Overview

This book offers an important and timely critique of expertise, showing how it is a ‘keyword’ shaped by social, historical, and political debates about what counts as knowledge and truth, and who counts as experts. Using teacher expertise as an illustrative case, Jessica Gerrard and Jessica Holloway reflect on recent events, including COVID-19 and the climate crisis, to examine how expertise is never neutral, objective, or fixed. They argue that ‘getting political’ is not just an inevitable part of teacher expertise, but a necessary basis of any claim to it. Across the chapters, Expertise explores how expertise is socially constructed in relation to governance, uses of data and evidence, understandings of ignorance and the unknown, and – ultimately – power. Using contemporary and historical examples from international contexts, the authors address the political positioning of expertise and how this creates boundaries between who is an expert and who is not, and what is (and is not) expertise. Gerrard and Holloway argue that ongoing policy debates about teacher expertise cannot be resolved by neutral definitions of ‘good teaching’. Rather, expertise is unavoidably political in its expression.

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9781350238237

Table of Contents

Reviews

While this is a valuable contribution to the philosophy of expertise, it is not only for philosophers. This is an excellent book for both research and teaching purposes, with something to offer those looking for a comprehensive introduction to expertise as it has been theorized across philosophy, psychology, and sociology, as well as those of us who specialize in these disciplines and could use some help escaping our epistemic bubbles and echo chambers. --Metapsychology

Author Information

Jessica Gerrard is Associate Professor in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at University of Melbourne, Australia. Jessica Holloway is Senior Research and ARC DECRA (2019-2022) Fellow in the Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education at Australian Catholic University, Australia.

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