Hargreaves Making of an Educator

Living through and learning from The Great Education Shift
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78583-763-0
Verlag: Crown House Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

Charting the first 15 years of his career in education as a teacher, researcher, academic and growing collaborator with schools, Andy Hargreaves casts light on what he calls a Great Education Shift. This was a period during the early 1980s which was marked by the rise of neoliberalism and which brought an end to an era defined by public investment, pursuit of equality, commitment to educating the whole child and support for a strong and highly qualified teaching profession. Andy's reflections on the present and the past offer powerful and often provocative insights into some of the most pressing issues in education today, including teacher autonomy, evidence-based practice, early career struggles, intellectual bias and the impact of mentors. In this captivating and inspiring book, you will learn quite a bit about Andy and the experiences that shaped him. But you will learn far more about yourself, your work and your world as you seek to create a better future for all our young people and those who serve them. A must-read for anyone working in or interested in education today.

Andy Hargreaves is a world-renowned British-Canadian educator who has dedicated his life to working with teachers and schools to make learning and teaching more engaging, fulfilling and collaborative for everyone. An author or editor of almost 40 books, Andy is a gifted writer who has become one of the most cited education scholars alive and has received 8 outstanding writing awards to date. He is an education adviser to the First Minister of Scotland, and for the Minister of Education for New Brunswick in Canada. He holds Honorary Doctorates from Sweden, Hong Kong and the University of Greater Manchester, has been honoured in the UK, Canada, the US and Australia for services to public education and educational research, and was awarded his university's Excellence in Teaching with Technology Award in 2015 at Boston College in the US. You can learn more at www.andyhargreaves.com and can join his 40,000+ followers on X (formerly Twitter) @hargreavesbc or Bluesky @ahargreaves.bsky.social.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hargreaves, Andy

Leseproben

Foreword by Pasi Sahlberg

‘The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk.’* So wrote Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a German philosopher and one of the most influential thinkers of the 19th century.† In Roman mythology, Minerva is the goddess of wisdom, and her pet owl symbolises knowledge, culture, and discernment. A common interpretation of Hegel’s wisdom is that any given era of history can only be understood in retrospect – after it’s over.

If you take what Hegel wrote to heart, it has several interesting corollaries for educational literature and research. First, in education, our power to foresee the future is limited – as we’ve seen over decades, and even centuries, of efforts to try to predict how education will renew itself. Formal education systems and how they operate have remained largely unchanged despite revolutions and shifts in our societies, technologies, and the world. Second, Hegel’s notion of Minerva’s owl suggests that our power to understand the present and the shifts and underlying forces of any era is usually limited. To that end, Hegel’s insight enables us to see that in education – as in other things – true understanding and wisdom about what we experience at any given moment often emerge only in hindsight, after a major shift has passed.

I’ve been a fan of Hegel and his idea about the owl of Minerva since high school. As a teenager living through the turmoil of the 1970s, I tried hard to understand the world around me – without much success at all. The nuclear arms race had pushed the world to the brink of another global war. The energy crisis and struggles for basic human rights made the world a complex and often confusing place. Hegel often came to my rescue. I would turn to history books and listen to philosophers to better understand the present. The more I read about the history of education and consulted the works of John Dewey, Kurt Lewin, Jerome Bruner, and Maria Montessori, the better I could make sense of what was happening around me.

The next time I encountered the owl of Minerva was in the early 1990s, when I was offered a job at the newly established National Board of Education in Helsinki. That was a period of great educational change in Finland. Waves of neo-liberalism were shaking public-sector management thinking around the world, including in the Nordic countries. Corporate management models and business jargon were appearing in education policy documents and reform narratives. Political leaders embraced the principles of the Third Way, seeking to combine the best of the past with the most promising aspects of new corporate management thinking. Sweden, and other Nordic countries, was more eager to follow this trend than Finland – perhaps because Finns have always tended to be followers rather than leaders when it comes to significant social or economic shifts. That later turned out to be a blessing for the Finnish education system.

Dr Vilho Hirvi was the first Director General of the National Board of Education and my boss during the time I worked for that agency. He was a teacher and education scholar with a genuine passion for history and philosophy. I remember how many politicians, academics, and business leaders in Finland urged Dr Hirvi to jump aboard the moving train of modern ideas, which promised efficiency and quick improvements through corporate-driven education administration and policy. When Dr Hirvi spoke to his staff about the future of Finnish education in the early 1990s, he said that we would only make sense of the real significance of that time once it was over. We understood the wisdom of Minerva’s owl and decided to focus on building a stronger sense of purpose in education through shared values, collective responsibility, and mutual trust. That work went on as planned. The rest is history.

I was a young educator when the Finnish educational reforms ran against the global tide of neo-liberalism and pursued a path that was more professional, more collectively responsible, and more focused on the public good. In many ways, these early experiences have shaped my own path as an educator and have subsequently influenced how I, as a policy specialist, have been able to take these values and accomplishments – of professional trust, shared responsibility, and public good – to the World Bank, the OECD, and national governments across the world, most recently, in my adopted home of Australia.

During this formative period in Finnish education, in the 1990s, I spent some weeks as a post-doctoral research fellow at the International Centre for Educational Change, which Andy Hargreaves had established in Toronto. There, I met Andy, just a few years on in his own professional formation, whose ideas had started to take shape when neo-liberalism came across his bows during the onset of Thatcherism in England, a decade before it was popularised in Finland. I soon realised that, like me, Andy had already chosen his own alternate path that rejected standardised testing and the deprofessionalisation of teaching in favour of alternative assessments and collaborative professionalism. 

What happened to both of us in the past, during the great shifts that we each experienced at different times when our respective world views were evolving, has stayed with us, and grown in strength, throughout our careers. Like two owls, we came together. With eye and claw, both of us have since swooped down upon the many enemies of equitable, inclusive, and humanistic purposes in education in our pursuit of wiser and more ethical answers to the never-ending challenges of educational change.

Andy Hargreaves’ book reflects the spirit of the owl of Minerva. He surprises readers by revealing that this book is not a memoir. Rather, as he writes, ‘It’s not an intellectual biography either. It’s between and beyond these things.’ Anyone who reads this book will find that to be exactly so. It becomes clear, as you travel with Andy as a guide, from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, that the true meaning of the political and educational era that shaped him as an educator can only be understood in retrospect.

But it also works the other way around – awareness of key issues in the history of education can help us to make more sense of contemporary educational debates, as this book makes clear.

One such issue is the role of research and evidence in informing educational practice, especially teaching in schools. As part of post-COVID recovery, many education system leaders around the world now insist that teachers only use methods like explicit teaching and direct instruction, based on robust evidence. In some countries, like Finland, Singapore, and Canada, decisions about which teaching methods to use – and the evidence behind them – are left to schools and teachers. In other systems, though, education authorities select the evidence and determine which methods should be used. In Australia, some education ministers have gone even further by mandating which evidence-based teaching methods teachers are supposed to use in their classrooms and for how many minutes each day. These policy decisions are often made without looking to the past and considering what happened when such initiatives have been tried before. 

What makes Andy’s book different from other ‘memoirs’ is the way in which he reflects on contemporary issues and debates through the lens of history and his own experience. For example, when he writes about research and experience in education (especially in teaching), he explains how, in the dominant culture of teaching in the 1970s, the only thing that counted when teachers made judgements was their own experience in their schools and classrooms. It was rare for teachers to refer to educational theories, research, or conditions from other fields when designing their work. Andy reminds us that research on teaching and the teaching profession has significantly contributed to improved practice in schools, but the pendulum then swung too far – he shows – and now, the role of evidence is often misunderstood and overstated. Evidence-based practice, if not exercised thoughtfully, has led – and is leading again – to governing by numbers, top-down accountability, narrowing curricula, and chasing data and performance targets – all of which undermines the soul of teachers’ professional autonomy and erodes societal trust in schools.

I’ve taught graduate students in education policy and teacher education at five universities over the past 25 years. It’s surprising – and disappointing – how little students pursuing a master’s degree in education are expected to read from the past. It’s rare to find a recent graduate who has read John Dewey or classics like Willard Waller’s The Sociology of Teaching,‡ Dan Lortie’s Schoolteacher,§ or Andy Hargreaves’ Changing Teachers, Changing Times.¶ The book you are reading now makes it clear that becoming an educator is a long process – not simply the result of earning a university degree. Sometimes, as Andy shows here, it takes an entire career.

How can today’s education graduates make sense of the present if they have only a limited...