Once in a while, an opportunity presents itself to spend a few hours in the company of someone inspiring. For many in education and academia, Gert Biesta is one such individual. I’m pretty sure he would fit Malcolm Gladwell’s criteria for an ‘Outlier’, having definitely clocked up more than ‘ten thousand hours’ of practice in his specialist area, having authored and contributed to more than twenty books, edited multiple international journals, advised governments on education policy and held professorships at multiple universities around the world. But it isn’t just these achievements which set him apart. For me and many others, it’s the poignancy, challenge, clarity and hint of mischief in his ideas which make him a thought-leader in education, and someone worth listening to.
So, it was a great pleasure for the ECRG Pedagogy Strand to host Gert for an ‘in conversation with…’ event last Wednesday evening, to invite him to share his thoughts about the nature of teaching and to delve into these in conversation. Around one hundred teachers, school leaders and academics were treated to Gert’s headline ideas and emergent thinking in a short presentation titled ‘What teaching is, what it is for, how it works and why it requires artistry’. This talk was based on a paper of the same title which he wrote in 2023.
The key takeaways from this were that, whether we like it or not, teaching operates in uncertainty. It is complex, subtle and nuanced. It requires judgement and intuition and its qualities (or it’s quality – whatever that is?) cannot be easily captured or measured using the logic of technical rationalism. This of course resonates closely with my own work and calls to mind that line from Hargreaves and Fullan (2012, p.107) that ‘uncertainty is the parent of professionalism […]’. Uncertainty is inescapably baked-into teaching.
An idea hovering conspicuously throughout Gert’s address, and our conversation, was that, despite its ubiquity in influencing policy, the explanatory and inquiry-based logic of the medical profession (which leads organisations to rank order interventions in terms of cost effectiveness), is not well suited to education. Gert took aim at this approach to judging teaching ‘quality’ because of its tendency to frame pupils similarly to patients, and ‘teaching’ somewhat like a cure. He talked a lot about the artistry of teaching and it is clear that art and artistry are important topics for Gert.
In our conversation, I invited him to put himself in the shoes of a headteacher whose pupils are soon to take exams, the outcomes of which will determine their next steps and for which he will be judged. I asked, “Do you want artistry from your teachers, or outcomes?’ and his response was short and unequivocal: Teaching requires artistry whatever the headteacher wants. That is the nature of teaching.
Read more about Gert’s work and works on his website, gertbiesta.com, and you may like to follow him on social media:
