An Inquiry Into Personal Identity Construction: Importance and Implications for Education

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 1:30 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Repair(ing)s of Education Through Identity and Multimodal Storytelling (Table 9)

Abstract

I argue that self-knowledge is a crucial educational aim because it contains the answer to many philosophical puzzles that we have faced and continue to face today. I then draw upon Medina’s (2013) framework to discuss how this self-knowledge emerges either by engaging with the “other” against which the identity is constructed or by recognizing how one has been perceived as the “other”. Both these processes are initiated by beneficial epistemic friction. I conclude by arguing that education for self-knowledge is complex and depends on social identities and one’s social location in structures of oppression. This endeavor hopes to understand how to achieve meta-lucidity and “network solidarity” (p.308), as imagined by Medina (2013), through appropriate educational interventions.

Author

• Ini Periodi, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign