I have written before about the role about being an academic. This time, I want to speak more from a personal perspective.

We have long aspired for a graduate profession in teaching. Whenever I have thought about what this term means, I have more focused about a graduate profession in how it conducts itself. A graduate profession is about a process by which we come to inquire, reflect and consider the evidence around us before making decisions for our pupils and communities. One that can hold its own discourse and can manage opposing views and perspectives. One that aspires for the evidence it needs to make informed decisions. One that offers a space to articulate what we are thinking so as to hear different views. One that values rigour and debate: that seeks to engage and read and question themselves.. To build knowledge and understanding in light of their practice, and to consider how new knowledge influences and informs their own ideas. One that seeks to create their own communities, informed by their own reading, practice and experience and articulates their ideas to help their fellow kind.  

A sign of a graduate profession is that practitioners feel confident enough to disagree with those who hold power and build their own spaces. Its not about us expecting practitioners to engage on our terms and in our ways. It is about coming to them to support and help and engage. But also to LEARN as a group of people passionate about education.  

A graduate profession needs academics. But not to dominate or act as some gatekeeper of thought. Not to ostracise those that disagree. Not to hold them in contempt or suspicion. Not to say “they don’t know” “they are just young” or to assume that those of different persuasions are mindless – that they have been tricked, duped, deceived or assume they have been hookwinked into a conspiracy that they are totally unaware of and have no agency over. Not to cast assertions which we would, all too rightly, hold our own students to account for – when they have no merit, no evidence and based purely on suspicion.

I would go as far as this -To act in any of these ways goes against what holding an academic role should be about. Such a position only serves to undermine the very process of the graduate profession.

Our role is one predominately of service – to take our responsibility to service seriously and in a way that shapes lives positively, that helps those around us to think and provides a safe space to do so. So how can we serve “well”

We should seek to empower, to ignite and to lead through example. To hold that bar high, not to tear it down. To recognise that power that our roles hold and to use that power with grace, tact and wisdom. To meet practitioners where they choose to engage and to reflect WITH them, from a position of mutual respect and trust. Indeed, to build that trust. To respect the profession to build arguments and offer them to the world as tools for thought, not as tombs of wisdom. To respect to profession that these arguments should be questioned as part of a wider professional dialogue that helps us all to grow.  

Does this mean we should be neutral? No. We should be prepared to question and critique. But not from a position of such active distain and distrust for those for whom we disagree. Instead, we should do what we ask our own students to do – to  ask questions from a position of trust, kindness and in their interest of the wider profession. Not to judge or make assertion on their values or assumed political ideology. Instead, from a position of mutual respect, intrigue and for the benefit of the profession.  

I was lucky to have this modelled to me by the wonderful Professor Chris James. No matter what room he was in, he would listen. He wouldn’t put on the kid gloves – he challenged and discussed, but from a position of wanting to learn, to hear and to advance each other’s argument through honest debate and discourse. There was a shared trust that you had come to your own perspective through thought.  I learnt a lot from him and how he worked.

I have experienced this across the very many academics within education and in psychology. They are mostly not on Twitter. They are brilliant and kind and working hard to act exactly in the way that I got to experience Professor James work across many years. Whether it is in marking term papers, in how they support SCITTs in their work, how they supervise their students or how they proactively seek to engage with practitioner communities on their terms.  

Only difference is Chris would always buy the beer afterwards….