Have you ever wondered what is in a teacher’s bag? The following is a ‘found’1 poem compiled from the chat transcript of one of the four online poetry workshops which formed a part of the critical authenticity project.
In the first workshop, I asked teachers what they would put in their bag, as a way of directing a discussion towards teachers’ intrinsic values and exploring the liminal spaces in teachers’ self-conceptions and their link to their identities as teachers. The list gives us an insight into the complex iterations that is the teacher self.
In the literature on teacher identity, the concept of teacher authenticity is submitted as a well-accepted phenomenon – a binary construction of the self that is either authentic or inauthentic. Teachers are either passionate or not, experienced, or inexperienced, and so on. It is not that the set of values enumerated by researchers such as Kreber et al. (2007) and De Bruyckere and Kirschner (2017) on teacher authenticity, or indeed the government’s Teacher’s standards, are not desirable, professional or even morally germane.
The problem with homogeneous systems of reference is that they tend to speak for all, ‘ignoring the importance of personal impulse and desire’ (Dewey, 1997, p. 70) and the simple fact that we can sometimes be inexperienced and passionate, or vice versa. The exhortation is also often ambiguous, both in the literature and in practice. For instance, to be genuine will mean at some point to tell the truth about the inadequacies of the education the students are being provided; at other times, the opposite. To be professionally distant yet open to self-disclosure, is itself an oxymoron. Yet, in all of these instances, teachers are also expected to remain true to themselves.
