Reflexive Identities: Interrogating the Social Genesis of Teacher Educator Subjectivities in Late Modernity

Reflexive Identities: Interrogating the Social Genesis of Teacher Educator Subjectivities in Late Modernity

 

Anthony Joseph Research Scholar Dept. of Education – CIE, DU Delhi

Poonam Barla Research Scholar Faculty of Education – BHU Varanasi

 

Extended Abstract

 

(For, 9^th International Conference, 2018 of Comparative Education Society of India (CESI) on 'Modernity, Transformative Social Identities and Education in Comparative Contexts' from 14-16 December, 2018)

 

 

Education plays a major social function in society. Bequeathing to our children and posterity an education that is centred on social justice and human welfare, particularly in times of rapid economic and social change – is easily the central concern of government officials, social innovation practitioners, social entrepreneurs, civil society organizations, as well as students who would like to contribute to the common social good. The implicit role of teachers to address this concern assumes the role of teacher educators to promote a dynamic vision of teaching and build bridges between the academic world and political and social decision-makers. This paper argues that such an implicit assumption fails to adequately problematise the social genesis of teacher educator subjectivities in late modernity and thus the central concern of ‘LEARNING to Realize Education's Promise’ (World Development Report, 2018) remains a mere wish.

 

Ways of being and becoming in teaching requires of teachers to engage with ways to strengthen and sustain self, soul, heart, identity, and leverage these key touchstones to strengthen teaching and learning. While making sense of their teaching lives and teaching selves, teachers live in an ever-changing social world, which constantly demands adjustment to their identities and actions. With the shattering of the mirror of class consciousness, modern subjects conceive of themselves as reflexive, rational individuals, as indeed they must in order to survive the insecurity created by the structural fragmentation that Beck’s metaphor below makes explicit. 

 

The emergence of reflexivity goes hand in hand with a decline in sources of meaning which situate the subject within a collective. One of the driving forces behind this is the fragmentation of the industrial class structure and the resulting changes in the sources of identity available to subjects in late modernity:

 

To express this metaphysically, one could say that the concave mirror of class consciousness shatters without disintegrating, and that each fragment produces its own total perspective, although the mirror’s surface with its myriad of tiny cracks and fissures is unable to produce a unified image. As people are removed from social ties and privatized through recurrent surges of individualization, a double effect occurs. On the one hand, forms of perception become private, and at the same time - conceiving of this along the time axis - they become ahistorical. (Beck 1992, pp. 134–135)

 

The structural fragmentation challenges teacher educators to undertake the rigourous work of discovering who they are as human beings and how this impacts who they are with their students. Such a discovery calls for a critical interrogation of the social genesis of their subjectivities particularly in late modernity. Reflexive pedagogical practice, inherent in this interrogation, looks at the ‘identity undoing’ that such practice demands from teacher educators. Such identity undoing, the paper will discuss, is found to have strong connections to the impact on identity of power relations, resistance and struggle.

 

Reflexivity, which sets of reflexive pedagogical practice, is a core concept within the sociological theory of Anthony Giddens (1991), together with Ulrick Beck and Scott Lash brought the term its most prominence, is seen as the capacity of people to be both subjects and objects to themselves (Weigert and Grecas, 2003:280).

 

Reflexivity is viewed as a two-pronged understanding of the role of the researcher, both as someone who possesses knowledge and as someone pursuing knowledge (May, 2002). We contend that this understanding of reflexivity is also well suited for the practice of teaching, and specifically well suited for the practice of teacher education. Evidently, among teacher educators there been an increased awareness and call to use reflexive methodology particularly with

post-structuralist critiques of qualitative methods that made explicit the need for researchers to situate themselves within their data (Brewer, 2005).  Teaching and learning transforms Teacher Educators to research practitioners.  Positioned as instructors, they situate themselves within their data and are required both to demonstrate a way of knowing and seek to learn from their students about their social world and the potential application of their sociological knowledge beyond the university, namely the larger society.

 

Societies are defined and managed through discourses which constitute the social terrain on which subjectivities are constructed and practiced. The interactions between and among dominant discourses, structural and institutional processes, and lived subjectivities make up the complex web of power relationships that make up late modernity (Farrugia, 2015). This paper discusses a wide variety of critical issues that have a direct role in the social genesis of teacher educator subjectivities in late modernity. These include questions about the character of contemporary societies, the periodisation of social change, the processes of change by which societies are constantly made and remade by people, the relationships between the 'social' and the 'natural', the formation and maintenance of identities and matters of epistemology and methodology in pedagogy.

Theoretically, the paper approaches teacher educator’s reflexive identities as a manifestation of late modern material inequality, and sketches a theoretical framework which accounts for the relationship between these inequalities and the subjectivities available to teacher educators in late modernity.

 

Plotting the possibilities and challenges, the paper explores how the individual constructs a self from the thousands of colloquial identities provided by a society’s culture, and reveals how the individual actualizes and sustains an integrated and stable self while navigating the sometimes treacherous waters of everyday institutional life.

 

Current discordant discourses on all too familiar - disengaged students, disenfranchised teachers, sanitized and irrelevant curricula, inadequate support for the neediest schools and students, and the tyranny of standardizing testing have ignored the social genesis of teacher educator subjectivities in late modernity.  The ‘becoming’ of a teacher educator, an important dimension in a dynamic and ever-changing educational landscape in late modernity, hardly merits mention in the policy documents related to Teacher Education, nor how embracing a pedagogy in which emergence and becoming are central aspects– raises uncomfortable power and identity issues for teacher educators. Such an omission ignores questions related to, how do teacher educators weave personal and professional identities to model teaching practices to support continued resistance and possibilities in teacher education.

 

Exploring the curricular landscape of teacher educator identity, the paper aims to raise awareness of the inextricability of teaching and learning selves and the subjects with whom and which they engage, this paper argues that such an exploration entails a critical interrogation of the social genesis of teacher educator subjectivities in late modernity. By exploring identity at this intersection, the paper invites scholars and practitioners to reconceptualize relationships with students, curriculum, and their varied contexts. Our hope is to encourage authenticity, consciousness, and criticality that will foster more liberating ways of teaching and learning.

 

Teacher educators, through this paper are invited, to envision a social genesis a shifting of power away from government control and standardization and one pointed towards empowering teacher educators to guide and further develop the unique talents of diverse individuals. A Critical and sustained engagement with reflexive identities, the paper advocates, enables teacher educators with a new and generative approach to the introduction of critical literacies and pedagogies and offers a potentially powerful way to explore theory, methodology, and social issues.

 

Key Words: reflexive identities, social genesis, teacher educator subjectivities, late modernity