Final Action
The Teacher’s Identity
Tim Huey
Fort Lewis College
THE TEACHER’S IDENTITY
Throughout my student teaching semester, as I took opportunity to observe various teachers’
performances, and as I became increasingly aware that my own teaching involved an aspect of performance, and wanting to establish a healthy approach to that performance, I have taken an interest in attempting to understand the teacher’s identity. During my practicum hours in the fall semester, I noticed that my cooperating teacher (a high school English teacher) performed no differently before his students than he did without them; he did not perform but presented himself as he always did. His class was dry. Students were not engaged –unless he engaged them in conversation that was not school related, and those students were only ones he got along with naturally, on a person level. During my student teaching hours in the spring semester, my cooperating teacher (a different teacher of the same department) performed charismatically. Her class was rich and enrapturing. Students couldn’t help but be engaged –yet the conversations she had with the students only minimally left topics concerning school and scarcely got personal. So, this year, I have been provided with these two examples of contrasting teaching styles, different from one another in their approach to teacher presentation and purpose, thrusting me into a challenging semester of personal reflection and active inquiry into the question: what is the teacher’s identity.
After reviewing the literature on teacher identity, I categorize teacher identity in three ways (in this paper), three aspects or factors simultaneously impacting identity, which teachers experience in some respect by the nature of their position: self-understanding, decisions, and narratives.
NOTE ON PROSE
During my research I stumbled across an article written by a creative writing professor out of Eastern Washington University that advocated for increased congruency between teacher’s identity and their academic writing, arguing that both mediums, teaching and writing, require serious consideration of one’s self-presentation, whether of facial gestures, tone of voice, or narrative style (Toor, 2016). Behind this argument is a value for personality, and a plea for its appearance in all of a teacher’s work. With this in mind –and especially as this paper’s topic is persona and identity– I wrote this paper using a narrative-esc style, displaying my own personality and taste. They say literature reviews are like orchestrating a dialogue between various researchers. I thought to flesh that out.
SELF-UNDERSTANDING
The teacher is a person. The teacher is public. The person of the teacher is before the eyes of the people. This situation of the teacher’s demands performance, as being attended by a crowd and being aware of it is to perform. So he or she picks up the mask and covers the face –naturally. There is no problem with the act, we all do it, says Carl Jung (1989). Robert P. Craig retorts, yes, we do, we all wear masks, but “if people constantly wear masks, they find it difficult, if not impossible, to shed the mask and live in reality, the reality of the self behind the mask” (2018, p.189). So there it is; there is the dilemma for the teacher. Craig sits with his fist under his chin, considering this dilemma. The people of teachers are ones disposed to wearing masks, as such, teachers have a knack for self awareness, self-knowledge, which in turn affords them the knack for knowing and recalling their genuineness. Craig lifts his head; he no longer has a dilemma, because, he thinks, teachers have a built-in safeguard against forgetting themselves –remembering themselves. (Professionally suggested practices for remembering and self-reflecting include Mindfulness and journal-keeping) (Craig, 2018).
Not so fast, harks Geert Kelchtermans. People do not have genuine selves and artificial selves; that is a mistake of “conceptualizing identity”; I’m always myself –shadow me for a day and you’ll see it’s true–; rather than going on about real-selves and fake-selves, teachers should refer to what we are talking about as “self-understanding” (2009, p.386). The distinction is important. Teachers’ self-understanding ought include the numerous and dynamic ways they are perceived. The position or instance of dynamic perceptions can accurately be described as “vulnerable” (Conroy, 2004, p.113). Before James Conroy begins listing-off the ways in which the public educator is vulnerable, he clarifies that what is he means by vulnerable is not, in this instance, a remark about emotion, or teachers’ emotional states; rather, the state of affairs for the teacher, the situation he or she is in, he says, is a state of vulnerability: the relative fiscal-poverty of the teacher, “the openness of [teaching’s] sphere of activity” (almost every adult has personal experience being a student, observing a teacher at work), the inquiries regarding “the exact nature of the expertise” of a teacher, the threshold-like position of teachers’ lives which are neither in childhood nor adulthood per se, etc. (2004, p.113). In some respects, the teacher is like the preacher, living in a glass house. Therefore, the teacher should consider not only their subject-area’s content as their content, but their lives and the choices they make as their content (hence the importance of teacher identity) (Lang, 2007; Kelchtermans, 2017).
DECISIONS
If it is believed that teachers’ lives are their content, or at least that their humanity is in some way role-modeled to their students, then the decisions that teachers make everyday are intimately related to their identities. One may not be the mask they wear, but certainly one is doing the choosing, choosing which masks to wear, or whether to wear a mask at all.
Monique Cherry-McDaniel enters the conversation by describing a particularly difficult decision that public teachers face, and which plays significantly into a teacher’s professional identity: deciding what is they believe the teacher’s relationship is with state standards? State standards have their place in education, measuring students’ relative proficiency in skills and knowledge that states deem necessary for their citizens. Yet, Cherry-McDaniel describes what her high school students were like when she made the mistake of adhering too loyally to the state standards, “They learned to separate their personhood from their student-hood. They read Romeo and Juliet and did not see themselves in the characters; instead, they thought about the difference between monologue and soliloquy” (2014, p.94). This tragic result is directly related to Cherry-McDaniel’s personal choice to separate her own personhood from her teacher-hood. The teacher is a person. What Cherry-McDaniel learned from her experience, she states well: “We cannot afford for politicians and big business to have a louder and more influential voice than the people who are actually doing the work of education,” and she goes on to encourage teachers to more actively engage in how standards inform their teaching (2014, p.97).
In contrast to the quote above, it is important to remember that teachers are not the only stakeholders in the skills and knowledge that students learn; this reality is constantly tugging at the thousands of decisions teachers make every day. The teacher needs to consider the various stakeholders involved –parents, relatives, other teachers, administration, community members, politicians, etc.– even at the micro level of their decisions, especially as their choices are often put into question, requiring their sound justification. Making judgement-calls depends upon teacher’s commitment and orientation to their students and these other stakeholders, thus are morally and ethically based, and are often emotionally demanding for teachers; here, again, is the teacher’s position of vulnerability (Conroy 2004; Kelchtermans 2009). Kelchtermans gathers himself, takes a deep breath, and then with eyes closed and chin up declares the following, extending the teacher’s position from vulnerable to paradoxical:
Professional teachers then incarnate the paradox of on the one hand taking a stance, speaking out of normative ideas and values and in line with that designing educational conditions that must help students to learn and to develop their individual capacities and identities as much as possible, while at the same time knowing that their purposeful action doesn’t fully capture, direct or predict what will happen. (2017, p.393)
Kelchterman’s paradox explains why teacher’s position must be vulnerable, why it couldn’t or shouldn’t be otherwise. The teacher can not make students learn, or grow, or become motivated; this depends on the students; the teacher by necessity, then, remains merely a fragment or partial contributor to the growth of their students; furthermore, that partial contribution is usually unrecognized or unidentifiable.
NARRATIVES
Morality, ethics, and emotions exist. They exist where one is honest with oneself. They exist too where one lies to oneself, or pays no mind to them. Because discussing these dimensions of our lives requires, well, vulnerability, we tend to put faces or narratives on such invisible things so that they are easier to look at, easier to admit; also, as such topics are often sprawling and complex, narratives help us to focus, locate, and share our thinking.
Kelchtermans opens his eyes, looks across at Conroy, and asks him to recall the point he made earlier about “self-understanding,” to which Conroy nods his head, and Kelchtermans says, well that same self-understanding is, for the teacher, only realized when the teacher considers themself before their audience; in other words, one’s self-understanding only appears in telling about that self, and that telling, that narrative, helps the teacher by its non-technicality, its liveliness, for we all live “storied-lives.” The teacher will therefore understand themselves more fully through narratives about teachers (2009, p.384-386).
The edges of Conroy’s lips slowly and slightly turn upward. I’ve been thinking about that a lot, he says, with a Machiavellian air, which suggests to Kelchtermans and the others that something were about to happen, but Conroy just sits there, hardly moving, and a sense of confused ambiguity passes over his attenders –Conroy seems to be on the threshold of silence and telling a riddle. I’ve been thinking about that a lot, he says again, and I’ve come up with a narrative that I think could help all teachers’ self-understanding: throughout the history of storytelling, from region to region and culture to culture, a single character, though taking different form, has continually appeared in our stories. I’m speaking, or course, about the trickster. The trickster can been seen all throughout folklore, mythologies, and the stories told in the present day, a figure that represents both wisdom and folly. Consider for example the commonly known, Native American mythical character of Coyote, who is sometimes portrayed as humble or weak and other times cunning and sly. Or again consider Shakespeare’s fool, who pops in and out of his plays like a ghost, yet oftentimes cackling with the more memorable notes of wisdom. By adopting the narrative of the trickster, at least in the conversation of teacher identity, teachers can begin to make sense of their position of vulnerability, their position of actor and attender of conflicting interests, their disposition to lead people on and criticize from within, for the trickster, like the teacher, is concerned with breaking-down and reimagining their own culture, traditions, and institutions (Conroy, 2004, p.112-126).
ARTIFACT #1 (two entries)
During my student teaching semester, I kept a google page dedicated to personal/professional reflections. I wrote in the journal about every three days. The following are two excerpts from the journal (dates included) that exhibit my personal wrestling with and beginning inquiry of the topics being discussed. The first entry, shows my grappling with the emotional aspects of teacher masks, and my seeking advice about that. The second entry shows my explicit mention of the teacher’s mask and a connection between teaching as a profession and other professions.
2/7
Issues in Public Speaking class. I’m getting vibed out. I’m being awkward. I’m speaking awkwardly in front of the class, as I’m allowing kids’ faces, moods, insecurities to affect how I feel. I was praying on my walk to school today for emotional constancy. A wall. An emotional wall, distancing myself from kids’ intentional or unintentional vibes. After being awkward –”Mentor” observed; I could tell she saw my awkwardice– I discussed this emotional constancy, wall, desire, with “Mentor”, whom I would have expected to be in support of the idea, as it seems to me that she has built up a teaching persona that repels student stuffage, but she actually responded by saying among other things that when she doesn’t express how she feels, she’s more likely to blow-up on a student. She meant that she likes to talk with the student. She is constantly surprising me, in that she makes complicated issues, simple. She would go to the source, the student, who is getting under my skin, and talk to them about it. Get on a human level with the student. Let them, him, her, see your humanity. And try to work with them.
2/27
I’m considering the show the Crown. The queen represents the monarchy, not herself. She does her job. To teach is to teach students. To love by teaching is to teach, not to use the mask of teacher as a way to love. This is how you love people, by finding a job where you have a common ground, you can’t just look at someone and say i love you, you need something to look at with them and say, i love that, don’t you. This is the teacher; mindfulness is saying I love you, but lazily. We love ourselves when we are good and healthy to ourselves and push ourselves to become better. This is how the teacher ought to love.
I see teachers who focus on their students rather than teaching their students, creating tiring, boring environments. I see teachers who focus on teaching their students, loving their students by engaging them. The teacher who is him or herself always, by nature, plays favorites with students. How could you not, we naturally gravitate towards certain people. The teacher however isn’t made to play favorites, should instead restrict their own personhood for the sake of all students, and play the teacher.
In the first entry above, early on in my student teaching, I recognize an emotional dynamic in teaching for which I see building an emotional wall (keeping me safe from danger, as the metaphor goes) as the fix, as the cure. Quite early in my semester then, I am discovering the need for a mask of sorts, since without one, I was hurting. Then, in the second entry, first paragraph, twenty days later, as I follow the connection between the profession of teaching and the profession of the Queen of England to the connection between teaching and any other people profession, requiring one to represent, primarily, I settle on what at the time I thought was the right way to view this… which I currently don’t know what I think about it, but I think there are exceptions… I settled on the idea that students can’t themselves be the focus, object of love, but the content of the class must be the focus. I settled on this despite what “Mentor” said in the entry before. The second paragraph of the 2/27 entry provides support for my thinking; that is, why I thought this.
ARTIFACT #2 (two entries)
This third excerpt from my journal, shows my reflection on the inconsistency between my own values, persona, and performance. Here I also reflect on a video of my teaching and an aspect of the position or role of the teacher. (I did not include the videos as an artifact because, after rewatching them, it is clear that I did not try dramatically different personas on, nor could one even tell by watching that I was inquiring into teacher identity issues). Fourth excerpt, shows my wrestling with an aspect of Conroy’s trickster (before having read it) –that the teacher trickster attempts to affect change from the inside of the system.
3/8
You say you’re all about the hidden curriculum, but today when a student drew your attention to a molding-over text book you took it and put it on a shelf and then the student said in a sarcastic voice, “well just leave it for next year,” and you smiled and repeated what they said; in this you displayed low expectations. You need to remember that everything you do represents high expectations, represents the Lord. Be direct with youth; look them in the eyes when you talk to them one on one, and be direct, plain, emotionless and clear.
Watching a video of myself teaching, Romeo and Juliet day one, I am letting kids’ comments, non-hand-raised comments distract my direction too much; I feel that I need to take responsibility of the direction of conversation more –yet, I am considering that I value student voice a lot and want that to be dominant in my class, perhaps by not responding to call out off-task comments I can establish space and safety of student voice better.
It is at bottom a being handed power, being handed a position or function of power, and learning how to handle it. Your students don’t know it, but they want you to accept that power; they need you to; and you, in your nature of being not above another, try to reject it, but that is not what is best for anyone. To teach is to be in a position of power. When you say, only answer questions with your hands raised, and kids share out without, you remind them, you tell them you’re looking for people with their hands raised. Warm demanders. It is not nice to be just nice to students. It is mean, selfish; to be nice is to discipline, to teach a disciplined learning.
4/8
Real change is accomplished by being real, not by trying to change something from inside it. I imagine most teachers feel like spies on a mission, acting the part. But this is the case for everyone at a school, not being what they’re saying, but instead, upholding an idea of being approved by a collective standard, upholding the state standards.
In the 3/8 entry, one can see that I was still dealing with the idea that the teacher is a person in a position of power (kind of like the Queen, mentioned above). Where I state, “It is not nice to be just nice to students,” I am outrightly acknowledging that I believe in the necessity and appropriateness of the teacher’s mask –otherwise I would advocate for kindness, which is more naturally where I fall. And the 4/8 paragraph shows my rejecting the effectiveness of that idea. Although it is true that teachers need to be rigorous and teach discipline, all that accomplishes is a reproduction of themselves; that is, a person disciplined for the educational system, not primarily disciplined for the sake of being a beautiful person, or a person of character. Character, personality, beauty –these things, the teacher is not fully aloud. I believe this in some respects. I also believe what seems like the opposite, that true beauty, personality, and character are obtained through selflessness, self-sacrifice, and a work dedicated to others.
CONCLUSION
Jung, Conroy, Craig, Lang, Monique, Toor, and Kelchtermans –all these cats are people. All these people are in conversation, somehow, about the person of the teacher. I’m conversing too, here at a laminated wooden table in the old Reed Library, categorizing their thoughts into my own three cents: self-understanding, decisions, and narratives. These categories are just categories that maybe help to communicate something about what it means to be a teacher. Maybe they communicate the overarching vulnerable position of the teacher: the intersection of interests of opinions about who the teacher is and what she should be capable of and what he should be, to me and to me and to me, and stakeholders united by an organization, the education club. Maybe they communicate the doom or inevitability of the mask, or to put it positively, maybe the understanding, the self-understanding, which admits the logic that to be social means being seen by another, and therefore the one and the other put on smiles and sympathy, because of course, they love one another. Maybe my pocket change communicates the value of the narrative, that teachers live storied lives, and not just the English teachers, but the uneventful teachers as well, storied, and driven by the telling of humanity and the seeing of themselves through the eyes of others –the parents see what they see; the townspeople see something heroic or gossip, and so on– when the narrative is simply another mask, but a stripping mask, a stripping past gut to moral mask –maybe. For me, I don’t know, (connection to artifacts 1 and 2 to follow. –assessed) the everyday exercise of putting on and taking off a mask, the representing of something that I’m not even 90% sure I agree with, the all-consuming aspect of the teacher’s thoughts, and the extent to which the teacher can and cannot see the fruit of their labor leads me to stepping away from teaching as a profession. I do not know where I’ll end up or what work I will do, and that is scary to me, but I know that Jesus, my Lord, guides.
References
Conroy, J. C. (2004). Chapter 4: The Teacher as Trickster. In , Betwixt & Between: The
Liminal Imagination, Education & Democracy (pp. 111-136).
Craig R. P. (1994). The Face We Put On: Carl Jung for Teachers. The Clearing House, (4), 189.
Jung, C. G. 1989. Memories, dreams, reflections. Trans. Y R. and C. Winston. New York:
Vintage Books.
Kelchtermans, G. (2009). Who I am in how I teach is the message: self-understanding,
vulnerability and reflection. Teachers & Teaching, 15(2), 257-272.
doi:10.1080/13540600902875332
Kelchtermans, G. G. (2017). Studying Teachers' Lives as an Educational Issue: Autobiographical
Reflections from a Scholarly Journey. Teacher Education Quarterly, 44(4), 7-26.
Lang, J. M. (2007). Crafting a Teaching Persona. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved
from https://www.chronicle.com/article/Crafting-a-Teaching-Persona/46671
Monique, C. (2014). Coming Full Circle: A Young Teacher's Journey with the Standards
Movement. The English Journal, (2), 93.
Toor, R. (2016). Persona Matters. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Persona-Matters/238709