Irresolvable Tensions: The Impossible Work of Teaching

Harvard HGSE

What does it mean to teach? Is a teacher fundamentally a professional, a street-level bureaucrat, a transmitter of knowledge, a guide on the side, a designer of learning environments, a (co-)liberator, a caring mentor, or something else? Do teachers reproduce the social order, interrupt it, repair it, or open alternative worlds? Should they?This course explores teaching as a relational, ethical, and fraught practice. We will examine the tensions that shape educational life: authority and…