Mike Middleton

For the Love of Teaching

A plea for trust and engagement

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

In his sixty years in teaching, Mike Middleton's experience spans the globe in primary and post-graduate teaching to classroom teaching, through school and state-based curriculum planning to policy making at the national level. By school or system invitation, Mike has worked as a consultant in over four hundred Australian schools. He is passionate about teaching and its place in a healthy society. He believes that the Covid interruption provides a much-needed opportunity for policy makers, and school communities to rethink teachers' work, restoring it to a valued and central place in society. Since he began his career, Mike has seen teaching change from a role that was exciting, creative, and attractive to one where universities struggle to attract young people into the profession and where education systems struggle to retain teachers, even part-time. For the Love of Teaching follows Mike's career as he strived to maintain the integrity of his beliefs about teaching in the face of social and political circumstances that were transforming it from a high status and culturally embedded profession, to one that threatened to make teachers no more than educational functionaries. Combatting an agenda that shaped young people into economic units 'in the national interest' rather than participants in vibrant and culturally rich Australian communities was a constant challenge. This is a celebration of teaching as it can be, and in all-too-rare cases, still is. In parallel, is a critique of the political and administrative changes that have, over several decades, shifted from support for teacher professionalism and autonomy to making teachers accountable for the delivery of a uniform and 'teacher-proof' curriculum to all Australian communities and students independent of their background and circumstances. Mike offers ways that teaching might be brought back, involving initiatives to free up the immense potential of the teaching profession.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Helen Middleton
• Seitenzahl: 158
• Erscheinungstermin: 15. Dezember 2021
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 244mm x 170mm x 10mm
• Gewicht: 417g
• ISBN-13: 9781922691163
• ISBN-10: 192269116X
• Artikelnr.: 63242248

Autorenporträt

I started teaching sixty years ago. My daughter started three years ago. The contrast in her role as beginning teacher compared with mine in the 1960s could not be more extreme in terms of autonomy, professionalism and job satisfaction.Having worked in Australian education for six decades, I have seen teaching decline from one of the preferred careers for graduates to one where universities have difficulty attracting able people into their teacher education courses. A significant percentage of new teaching graduates leave the profession in the first five years. I find this disappointing and distressing because my early experiences as a teacher were exciting, challenging and fulfilling - a career I would have recommended to anyone.I began writing this three-part book in 2019, before the Covid-19 global pandemic. While the pandemic has had serious repercussions for some aspects of Australian education, particularly in the tertiary field, it may also productively have shaken loose some of the rigidity that has plagued Australian school education over the last two decades.In this book, there are places where diagrams and illustrations are used to complement the text. This practice is reflective of my teaching habits in both the classroom and as a television presenter.I hope readers of my generation will identify with the trends outlined in the three parts of this book and perhaps understand them better.I hope policy makers at all levels will see possible ways ahead.Most of all, I hope aspiring teachers will find inspiration that they too, given the chance, might enjoy teaching as much as I have.