__Demoralized: Why Teachers Leave the Profession They Love and How They Can Stay_ offers a timely analysis of professional dissatisfaction that challenges the common explanation of burnout. _Featuring the voices of educators, the book offers concrete lessons for practitioners, school leaders, and policy makers on how to think more strategically to retain experienced teachers and make a difference in the lives of students. Based on ten years of research and interviews with practitioners across the United States, the book theorizes the (...) existence of a “moral center” that can be pivotal in guiding teacher actions and expectations on the job. Education philosopher Doris Santoro argues that demoralization offers a more precise diagnosis that is born out of ongoing value conflicts with pedagogical policies, reform mandates, and school practices. _Demoralized_ reveals that this condition is reversible when educators are able to tap into authentic professional communities and shows that individuals can help themselves. Detailed stories from veteran educators are included to illustrate the variety of contexts in which demoralization can occur. Based on these insights, Santoro offers an array of recommendations and promising strategies for how school leaders, union leaders, teacher groups, and individual practitioners can enact and support “re-moralization” by working to change the conditions leading to demoralization. (shrink)

In this methodological reflection, I describe the multidisciplinary hermeneutic process of philosophizing about teacher dissatisfaction. I discuss how philosophy serves as a starting point for interpretive work based on interviews with former teachers and readings of qualitative and quantitative research on teacher attrition and dissatisfaction. The result has been a project that enabled me to offer new descriptions of phenomena and to develop concepts that can be used to interpret the moral dimensions of teacher dissatisfaction. The fact that I return (...) to language and concepts as my research outcomes is why, despite my multidisciplinary approach, I continue to describe my work as philosophical. I suggest that philosophical enquiry pursued through empirical research has the potential to inform larger empirical studies, serve as a “sensitizing instrument” for empirical analysis, and to open discursive spaces where common understandings limit interpretive possibilities. (shrink)

Moral madness is a symptom of the moral violence experienced by teachers who are expected to exercise responsibility for their students and their work, but whose moral voice is misrecognized as self-interest and whose moral agency is suppressed. I conduct a feminist ethical analysis of the figure of Cassandra to examine the ways in which teachers may be driven to moral madness.

In this essay, Doris Santoro examines the discourse of “fidelity of instruction” to show how it is doublespeak for teacher compliance that is incompatible with democracy and education. Analyzing the distorted use of the term “fidelity” by market-based reformers, Santoro illustrates how it can be used as a weapon against teacher intelligence and moral response. She argues that John Dewey's philosophy provides conceptual resources to reframe some teacher infidelity as intelligent response, the moral agency required for pedagogical responsibility.

Many scholars have pursued philosophical inquiry through empirical research. These empirical projects have been shaped—to varying degrees and in different ways—by philosophical questions, traditions, frameworks and analytic approaches. This issue explores the methodological challenges and opportunities involved in these kinds of projects. In this essay, we briefly introduce the nine projects featured in this issue and then address two key questions: First, how do these diverse contributors understand their empirical research as a mode of philosophical inquiry? And, second, what is (...) the value in engaging in empirical research oneself, as opposed to drawing on the empirical work of others? As the essays in this issue demonstrate, there is no single answer to these questions. Our hope is that these guiding questions—and the diverse and divergent answers offered within this special issue—might demonstrate the live and pressing methodological questions involved in integrating empirical research and philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

_Principled Resistance: How Teachers Resolve Ethical Dilemmas_ brings together senior scholars and activist teachers to explore the concept of resistance as a necessary response to mandates that conflict with their understanding of quality teaching. The book provides vivid examples of the pedagogical, professional, and democratic principles undergirding resistance, as well as the distinct perspective of each of its contributors: teachers who reflect on their acts of principled resistance; teacher educators who study teachers and support their professional growth; and historians who (...) demonstrate that a tradition of teachers’ principled resistance has had a significant impact on American society, not only on schools and teaching. They also show the steps teachers take, in their reasoning and in their actions, to resist policies and mandates they are expected to enact. This volume offers a critical and unique resource for teacher educators who are preparing prospective teachers to navigate the contentious terrain of education politics, teachers who are interested in leading change, and others interested in educational ethics. (shrink)

Only months following the declaration of the Turkish Republic in October 1923, Turkey’s newly appointed Minister of Public Instruction, Sefa Bey, invited U.S. philosopher and educator John Dewey to survey his fledgling country’s educational system. Having just emerged from a brutal war for independence, Turkey was beginning a process of rapid modernization under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal “Atatürk,” and government officials looked to Dewey for recommendations on how to make Turkish schools agencies of social reform that would advance their (...) state’s identity as a democratic republic. Dewey traveled for two months throughout the country with his wife, Alice, and met with teachers and government officials in .. (shrink)

In The Beautiful Risk of Education, Gert Biesta displays his gift for engaging generously with the thought of others to illuminate what makes education educational, that is, the value in maintaining the complexity and risk involved in a dialogic approach to education. As Biesta puts it, “[education] is therefore, again, a dialogical process. This makes the educational way the slow way, the difficult way, the frustrating way, and so we might say, the weak way” . Such a view of education (...) promises no “results”, in fact the outcomes of education can never be guaranteed. Embracing the risk inherent in this weak notion of education entails welcoming the risk involved in teaching. In this review, we focus on Biesta’s attention to the meaning of teaching and his call for a kind of teacher education that learns from and develops virtuosity. We find Biesta’s use of the term “virtuosity”—rather than the more typical usage for the exercise of wisdom found in educational theory, “virtue”—prod .. (shrink)