Amplifying Whitness and Teaching as Being With

Abstract

Hansen, D. T. (2021). Reimagining the call to teach: A witness to teachers and teaching. Teachers College Press. David Hansen’s book Reimaging the Call to Teach: A Witness to Teachers and Teaching, in very nuanced, subtle, and complicated ways, inquires into teaching as a calling: it enacts and embodies the educational moments and space in teaching filled with uncertainties and complexities as “being with” (p. 33) others, “linking the past, present and future” (p. xiii). Hansen, as it rarely happens, bears an attuned and amplifying witness in sitting in on the classrooms as well as ongoing conversions to 16 public teachers over 2 years who participated in the “Person Project” (p. 52), which assembles teachers’ testimonials about teaching and what it means to “be a person in the world today” (p. 54) without imposing objectifying measurements and standards. In the book, the messy and rough ground of teaching, full of feelings, hesitations, and confusions, is not analyzed and decoded but rather felt, embodied, and described more comprehensively. As Hansen suggests, “I believe what is put forward here is a better description of the unity of the aesthetic, ethical, moral, and intellectual aspects of teaching—of the gestalt of teaching—of the meaning of teaching” (p. 57).