No abstract

Self-evaluation, a devolved, rigorous form of teacher inspection, has increasingly been promoted in educational circles as a way to balance both teacher autonomy and accountability. Such balancing acts help to alleviate anxiety around inspection, for the teacher who would otherwise face a visit from an inspector, and for the public who are concerned about self-evaluation being less objective. Using the Irish policy of self-evaluation, this paper will first explore the evidence-based approaches and the appropriation of a 'language of evaluation' that are inherent to so-called low-stakes accountability systems. In part, such mechanisms are used in order to alleviate anxiety. The anxiety that self-evaluation focuses on, however, corresponds only to aspects of teaching that are conducive to measurement, and therefore refers solely to what may be called an anxiety of performativity. Furthermore, its attempts to repress an anxiety of performativity ironically fails to acknowledge a more fundamental form of anxiety that teaching as a 'performance' involves. Using Sartre's idea of 'bad faith', this paper will ultimately argue that teaching inevitably involves an element of anxiety that should not be repressed but rather should be lived and worked with well, something which selfevaluation in its current form fails to capture.

Self-evaluation in inspection policy has become a global phenomenon. The idea is that it increases levels of teacher and school autonomy, wherein both schools and teachers have more ownership and responsibility over their work. In turn, such a process has allowed for greater accountability, which is then said to provide high quality education and, therefore, greater competitive advantage amongst knowledge-based economies. In both England and Ireland, self-evaluation has become a demanding procedure that is meant to complement external inspections of schools and teachers. In this article, I will argue that self-evaluation, whilst having the potential to become a worthwhile endeavour, does not live up to its name. In the first instance, the criteria used for self-evaluation are not internally generated but externally imposed. Thus, I would like to discuss the extent to which visions of 'good' or 'bad' education developed by inspecting bodies influence the way in which teachers and schools assess themselves. Furthermore, I will raise questions as to what appropriate criteria for teaching might look like. In doing so, I shall try to show that what is now current is a debased form of self-evaluation that is not only detrimental to the self-perception of teachers, but inadequate to what any coherent notion of the 'self' might be. In light of work by the philosopher Charles Taylor in particular, I will argue that the self is not something that can be examined in the way that is imagined in these inspection systems but is rather something dynamic and unfixed, constituted within a wider community of practice and, therefore, not amenable to evaluation in quite the way that is supposed.

Effective teaching is often connected to reflective practice. Reflection not only involves recording thoughts about what went well (or not) after class, but also to consider examples of potential bias in (re)actions to certain situations, and indeed, to one’s own evaluations of educational activities. This relates to the drive towards greater objectivity in education, and an emphasis on making educational practices and their evaluation explicit.  In ‘Transcendence of the Ego’, Sartre (2004) outlines a theory in which a ‘pre-personal’ self produces itself through reflection. This production is unavoidable, and yet dangerous in how it is conflated with a more fundamental ‘pre-reflective’ state of being. This ‘pre-personal’ self, as the very foundation of consciousness, is only experienced in moments when one is fully absorbed in a task, conscious but unaware, uninterrupted by thoughts or reflections that might disrupt this ‘raptured’ state of being. Complete immersions in the task at hand find their place within educational settings, and thus, what Sartre deems as the move from the ‘pre-personal’ to the ‘produced’ self is relevant for teaching. But so too is what comes after that sense of exposure recedes. Such absorption in the task of teaching leads to might be called a ‘post-personal’ self and is often when moments of ‘good teaching’ can be found. But this proclivity for reflective action can disrupt the flow of such immersive events. This is dangerous for two reasons. Firstly, it frames teaching within a particular ‘temporality’ that fails to allow for the performance of teaching in the present moment. Secondly, it fails to account for what the experience of teaching entails. This paper attempts to argue for the space and value of such forms of suspension, and to call into question the overly metricised way in which teachers are expected to reflect.

Current conceptions of accountability imply that, in order for teachers to be able to hold themselves to account, they need first to have cultivated certain 'professional dispositions'. But these conceptions fail to acknowledge the extent to which teachers are first and foremost accountable 'as such'. For the early existentialist thought of the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, this relates to a kind of responsibility premised on the ways in which we are always and inevitably responding to the world in which we find ourselves (with others). In this paper, I offer a reconceptualisation of teacher accountability in light of this, one that recognises implicit responses in classroom situations as underpinned by the subjectivity of those who bring these situations to light-often in subtle and immeasurable ways.