Presentation by Tom Are Trippestad
at Visual worlds of Education, Bergen June 8-10, 2020
Rhetoric of Crisis in Education
A commonplace understanding of crisis is that it is a dangerous or unstable situation that may affect people and society in unpredictable or negative ways. A crisis represents an emergency that need decision and action. “Crisis” and “critique” are cognates and is derived from the Greek work “krino” which means to separate, choose and judge. The lecture will elaborate on how educational crisis may foster or are related to new judgement, choice, and decisions in educational policy. A crisis may involve a blame game; who faults are the crisis? A crisis may as such open space for new actors with new epistemologies and normativity challenging the established arrangements and actors within an educational field. A crisis understanding may occur from unrealistic future expectations or they may be ideological manufactured to promote change in a strategic way. The lecture will elaborate on typical rhetorical figures in crisis construction that drive education policies worldwide and challenge some of these figures with a variety of critical recourses.
The Speaker
Tom Are Trippestad is a professor of pedagogy in Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. He has worked extensively on teacher professionalism, rhetoric, reform and realities in education over two decades. The constructions of social architectures and persuasive tools; amongst them the visuals and how they are used in educational governance to shape schooling, the reception and formation of professions, are at the core of his interest.
He wrote his PhD thesis The Code of Command Humanism - a Rhetorical Analysis of Gudmund Hernes Rhetoric, Social Engineering and Education policy (2009) on this subject. Latest publication: Struggle for Teacher Education (2017). Teacher Education and the GERM: Policy Entrepreneurship, Disruptive Innovation and the Rhetoric’s of Reform (2018).