The purpose of this presentation is to inform the attendees of how a culture of free learning and teaching is encroached upon if a culture of fear exists in the teaching/learning environment. The speaker will take the position that a classroom should be a place to establish a culture of “harmonious co-existence” or what Efron [3] suggests should be a “culture of learning.” The speaker will begin the presentation by providing a modern interpretation of academic/educator freedoms and operationalize both the concepts of “lehrfreiheit” and “lernfreiheit” [2] for the audience. Lehrfreiheit will be operationalized as teacher freedoms and lernfreiheit will be operationalized as learner freedoms [1]. Specifically, the contextual history of academic freedom and modern applications within the academia/education will be discussed. Next, the presentation will focus on Mellon’s [4] identified fear generators (1. Pugilism, 2. Anti/intellectualism, 3. Short-termism, 4. Hierarchism, and 5. Perfectionism). Detailed examples of each of the fear generators as a form of suppression of academic/educator freedoms will be provided to orient the participant on how these fear generators encroach on academic freedoms. Each of the fear generators will be discussed both in terms of how the fear generators encroach on teachers’ lehrfreiheit and how the fear generators continue to encroach on students’ lernfreiheit.

Speaker: Brett Holt

Published in: Canada International Conference on Education, 2022

• Date of Conference: 21-23 June, 2022
• DOI: 10.20533/CICE.2022.0007
• Electronic ISBN: 978-1-913572-49-5
• Conference Location: Virtual (Mississauga, Canada)