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Performing for the Students: Teaching Identity and the Pedagogical Relationship
Author(s) -
STILLWAGGON JAMES
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
journal of philosophy of education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.501
H-Index - 41
eISSN - 1467-9752
pISSN - 0309-8249
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9752.2008.00603.x
Subject(s) - identity (music) , curriculum , performativity , pedagogy , relation (database) , context (archaeology) , teacher education , performative utterance , psychology , sociology , personality , mathematics education , epistemology , social psychology , aesthetics , gender studies , philosophy , computer science , paleontology , database , biology
Teacher identity is defined in its relations, on the one hand, to curriculum and, on the other, to students: to be identified as a teacher is to be taken by the latter as a bearer of the former. In this essay I consider some variations on theorising teacher identity within these relational terms. Beginning with the educational task of cultivating student subjects within the often impersonal aims of curriculum, I reject a correspondingly personalised production of teacher identity that would humanise education through the teacher's personality. Turning instead to the idea of a teaching role defined by institutional authority, I look at two perspectives from which the teacher's identity can be theorised as a matter of performing that role. Jane Gallop's performative definition of teaching highlights the teacher as a pre‐existing role but is fundamentally concerned with the teacher's self‐understanding, this fails, however the relational requirements of teaching. Ultimately, bringing performativity into the context of the transferential relation between teacher and student provided by Plato's Symposium , I argue that student desire produces teacher identity in response to the teacher's performed relation to truth.