Teacher Identity and the Struggle for Recognition (original) (raw)
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“What is essential is invisible to the eye”: Invisibility as Theme and Concept in Teacher Education
I consider the ways in which well-meaning scholars and educators have turned invisibility from a theme into a theory and in the process have elided the contingent cultural processes with sometimes fraught cognitive and affective consequences, most specifically in teacher education. Thus, I detail not only the ways in which this occurs but also enumerate the relevant cultural processes and offer examples through a case study of the Global Issues cohort at OISE.
1992
In education, it is necessary to look at students who are marginalized, and excluded, who is centered or privileged, and how, through academic discourse, silences are created, sustained, and legitimized. The three papers in this collection explore the politics of silencing and voice in education. "It's More Covert Today': The Importance of Race in Shaping Parents' Views of the School" by Annette Lareau focuses on the ways in which certain types of parental culture and discourse are privileged in schools, leading to the construction of an "ideal type" of parental involvement. Parents who do not fit this construction are outside the bounds of what is acceptable for a parent, and their ideas, no matter how salient, are rebuffed. Lois Weis, in "White Male Working Class Youth: An Exploration of Relative Privilege and Loss," focuses on the ways in which white male working class identity is taking shape under the restructured economy of the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, ways in which young men are reaffirming the discourses of white male power and privilege in spite of an economy that increasingly denies them this privilege are examined. Michelle Fine, in "The 'Public' in Public Schools: The Social Construction/Constriction of Moral Communities," examines a third set of issues related to silencing, the ways in which public schools, supposed to be universally accessible moral communities, engage in patterns of systematic exclusion and yet justify these patterns as being for the common good. (SLD)
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In this paper 1 have analyzed discourses in preservice education classrooms. The analysis is done in order to examine the complexities faced by professors who attempt to move away from using prescribed ethnic categories of identifications in their teaching. 1 argue that the struggle to assert one's identity as fluid and as drawn from multiple and changing social practices and desires is complex and often futile discourse. The classroom discourses of preservice students whose prior knowledge and experiences are congruent with practices facilitating marginality and white supremacy are most likely to marginalize progressive educators in general and people of colour in particular.
Teacher Education. A Black Student-Teacher’s Narrative About Black Identity
Voces y silencios, revista latinoamericana de educación, 2023
Student-teachers' Black identities have barely been documented in initial teacher education. Although some studies have focused on their cultural experiences, their identities are still unexplored to understand teacher education. This is why this study adopts a narrative perspective to address, through life story interviews, the identity formation and experience of a Black woman and student-teacher at a public university in Bogotá, Colombia. By dwelling on her experience, this study reflects upon how, although Black students deny their identities when learning a foreign language and becoming teachers, their personal and historical backgrounds work to position themselves politically and ideologically. Race and body become intersectional categories to comprehend their processes of resistance. This exploration also discusses how discursive representations have a stake in the constitution of Black identities in teacher education. KEYWORDS Black identity, initial teacher education, student-teacher identity, race, zone of non-being. 1 El artículo es parte de un proceso de investigación dentro de los espacios lectivos de la Licenciatura en lenguas con énfasis en inglés. No contó con financiación y no existe ningún conflicto de intereses por revelar. La correspondencia relativa a este artículo debe ser dirigida a Diego F. Ubaque-Casallas, MA., Licenciatura en Lenguas Extranjeras con Énfasis en inglés (LLEEI),
You Are Not Like Us: On Teacher Exclusion, Imagination and Disrupting Perception
Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2019
Debates on educational exclusion are almost exclusively focused on the experiences of learners as they navigate their way through barriers of race, culture, gender, sexuality, class, disability and language. Similar attention has not been afforded to the experiences of teachers, creating the impression that, unlike learners, teachers do not struggle with matters of inclusion, participation and belonging. Adding to the complexity of teacher inclusion is that it is often reduced to a preoccupation with external practices of inclusion, discounting the experiences and complex challenges encountered by minority group teachers as they attempt to assert their pedagogical identities. Focused on a post-apartheid South African context, this paper has two concerns. Firstly, it brings into question the dichotomy of inclusion/exclusion in relation to teacher exclusion, and suggests, instead, that exclusion exists in a dyadic relation to inclusion. In this regard, attention is given to the various experiences of teachers in relation to a language of 'standards' and 'competence', even when they are included. Secondly, by calling into question the uncontested constructions of norms and perceptions, a case is made for teacher inclusion, not only for the sake of including diverse narratives and lived experiences, but for the purpose of offering symbolic points of reference for learners and learner inclusion. In other words, inasmuch as the focus is on learner exclusion, deeper consideration and reflection on the experiences of teacher exclusion might be useful in understanding learner inclusion.
The Indispensability and Impossibility of Teacher Identity
2018
For many, the term ‘teacher identity’ carries purely positive associations, as something that provides a reassuring source of professional solidarity and support. Yet identity is something of a paradoxical and problematic notion. In thinking through the problematic of identity, and its relation to teachers’ lives and work, I draw on psychoanalytic theory, where identity, far from being characterized by harmony, completeness or self-sufficiency, is a site of conflict, fragmentation, and alienation. For psychoanalysis, this alienation derives from the external location of our primary sources of identification, including imaginary identifications with the specular image of the other and symbolic identifications with the demands and desires of the Other embodied in law, language and discourse. In other words, we are never quite ‘at one’ with ourselves because the source of ourselves – our identities – lies outside us. I explore the implications for teachers of the paradoxical nature of ...