This contribution is intended as a critical, playful, radical and irreverent ‘interruption’ (Biesta, 2013) of the politics of initial teacher education (ITE) in the UK and beyond. It is a prelude to a project involving students in the co-curation of a richly-illustrated collection of ‘pedagogical moments’ (van Manen, 2015, p. 17). The books will be distributed at graduation ceremonies in 2024/2025, as the intended audience is early-career teachers. The aim of the project – and lexical choices are important here – is to keep newly-qualified teachers in good heart.

Such ‘interruptions’ have become necessary in an era of intense ‘professionalisation’, with the concomitant emphasis on measurable manifestations of ‘professionalism’, at primary and secondary school – and at university, the context in which teacher education is theorised and implemented (often with the emphasis on the latter). Higher education is subject to the same disciplinary pressures and compliance mechanisms that impinge upon individuals elsewhere in the education system. We argue that this degrades the very notion of professionalism and undermines ‘the processes of creative transformation that are implicit in doing good work well’ (Pirrie, 2019, p. x). In the worst case, they induce a form of ‘ethical loneliness’ Judith Butler (2004, p. 15) describes as follows: ‘I am other to myself precisely at the place where I expect to be myself’.

Processes of creative (co-) creation, we argue, are essential for the cultivation of a vocation rather than the exercise of a profession. Education, we suggest, is an ethical endeavour involving responsive, creative-relational inquiry that is premised on ‘venturing from home’ (Pirrie and Fang, 2020) and ‘knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do’ (van Manen, 2015). It entails offering spirited and joyous resistance to the pressures to submit to increasingly intrusive mechanisms of monitoring and control, surveillance and ‘time management’ in a sector blighted by managerialism. As Esposito et al (2018) demonstrate, similar trends are evident across Europe. For over a decade there have been concerns expressed about the direction of travel in the university sector across Europe: from democracy to accountability (Carney, 2006)

As Biesta (2013) reminds, Derrida (1994, p. xviii) once observed that ‘to live, by definition, is not something one learns’. But let us resist institutional and disciplinary pressures to ‘stand on the shoulders of giants.’  As ECER comes to Glasgow, it is only fitting that Nan Shepherd (1893-1981), a Scottish teacher educator and a key figure in the literary movement known as the Scottish Renaissance should be the standard bearer for this project. Shepherd’s example suggests that ‘it is only by contemplating what surrounds us with due care and attention rather than ruthlessly exploiting our natural resources [while invoking ‘education for sustainability] that we may live our lives with “with a great but quiet gusto” (Macfarlane, 2011, p. xi)’ (Pirrie, 2018, p. 73). Like her close friend and contemporary John Macmurray (1891-1976), Shepherd had an intuitive understanding that to ‘live finely’ (Macmurray, 1935, p. 76) was something one could learn – but mainly in and through relationships with others rather than by acquiring propositional knowledge and delving into ‘tool boxes’.

We aim to counter the trend towards narrow instrumentalism by deepening education professionals’ understanding of teaching as a form of being-in-relation by cultivating a ‘teeming attentiveness while exchanging the assertiveness of self for Keatsian negative capability’ (Aloff, 2022, pp. 79 and 84). The ensuing publication will ensure that the ‘white flame of sincerity’ in practitioners is not readily extinguished. In short, our aim is to restore ‘all the play and life of flame’ (Shepherd, 1987, p. 49) to the exercise of the teaching profession.

Kindling the crystal flame, the project referred to above, is intended as a creative-relational response to some of the issues raised in contemporary debates on the nature of professionalism in teacher education in Europe and beyond. For example, Menter and Flores (2021, p.117) point to the tension between ‘the populist and simplistic view of teaching (and hence of teacher education) that have become dominant in the USA and England’ and ‘a view that emphasises complexity, personal growth, agency and autonomy, such as may be found in Finland, the Republic of Ireland and in some aspects of provision in Japan and Hong Kong’. We adopt what Menter and Flores (2021, passim) refer to as ‘enquiry approach’, while foregrounding the creative-relational dimension in an attempt to counter what we consider to be an undue emphasis on individual agency and autonomy in the discourse on teacher education. (See Pirrie and Thoutenhoofd, 2013 and Thoutenhoofd and Pirrie, 2015 on the emphasis on self-regulation and autonomy as a manifestation of the dominance of psychology among the foundation disciplines of education.) The theoretical underpinnings of the study are also tangentially related to the relatively new field of critical university studies, which examines the role of higher education in contemporary society, focusing on issue concerning culture, labour conditions and politics. As Menter and Flores (2021, p. 24) point out, teaching is a profession ‘concerned not only with knowledge and cognition, crucial though these are, but also with values and morality’. Darling-Hammond and Hyler (2020) the Covid-19 pandemic on teachers and teacher education. Research conducted at the UCL Institute of Education (Moss et al, 2020) revealed that 68 per cent of all head teachers and 78 per cent of teachers working in the most deprived areas reported that their highest priority was ‘checking how families are coping in terms of mental health, welfare, food.’ This is the environment that many newly-qualified teachers will be entering. We anticipate that the project outcome (the illustrated pocket book described above) will play an important role in a collective process of rebuilding, reconnecting and reimagining educational futures post-Covid-19. We also hope that it will sustain practitioners throughout Scotland (and possibly beyond) in the crucial early phase of their careers. Examples of the vignettes of ‘pedagogical moments’ for possible inclusion in the illustrated pocket book will be available for discussion and review at the conference.

The final outcome of the proposed project will be a richly-illustrated pocket book that will have the same production standards as one the author’s earlier endeavours to amplify the range of academic publishing: https://goldenharebooks.com/products/dancing-in-the-dark-a-survivors-guide-to-the-university (see Pirrie et al, 2022 for a review).

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