Reconnecting with Purpose: The Reason for Teaching
Delivery: Online (via Zoom)
Dates: Please see the detailed timeline below for scheduled session dates*
Duration: 8 Months (1 hour per month plus pre-reading – See session dates in the detailed timeline below).
Fee: £400 per person
- WCTA/FLA Partner Schools/Students = 80% discount
- State Schools = 50% discount
*Participants must attend a minimum of 5 out of the 9 sessions to receive a certificate of completion. New participants may join the course up to 2nd March 2026 in order to complete the 5 sessions before the end of the academic year.
Facilitator: Patrick Alexander, Professor of Education and Anthropology. Research Lead for Education, Oxford Brookes University.
Why do we dedicate our lives to teaching?
Join a global community of engaged practitioners to explore the big questions and challenges at the heart of what it means to be a teacher.
Overview and Rationale
This flexible, 9-part programme is an opportunity to reconnect with the ethical foundations of what it means to be an educator in a complex and troubling world, while developing the skill set to turn thoughts into action.
There are few roles in society more important than the teacher. The average teaching career will span tens of thousands of classroom hours, over years of time in school. But why do we do it? What is the calling to be a teacher, and what drives us to do our work? How do we stay true to this calling, amidst the complexities of daily life in school?
Too often, teachers’ time is completely taken up with the important work of the classroom, or the team meeting, or the looming deadline for reporting or marking. There is no doubt that the most valuable time in schools is spent on the care and cultivation of students. But at the end of the working week, many of us are left feeling the need for thinking space. Without enough time to pause, reflect, and engage in serious conversations about our profession, we may lack opportunities for thinking differently about challenges, and thinking better together to find solutions. We may lack opportunities to feel part of a wider community of like-minded educators with a strong desire to reconnect with the original purpose that drives us as educators. We may want to connect with others to think about how we better prepare young people for the future that is around the corner, and how we can empower ourselves to make positive change in our own schools in the present. Reconnect with Purpose offers the time, space, insight, and connection for this to happen.
A Non-Linear Approach
This programme is accessible because it follows a non-linear approach. Participants start the programme by making a commitment to engagement with a minimum of 5 sessions, but it is up to each individual to decide when and how they wish to participate.
There is no requirement to attend the sessions in order, but simply an expectation that participants come prepared to discuss, reflect, and learn. The programme will run monthly from November 2025 to June 2026.
Cultivating Practical Wisdom
Each virtual 60 minute session involves an accessible pre-reading, listening, or viewing, followed by a provocation.
Participants are invited to collect their thoughts (through text, images, or any other medium)about how each session theme resonates with their own practice.
By the end of each session, each participant will make their own commitment or plan for enacting their learning through observation and attention to practices and interactions in their settings, and will share this with the community during their next session.
In this way, the programme is closely focused on the ongoing cultivation of phronesis, or practical wisdom – of becoming a more attentive, thoughtful, experienced practitioner.
Building Community
This programme takes as its starting point the importance of a social contract between participants. All participants are encouraged to engage thoughtfully in discussion and personal growth, so that every person leaves each session feeling like they have gained something valuable.
The programme is designed to equip participants with new knowledge and practical wisdom, but also presents an intellectual, critical challenge to think through beliefs, concerns, and assumptions about how education works.
Reconnecting with Purpose will be led by Professor Patrick Alexander. Patrick is an anthropologist of education with twenty years of experience working with teachers and leaders in schools to explore the interconnections between theory and practice.
Detailed Timeline
Online via Zoom from 4pm – 5pm UK Time on the following dates:
4th November 2025: Who are you, and why are you a teacher?
In this session participants will receive an overview of the programme and its conceptual starting point of cultivating phronesis, or ‘practical wisdom’ through the various session themes. We will begin by discussing what it means to be a teacher, exploring initial motivations to join the profession, ethical starting points for teaching, and the practical, political, and intellectual challenges of life in the teaching profession.
2nd December 2025: Practice Architecture
What is the ‘architecture’ of your practice? What holds it in place? What keeps you doing things the way that you do them? In this session we will draw on the work of Prof. Stephen Kemmis to explore how practice is shaped, and what you can do to make productive changes to what you do as a teacher.
13th January 2026: What is a school for?
In this session we will draw on sociology, anthropology, and philosophy to explore the societal role of the school and the teacher.
3rd February 2026: Have you got a second? Interrogating the time of life as a teacher
We will kick off the year with a depth discussion about how time shapes the work of teachers, including themes of time poverty, power and time, time capital, and the ‘performance’ time of the classroom.
3rd March 2026: Assessment
In this session we will explore the role that assessment plays in experiences of being a teacher. What does it mean to assess, and what is the margin for creative thinking about assessment that we may have? What is the point of assessment?
21st April 2026: Cultural Complexity
How well do you really know your students? This session will involve a micro-ethnographic practice in cultural complexity and ‘global citizenship’ (or, story gathering and mapping to better understand your classroom/school). By engaging with thinking from anthropology, we will dig into the complexity of identity for children and young people, and think deeply about the implications for diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ).
19th May 2026: The road less travelled: Past and Futures thinking
In this session we will explore a range of ‘anticipatory practices’ (how we think about past, present, and future) in order to open up new ways of thinking about positive change in the role of the teacher. One way into this discussion will be developing counter narratives. What can we learn about our professional values by imagining if our lives had turned out differently?
16th June 2026: Care, compassion, capitalism, and collapse
In this session we will explore the conditions of the ‘polycrisis’ that is facing the world today. Unpacking the components of the polycrisis will help to frame teaching as part of the solution to some of the problems that the world faces today. We will explore the case for regenerative, world-centred education, and think about how teachers can se ideas of ecology to support colleagues and students to think beyond education for our current political and economic models.
30th June 2026: What is the future of teaching?
In the final session of this cycle, we will look again towards the future to consider how teaching might change, or stay the same, as the world becomes more complex and uncertain. We will do this by conducting a futures literacy exercise entitled: The view from 2050: ‘Retro-casting’ as a practice for thinking about the present and future of education.
Participants are not required to attend all sessions. A minimum of 5 sessions should be attended to receive a certificate of completion for the programme.