Professor Ben Kotzee

School of Education
Professor of Philosophy of Education
Head of Department of Education and Social Justice

Contact details

Email: h.b.kotzee@bham.ac.uk

Address: School of Education
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston, Birmingham
B15 2TT, United Kingdom

Ben Kotzee is a Professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of Birmingham. He works on topics in the philosophy of education and focuses on applying insights from contemporary epistemology to questions regarding intellectual development. He also has research interests in professional ethics and in professional education. Ben Kotzee is the editor of the journal Theory and Research in Education (SAGE). He holds a PhD in philosophy from King’s College London and was previously lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London.

Qualifications

PhD (Philosophy) (London)
MA (Philosophy) (Stellenbosch)
Grad Cert (Social Research) (London)
BA Hons (Philosophy) (Stellenbosch)

Teaching

BA Education, Year 1: Philosophy of Education
MA: Introduction to the Philosophy of Social Science

Postgraduate supervision

Ben Kotzee works on topics in the philosophy of education and focuses on applying insights from contemporary epistemology to questions regarding moral and intellectual character development. He has written on the epistemic aims of education and on the nature and development of expertise; he is the editor of Education and the Growth of Knowledge: perspectives from social and virtue epistemology (Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming). Dr Kotzee is interested in supervising doctoral research in the philosophy of education, the epistemology of education and applied ethical issues in education.

Other activities

Ben Kotzee is secretary of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain.

Publications

Recent publications

Article

Spicksley, K, Kotzee, B & Tian, M 2026, 'Visible yet fuzzy: new adventures in (post)panopticism under England’s 2019 Education Inspection Framework', Journal of Education Policy. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2026.2667294

Kotzee, B 2025, 'The Ethics of Belief Debate and the Norm of Teaching', Educational Theory, vol. 75, no. 2, pp. 374-398. https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.70016

Kotzee, B & Sato, K 2023, 'Testimonial Justice and the Voluntarism Problem: the virtue of just acceptance', Journal of Philosophy of Education, vol. 57, no. 4-5, qhad063. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopedu/qhad063

Kotzee, B 2023, 'The economic and epistemic division of labour: on Philip Kitcher’s The Main Enterprise of the World', Journal of Philosophy of Education, vol. 57, no. 2, pp. 400-408. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopedu/qhad029

Kotzee, B 2023, 'The Philosophical Dimensions of Teachers' Research Literacy', Professions & Professionalism, vol. 13, no. 2, e5346. https://doi.org/10.7577/pp.5346

Matthews, A & Kotzee, B 2022, 'Bundled or unbundled? A multi‐text corpus‐assisted discourse analysis of the relationship between teaching and research in UK universities', British Educational Research Journal, vol. 48, no. 3, pp. 578-597. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3783

Paton, A & Kotzee, B 2021, 'The fundamental role of storytelling and practical wisdom in facilitating the ethics education of junior doctors', Health, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 417-433. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363459319889102

Matthews, A & Kotzee, B 2021, 'The rhetoric of the UK higher education Teaching Excellence Framework: a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of TEF2 provider statements', Educational Review, vol. 73, no. 5, pp. 523-543. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2019.1666796

Kotzee, B & Palermos, SO 2021, 'The teacher bandwidth problem: MOOCs, connectivism, and collaborative knowledge', Educational Theory, vol. 71, no. 4, pp. 497-518. https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.12495

Matthews, A & Kotzee, B 2020, 'UK university part-time higher education: a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of undergraduate prospectuses', Higher Education Research and Development, vol. 39, no. 6, pp. 1186-1201. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2020.1713730

Kotzee, B, Carter, JA & Siegel, H 2019, 'Educating for intellectual virtue: a critique from action guidance', Episteme. https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2019.10

Chapter

Kotzee, B & Baehr, J 2024, Intellectual Virtues. in MD Matthews & RM Lerner (eds), The Routledge International Handbook of Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Character Development, Volume I. 1st edn, vol. 1, Routledge, pp. 512-532. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003251248-28

Kotzee, B 2023, The Epistocratic Challenge to Democratic Education. in The Cambridge Handbook of Democratic Education. Cambridge Handbooks in Education, Cambridge University Press, pp. 550 - 573. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009071536.037

Kotzee, B 2022, The Formation of Expertise. in R Curren (ed.), Handbook of Philosophy of Education. 1 edn, Routledge. <https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003172246-15/formation-expertise-ben-kotzee>

Kotzee, B 2019, Bullshit Assertion. in SG (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Assertion. Oxford University Press.

View all publications in research portal