Working with a widening participation agenda is central to much of the teaching we undertake at a university like UoG. While this is a lauded objective, there is much less discussion about what this involves at the level of teaching practice, despite its importance to our work. 

In this presentation, I introduce the book ‘The Ignorant Schoolmaster’ by the French social theorist Jacques Rancière. Central to this work is Rancière’s conception of ‘equality’ within education.  I argue that his distinctive insight in working with students is his inversion of the practice of presuming students’ ‘ignorance’ (of the curriculum). 

Rather than seeing the job of the teacher as requiring that students learn the curriculum, Rancière argues that the most important role of the teacher is to require that students learn to take their capacities as thinkers seriously. I argue that this work offers some important conceptual and practical ways forward for our work with students in a widening participation context.