The Indispensability and Impossibility of Teacher Identity

• In Event: 31.035 - Teacher Identity Development Situated in Dynamic Social and Cultural Contexts

Abstract

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 a paradoxical and problematic notion. In thinking through the problematic of identity, and its relation to the learning and motivation of teachers, this paper draws on psychoanalytic theory, where identity, far from being characterised 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.

Whatever we understand by teacher identity, there can be little doubt that, like those of the wider population, teachers’ identities are located within the dynamic social and cultural contexts of history, geography and policy. Specifically, teachers’ identities have undergone a transformation and intensification since the 1980s as a consequence of what Connell (2013) refers to as the ‘neoliberal cascade’ that has swept across education and schooling in many international contexts. This cascade has included an increase in the level of policy prescriptivism in relation to core aspects of teachers’ work, such as curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, along with heightened levels of audit and accountability (Taubman, 2009). We might describe these changes in terms of a move away from an earlier ‘inside out’ form of professionalism, where the contours of professional identity were largely determined from within the profession by individuals and groups, to forms of ‘outside in’ professionalism, where the profession is largely reacting and responding to pressures and agendas emanating from policy makers and politicians (Author et al., 2016c; Dawson, 1994).

Psychoanalytic theory helps us make sense of this tension as a perennial struggle between the ways in which we would like to see ourselves – our preferred self-image or ideal ego – and the meanings and practices we assume the Other of the symbolic order of society expects us to accept and adopt – our ego ideal (Lacan, 1991). Our motivations for wanting to teach and the process of learning to become a teacher can also be read in terms of this tension between ideal ego – our preferred view of ourselves as the teacher – and ego ideal – the identity we must adopt in order to be recognized as professional teachers, including conforming to the governance and accountability requirements of policy. This paper draws on qualitative case studies conducted in a teacher education program in New South Wales, Australia, to illustrate the conflicts experienced by student teachers struggling to reconcile personal values with the demands of policy. The analysis affirms that teacher identity remains a site of perpetual struggle, insofar as any final resolution of the tension between ideal ego and ego idea is impossible, even as establishing some form of uneasy truce is indispensable.

Author

• Matthew Clarke