Product reviews for Making of an Educator

Andy Hargreaves has written a slew of books in the past three years. My advice is to put them all aside and go straight to The Making of an Educator. Or should we say the ‘making, remaking’, and ‘further making of an educator’. And it is not linear. It is forward, sideways, rediscovering, doubling back, leaping forward. Always human and grounded in the roots of life and humanity, Hargreaves takes us through his non-linear but ultimately converging body of early work. From the time that Andy found himself in charge of the household when his father died and his mother was bedridden, Andy was responsible for the whole family, including his younger siblings. We then witness Andy’s first 15 years in formation as a British academic, in his 20s and 30s, before he came to Canada. In his 20s and 30s, he would have been seen as an upstart in the stuffy halls of British academia (and he still has that upstart demeanour in his 70s). In 1987, Andy, his wife Pauline, and their two children, Stuart and Lucy, took the leap into the unknown as they came to join us in Toronto. From that period on, Andy always found himself in leadership roles. Again, you can’t understand Andy’s sources of inspiration if you don’t see him in different roles, with different aspects of life and his scholarship and its application. In The Making an Educator you see Andy in flesh, blood, and as he was up to the age of 37. You understand what makes him tick and be ticked off. You can’t understand and get the full brunt of Andy’s magnificent contribution to practice and theory without absorbing the making of the early man. Read this book first before you pick up any of his 30+ other titles.