Critical Reflection on a Professional Identity Trajectory: Shedding Certitude

• In Event: Journeys of Self: Critical Reflections by Teacher Educators on Their Professional Identity Trajectories

Abstract

Purpose
In this ontological narrative (Somers & Gibson, 1994), located in self-study research methodology (Lassonde, Galman & Kosnik, 2009; Samaras, 2011), I reflect on the experience of shifting identity on entering higher education when I moved from the role of school principal to college lecturer.

Framing and inquiry
Drawing on diaries and artefacts of teaching, I posed the quintessential identity question: who was (am) I and what was it that I did (do)? Confronting the journey from “teacher” to “teacher educator”, in the words of Stephen Brookfield (1995, 2010), I gradually came face to face with four elements of critical reflection in a process of ravelling and unravelling my identity within teaching. Here, the elements of impostership, cultural suicide, road running, and lost innocence interwove. Impostership emerged from being part of a hybrid line of intellectual allegiance coupled with trying to fulfil the demands of a senior position. Was I a teacher, a lecturer, both, neither . . . ? Invariably, I was leaving others close to me behind, as I moved into a cultural space that was at some remove from the immediacy of a teaching life that I had once known. Ministerial directives to schools were no longer urgent, requiring immediate management decisions and action. No longer part of my realm of responsibility, the exigencies of schools became more remote as I slipped into the rhythms of academic life, and adopted a more distanced view of policy and its analysis. At the same time, I struggled with competing discourses – the internal desire for academic freedom on the one hand, and a need to conform on the other. I struggled, too, with the need to deepen knowledge, while maintaining a breadth of vision. Enthusiasm for various projects inevitably led to road running—desperately chasing elusive goals, only to discover groundlessness mid-air, followed by a falling flat on the floor of the canyon of learning. In attempting to do some good, I came to terms with lost innocence, recognizing that the good of the institution superceded the good of the individual.

Implications and significance
Over time, I have come to recognize that “incremental fluctuation” (Brookfield, 1996, p. 239) of my changing identity is part of who I am and what I do, and that such fluctuation can be unexpectedly enriching. Through teaching and learning in higher education, I have come to appreciate, for example, the situatedness of learning that occurs in Wenger’s (1998) dualities of participation and reification, and begun to see, both retrospectively and prospectively, how meaning may be constructed and reconstructed. More recently, theories of reflective practice, and Brookfield’s (2010) critical approach, have challenged me to find new layers of meaning and purpose to my work. Finally, engaging with critical collaborative inquiry as a facet of self-study (Samaras, 2011) has helped generate an intellectually safe and supportive community to articulate what matters, and in turn, to foster critical collaborative inquiries for those whom I teach.

Author

• Regina M. Murphy, St Patrick's College