. In a keynote address to education graduates in 2008 I drew attention to the collective courage of Norwegian teachers during the Quisling era during World War 2 (named after the pro-Nazi Norwegian leader at the time). In the face of an attempt to ‘nazify’ the curriculum, teachers resisted at the risk of their own lives.  Certainly, many instances can be cited since then, but the force of the Norwegian case lies in its direct relation to education and policy decisions that the teachers so bravely and at great cost, refused to accept. Teachers who had hope for a better future and took their community with them.

Courage faces fear with a determination to act. It requires the employment of an ethical sensibility in exercising judgment wisely in order to address those constraints that lead to injustice and to harm. Courage cannot sit lightly on the shoulders of those engaged in the educational enterprise. There are many “we know best” forces arrayed against them; determined to argue that this or that practice is “best practice” and that this or that accountability measure is deemed the “best measure”. Resistance in risky business.

Taking risks is not to be engaged with lightly. To assess and judge the costs and the beneficial outcomes requires a degree of wisdom. Biesta (2017) in his exploration of the future of teaching and teacher education regards much of the current onslaught upon teachers, their practices and preparation, as a means to de-professionalise them, to command and control them. He turns instead to an argument for teacher judgment and discernment – that is, for the capacity of teachers to exercise informed, practical wisdom in order to act thoughtfully, effectively and ethically, employing all their critical faculties.

This book is designed to reanimate a positive set of dispositions regarding  hope, wisdom and courage. Each of the essays that follow suggests pathways forward.

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[1] The NSWIER has given me permission to quote drawing upon the address that has only been published to its members.