VIRTUAL EVENT: Response and responsibility: rethinking accountability in education
Alison Brady proposes that teacher's responses within classroom situations are key to understanding responsibility and therefore the concept of accountability.

To register and for more information please contact Judith Suissa.
For the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, responsibility lies in the extent to which humans have the possibility to act. It is not a cultivated disposition but an ontological condition of being able to respond, where one is therefore responsible.
Alison will argue that current conceptions of accountability as a cultivated disposition deny the extent to which teachers are also accountable ‘as such’. She will explore the idea that in order to understand what we are responsible for, we must first accept that individuals inevitably respond to the situations that they find themselves in (with others).
Accountability understood in this sense relates to implicit responses in classroom situations, responses that are underpinned by the subjectivity of those who bring these situations to light – often in subtle and immeasurable ways.
Links
- Tweet with #philofed
- Philosophy at the Institute of Education
- Department of Education, Practice and Society
Image: NeONBRAND on Unsplash
Teaching Fellow at UCL Institute of Education and Module Leader and Departmental Representative at the UCL Summer School
Alison is also an administrator for the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (London Branch) since 2016, and an elected member of the Executive Committee since 2020.
She is currently in the process of completing her Doctoral Studies, where her research focuses on re-conceptualising current accounts of teaching through an engagement with the early thought of Jean-Paul Sartre.
Her most recent publications include ‘Struggling Teachers and the Recognition of Effective Practice’ (JOPE, 2020), ‘From the Reflective to the Post-Personal Teacher’ (Teoría de la Educación, 2020) and ‘Anxiety of Performativity and Anxiety of Performance: Self-Evaluation as Bad Faith’ (Oxford Review of Education, 2019).
Further information
Ticketing
Pre-booking essential
Cost
Free
Open to
All
Availability
Yes