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.
