Critiquing Praxis (Conceptual and Empirical Trends in the Teaching Profession)

Critiquing Praxis describes the contemporary state of the teaching profession based on different aspects of Dutch educational praxis, and the descriptions are followed by reflections from Australia and Scandinavian perspectives. Its critique of the current state of the profession, especially in the face of the centralisation of education policy and the decentralisation of responsibility to schools, has widespread application elsewhere in the world. The volume does not aim to judge those who made choices about schools and teacher education in the past; rather it aims to offer an evaluation of how the perspectives that shaped past choices were themselves shaped by ways of understanding the world, and by past historical conditions. In our turn, we who are making such choices and responding to such challenges now will ourselves be judged by history. That being so, we should prepare ourselves by learning from history. Critiquing Praxis offers us a unique opportunity to do that with a praxis model for critique that is mainly based on European perspectives in pedagogy and sociology.