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14Патрик М. Дженлинк
ЛИЧНОСТЬ УЧИТЕЛЯ КАК ПАЛИМПСЕСТ: РАЗРАБАТЫВАЯ ПЕДАГОГИКУ ЛИЧНОСТИ
Ключевые слова: личность, культурная идентичность, пространственная идентичность, палимпсест, педагогика личности, подготовка учителя, мультикультурный / мультирасовый.
Аннотация: Автор критически рассматривает, как преподаватели, готовящие учителей, должны формировать их личность. Он говорит о необходимости формирования личности будущих учителей (и тех, кто впервые вступил на поприще учительства) через педагогику личностного развития. Понятие «палимпсест» используется в качестве метафоры для обозначения всей сложности категории «личность» и профессиональной деятельности преподавателей, призванных формировать у студентов необходимые профессиональные и личностные качества. Данная работа носит педагогический характер, так как в ней раскрываются теоретические основы реализации педагогики личностного развития в подготовке учителя, а также анализируются вопросы, касающиеся личности учителя, призванного работать в мультикультурном и мультирасовом социумах. В этих условиях необходимо формировать его творческие начала взаимодействия в межкультурной среде, а, следовательно, - его личностные начала. Суть вопроса сводится к тому, что формирование личности учителя в мультикультурной и мультирасовой среде требует со стороны преподавателей понимания того, что сложный процесс обучения в условиях «человеческого многообразия» является социально обусловленной категорией и личность формируется в субъективных рамках данной реальности.
doi: 10.21510/1817-3292-2016-2-99-109
Introduction
Increasingly, teachers enter educational settings where difference "connotes not equal, better/worse, having more/less power over resources, discourses of identity and difference are braided at many points with a discourse of racism, both interpersonal and structural" (Cohen, 1993, p. 293). Teacher identity2 is often framed by difference, understood not as fact but as perspective. What is not defines the boundaries of what is. Coldron and Smith (1999) explain that teachers' professional identities manifest through their classroom practices, the choices teachers make and how those practices and choices are situated in the school community. Professional practices and choices are exercised in relation to such things as the way that teachers plan lessons and "a repertoire of activities that 'work', their relationships in the classroom and the school community, their responses in educational encounters, and the principles by, and extent to which, they judge the moral propriety of their work" (Coldron & Smith, 1999, p. 715).
The social, historical, and cultural contexts in which teachers work and live, and from which teachers derive their identity play a significant role in shaping the many different "self s" that are engaged in the social context of a teacher's practice at particular points in space and time. Teacher identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by misrecognition of others (Taylor, 1994). Interwoven with individual identity formation is the development of cultural identity. Lea and Griggs (2005) use the term 'cultural scripts' to refer to the different images and messages manifested in one's relations with others, in books and other media, and in institutional procedures and public policy, each a cultural factor that influences how an individual thinks, feels, and acts in the world and how these cultural factors influence the development of cultural identity as teacher. Recognition as a teacher, the strong and complex identification with one's professional culture and community are necessary for a positive sense of self and for the making of an involved and active community member.3 Teachers must learn to examine the consequences that prevailing social
2 I use the word identity in the singular here, as a way to talk about how individuals construct who they are in relationship to moments in space, place, and time. Identity does not convey a singular and fixed construction, but rather it is non-unitary, evolving within the multiple, shifting contexts in which we live, and is created within and through social and cultural discourse. The social, historical, and cultural contexts in which we live, and from which we derive our identity play a significant role in shaping the many different "self's" that are engaged in the social context of our practice at particular points in space and time.
3 Appiah (2005) is instructive in understanding the complexity of forming teacher identity in the diverse and pluralistic society that defines the educational surroundings: ". . . the social identities that clamor for recognition are extremely multifari-
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practices have jointly had in the creation of their own lives and the lives of their students. The formation of identity process that an individual experiences within social-cultural contexts is replete with multiple encounters that shape identity, one's own and the identity of others. Early in the preparation program forward to entering the classroom "teachers are engaged in creating themselves as teachers. Being a teacher is a matter of being seen as a teacher by himself or herself and by others . . . a matter of acquiring and then redefining an identity that is socially legitimated" (Coldron & Smith, 1999, p. 712).
Recognition as a teacher takes place within a horizon of socially imbued discourses4, politically, culturally embedded practices, and normative conditions that work to shape identity circumscribed by those discourses. "The professional identity of a teacher is a matter of where, within the professionally pertinent array of possibilities, a particular person is located" (Coldron & Smith, 1999, p. 713) and which discourses they are allowed to an active part. And, as Lea and Griggs (2005) explain, many "cultural scripts are ubiquitous, representing the shared socioeconomic interests of the most powerful individuals and groups in our society" (p. 94). Recognizing the influence of cultural scripts is important as "these scripts are so dominant an d omnipresent, we often—less than consciously—make them our own. This process occurs even when we see ourselves as representing alternative cultural scripts" (p. 94).
Writing One's Identity as Teacher
What does it mean to be a teacher? What constitutes a teacher's identity? Who determines what makes a good teacher? What is our role in developing teacher identity? For Dewey (1938), experience, education, and life were one and the same. He believed an individual's exp e-rience was a central lens for understanding a person and the keys to educational experience as the principles of interaction and continuity. To understand a teacher's identity, one must unde r-stand the teacher's life. Drawing on Isak Dinesen's (1981) Letters from Africa 1914-1931, we find a glimpse into the importance of understanding what constitutes the formation of self and what is necessary for the teacher in relation to his/her surroundings, and equally important a glimpse into the importance that understanding the life world of one's self holds in shaping identity:
What is it then "to be oneself"? It is not as easy as one might think. . . . it is not done by "having one's freedom" to a greater or lesser degree, but that one must be in contact with one's surroundings, - so that a professor of mathematics on a desert island or among the Hottentots or la belle Otero among Russian Dukhobors with the best will in the world cannot manage to be themselves, or be anything at all; first they must go out into other surroundings, and they can breathe again and develop their true personality. (Dinesen, 1981, p. 375, emphasis in original) For Dinesen, we must be in contact with our surroundings to be and become oneself in relation to the world and human geography that defines our location in the world at a particular moment. To be a teacher means to be in contact with the surroundings of our student, our self, and the community; in contact with the cultural, social, political, aesthetic, and emotional in order to develop one's personality.
ous. Some groups have the names of the earlier ethnicities: Italian, Jewish, Polish. Some correspond to the old races (black, Asian, Indian); or to religions (Baptist, Catholic, Jewish, again). Some are basically regional (Southern, Western, Puerto Ri-can). Yet others are new groups that meld together people of particular geographic origins (Hispanic, Asia American) or are social categories (woman, gay, bisexual, disabled, Deaf) that are none of these" (p. 117).
4 Danielewicz (2001) is instructive concerning what constitutes discourse as it relates to teacher identity and identity formation: ...all social interaction can be described as discourse, which is the environment where identities develop, the method individuals use to make identities, and the process that acts upon individuals to shape identities. Since everything— social structure, institutions, communities, selves, social practices, identities, culture - is constituted by discourse, through discourse, and in discourse, then the issue becomes how to work deliberately and self-consciously within this universe of discourse to foster particular identities. (p. 137)
Dewey's (1938) belief that we must "understand the teacher's life" speaks to the importance of understanding the surroundings that shape and are shaped by the individual's "self" in becoming a teacher. That we write our identity as a teacher as we live our life in the classroom, speaks to the biographical nature of the self, that is, the self is written through experience. And that experience is shaping who we are becoming as a teacher, and at the same time our experience is shaping others who are in our biographical space. Greene (1978a) is helpful as she notes: All of us achieved contact with the world from a particular vantage point, in terms of a particular biography. All of this underlies our present perspectives and affects the way we look at things and talk about things and structure our realities. To be in touch with our landscapes is to be conscious of our evolving experiences, to be aware of the ways in which we encounter our world. (Greene, 1978a, p. 2) Greene's notion of landscapes interprets into Dinesen's surroundings, the importance of which lies in being conscious of those surroundings and their influence in the shaping of our self, our identity as a teacher educator or teacher. It is "through acts of consciousness that aspects of the world present themselves," and "bring individuals in touch with objects, events, and other human beings; they make it possible for individuals to . . . constitute a world" (Greene, 1978a, p. 14). Whether as teacher educators, students of teaching, or teacher practitioners we must understand that "the self is not ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action . . ." (Dewey, 1916, p. 408). Dewey believed that if an individual, say, was interested in keeping at his or her work even if his or her life were endangered, that would be because the individual found his or her self "in that work" (1916, p. 408). How a student of teaching5 experiences his/her preparation, or how a teacher in the classroom experiences his/her job, how he/she interprets his/her position, how he/she understands what he/she teachers, what he/she knows, doesn't know, and doesn't try to know - all of these are neither simply individual choices or simply the result of belonging to the social category, "teacher." Instead, they are negotiated in the course of learning to teach or doing the job, in either case, through interacting with others.
Drawing on Dewey's (1938) theory of experience and education, Connelly and Clandinin (1999) approach the issue of teacher identity from the perspective of teachers' experiences and voices. They suggest that, "our identities are composed and improvised as we go about living our lives embodying knowledge and engaging our contexts" (p. 4). Our stories and experiences are the narrative expressions of who we are in our worlds, whether the world of the teacher education program or the world of the K-12 school. We write our identities as teachers, and then rewrite them, often times writing over earlier experiences that shaped who we are becoming as teacher. In this sense, our identity as teacher is like a palimpsest, not the product of a single moment, but a site of ongoing biographical production that fails to erase the traces of earlier social, cultural, political, pedagogical, narrative discourses.
Teacher Identity as Palimpsest
Teacher identity as palimpsest6 reflects an understanding that one's identity in the present is written over multiple pasts, multiple inscriptions of experience. Identity is not something that is finally
5 The "student of teaching" as I use the designation in this text refers generally to the preservice teacher student who is preparing to teach. However, because I believe that teacher educators must also be, as Freire (1998) explained, students of learning to teach, I include the teacher educator as a student of teaching. In this sense, "Whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching, and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning" (Freire, 1998, p. 31). In the context of teacher identity and our role as teacher educator, "The importance of the identity of each one of us as an agent, educator or learner, of the educational practice is clear, as is the importance of our identity as a product of a tension-filled relationship between what we inherit and what we acquire" (Freire, 1998, p. 70).
6 Palimpsest, which in the original Greek word palimpsestos is a compound of palin, "again" and psestos, "rubbed smooth", is defined as a parchment or other piece of writing material from which one writing had been erased to make room for another, often leaving the first faintly visible, a process to which many ancient manuscripts were subjected. Often the erasing wasn't altogether successful and the original writing showed through. This is why the word also has the meaning of some-
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achieved rather it is continually created, written as one's biographical experiences shape the nature of who one is becoming as a teacher. That doesn't mean those pasts are transparently legible or completely recoverable, rather, it is that even in their very opacity or inscrutability, the most archaic inscriptions in the teacher's identity as palimpsest do work by transforming and displacing what has been written over them (even as the later equally transform and displace their predecessors). As Sumara (1998) explains,
What one remembers must always be reinterpreted in light of new knowledge and in the context of new experiences. What and who is remembered, then, is not some perfectly preserved fragment of experience or identity from the past but, rather, is an image that is newly understood and resymbolized in the present. (p. 203) Just as the palimpsest retains everything written on it from the past, even if the legibility of its inscriptions diminishes with more and more over-writing, so to does the teacher's identity retain past experiences. But this is in some way a false dichotomy, the teacher's identity, like the palimpsest, resists any fantasy of total historical legibility or recovery, that is we do not see the earlier identity but rather the emerging identity, the teacher who is becoming what he/she is meant to become as a teacher. In this sense, past inscriptions from discourse and practice are constantly rendered opaque even as their traces remain.
What palimpsest foregrounds, as metaphor for teacher identity, is how this process of creating oneself as a teacher is more cultural, relational, and biographical. The continual shifts in the relations of our experiences and one's ongoing sense of identity are facilitated by what Merleau-Ponty (1962) calls the "cultural objects" that mediate the relations of our experience (pp. 347-348). Whereas he is referring to material objects, we find that pedagogical practice, discourse, and biographical experiences culturally shape the teacher's identity. When teacher identity is understood as becoming a teacher, learning how to teach is described as a process of transposing teaching skills onto persons who have the virtues necessary to become a teacher. The self that comes to the enterprise of teaching is viewed as the foundation for the skills and behaviors needed for effective teaching. Understood in this way, the work of teacher education becomes one of transposition rather than transformation. We must, as teacher educators, take into consideration the conditions in which students of teaching will enter, the classrooms and schools in which they will be teaching and the importance of all the knowledge derived from life experience, which they bring with them as they learn their identity as teacher.
Imagining our self as teacher—Fictive identity
Identity, like the palimpsest is written over time. The pre-teaching life of the teacher reflects but one of many layers of biographical narrative that is written over. The dissonance between the pre-teaching life and the life of teaching is mediated by use of a fictive identity. As Dolloff (1999) argues,
We all have very clear images of what teachers look like. After all, we have experienced teachers formally and informally for most of our lives. In addition to the many teachers that we hold in our memories from our schooling, we have accumulated a vast number of fictional teachers—teachers portrayed in art, in film, in theatre, and many other areas of popular culture. (p. 191)
thing that has been changed but which still shows traces of its earlier form, perhaps a building which has been altered but whose original structure is still recognizable. When considering identity as palimpsest, the palimpsest translates not as the product of a single moment, but a site of ongoing textual, or in the case of the teacher, biographical, production that fails to erase the traces of earlier inscriptions or social, cultural, political, pedagogical, imprints. I use the term as a metaphor for understanding the complexity of identity, in particular as we think about the affect on identity of cultural, political, historical, ideological, social, pedagogical, and so forth. The teacher's identity is written, and rewritten over time and in different contexts, shaped and reshaped. The teacher identity, the self, is written and then written over, often leaving impressions of earlier experiences beneath the surface.
Such images serve as a fictive identity of what a teacher is in society, and in each individual's own life world. The importance of this recognition is that the student of teaching situated in learning to teach experiences, must mediate a dissonance between his/her pre-teaching life, and his/her life as experienced teacher. Such mediation is accomplished by use of the "fictive identity. This fictive identity, of the teacher, while created in part by experiences early in life, is fostered as much by myth as by truth. Also, the fictive identity of a teacher is composed not only of elements of the student of teaching's already-experienced world of understanding, but also of the various cultural myths associated with the social idea of 'teacher'. Fictive identity is constructed in the culture in which we grow up, including institutionalized schooling, our homes and families, and the arts and media (Dolloff, 1999).
Creating commonplaces for our self as teacher—Cultural identity
Teacher identity is shaped through experience; over time the biographical memory is written as one layer upon another to form the palimpsest of the teacher identity. Teacher educators are responsible for understanding the importance of creating surroundings for learning in which the student of teaching may find a commonplace for learning, shaping, and critically examining the formation of identity.
Michael Ondaatje's (1992) The English Patient is instructive in understanding the importance of commonplaces of identity. In his novel, Ondaatje chronicles the lives of four strangers who come together for a time at the end of World War II in the abandoned, bombed-out Villa San Girolamo, in the hill town north of Florence. One these characters, a pilot who is burned beyond recognition in a plane crash, chooses not to reveal his name or any personal details about himself to the others, therefore he is assumed to be of English decent, and is referred to by the others as "the English patient." The only artifact the English patient salvages from the crash is a worn copy of the Greek historian Herodotus' The Histories (trans. 1954), which he has carried with him for over three decades. The book has become the English patient's palimpsest, a rewriting over time of The Histories, each new narrative carefully written in the margins of the text, artifacts and clippings from newspapers, other books, letters from others, and notes to himself pasted over pages or inserted between pages. As the English patient has experienced his surroundings, the book has become a commonplace for him to write his memories; the book grown to more than twice its original thickness over the years is referred to by him as his "commonplace book" (Ondaatje, 1992, p. 58).7
Teacher educators are responsible, in part, for mediating learning that ensures students of teaching "examine socially and culturally constructed realms of interpretations in which partic u-lar characters and actors are recognized, significance is assigned to certain acts, and particular outcomes are valued over others" (Holland, Lachicotte Jr., Skinner, & Cain, 1998, p. 52). The student of teaching has his/her "commonplace book" that reflects how the cultural identity of self as teacher is formed and reformed in relation to the everyday activities and events that are the substance and meaning of teacher identity. The teacher education program serves as perhaps a formative space for students of teaching to construct a "commonplace," where the cultural identity
7 The English patient's commonplace book, Herodotus's The Histories, serves as a "cultural object" (Merleau-Ponty, 1962) and at the same time a palimpsest of the English patient's identity. As Merleau-Ponty (1962) explains: "In the cultural object, I feel the close presence of others beneath a veil of anonymity. Someone uses the pipe for smoking, the spoon for eating, the bell for summoning, and is through the perception of a human act and another person that the perception of a cultural world could be" (pp. 347-348). By reading the book the strangers are able to examine the layers of biographical text written over the identity of the English patient, and at the same time, the strangers are able to read the artifacts that surround the human subject and the identity of that subject (in this case each of the strangers, with the English patient as the central figure of discourse), whether material (such as the pipe, the spoon, the bell) or linguistic (the stories we tell of our experiences), become "commonplaces" for these ongoing interpretations of identity.
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of teacher may be examined and understood in relation to the work of teaching in culturally diverse classrooms.
Writing our self as teacher—Biographical identity.
Struggling to understand the past, the characters in The English Patient draw our attention to excerpts of memory, passages from books, fragments or ruins, and isolated statues and images of art, and thus the novel's narrative as a whole presents a theory of history that replicates the discourse of the patient who "speaks in fragments about oasis towns, the later Medicis, the prose style of Kipling, the woman who bit into his flesh. And in his commonplace book, his 1890 edition of Herodotus's The Histories, are other fragments—maps, diary entries, writings in many languages, paragraphs cut out of other books" (Ondaatje, 1992, p. 96). The copy of Herodotus's The Histories the patient carries with him operates, in part, as a motif of biographical memory for the English patient. As the lives and identities of the four strangers in Ondaajte's novel intersect, generating new dimensions to their biographical lives, we find that a commonplace of identity is shaped. Just as the English patient's book, which he has "added to, cutting and gluing in pages from other books or writing in his own observations—so they [the strangers] all are cradled within the text of Herodotus," (Ondaatje, 1992, p. 16), and the biographical memories offer an understanding of how just as "poems imbedded in diary entries are inserted within Herodotus's pages" (Novak, 2004, p. 213), just as the palimpsest is written over, again, and again, "the memories that compose the narrative of the patient and the novel's narrative as a whole create a discontinuous vision of both past and present by ripping isolated moments and images out of their context in one narrative and drawing them into connection with one another" (p. 213).
Much the same, developing teacher identity requires a commonplace within which the student of teaching may examine the discourses, the cultural artifacts (objects), the experiences, and the memories that work to shape his/her identity. It is in the commonplaces that teacher writes and rewrites the biographical identity of teacher. Importantly, as Ondaatje (1992) notes, it is through memory, "things are smashed, revealed in new light" (p. 97, emphasis in original). For the English patient, this image of "things smashed, revealed in a new light" reflects both the characters' and the texts' encounter with the past; reflects a rewriting of the palimpsest of the their lives through the experiences shared in the abandoned Vila. For the teacher, it is the image of "revealed in a new light" that holds significance as the palimpsest of identity is written, and rewritten in and through the social, cultural, political, and pedagogical experiences of teaching.
Questioning our self as teacher—Provoked identity.
Greene (1978b), writing in Teaching the Question of Personal Reality, notes that memory is what allows us to create a story about ourselves: "we identify ourselves by means of memory" and memory helps us "compose the stories of our lives" (p. 33). Our stories and biographical narratives as teacher are related to our being-in-the-world because the stories of ourselves arise out of "the patterns and schemata" that "we use in the process of sense-making," and these cultural patterns, which are also narratives, have been "made available to us" by previous stories, earlier biographical lives, the ones that we read in childhood or studied in school and that comprised the canon on which our literary and cultural education was based (Greene, 1978b, p. 24).
Being-in-the-world and participating in the composing of our biographical self also implies a social responsibility. Being-in-the-world requires the student of teaching to understand his/her surroundings, and to be aware of how master narratives shape one's identity as teacher. Such narratives are ideological, serving political and cultural agendas. Within a world characterized by plurality—that is, the existence of biographies other than our own—we may not be able to choose the narrative of our origin (birth and childhood), but we can choose to attend to and teach stories other than "the master story" we have been accustomed to hearing (Greene, 1995, p. 118).
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Teacher educators must assist students of teaching in learning the importance of being provoked into a "heightened sense of agency" by being connected to their life-worlds and by being encouraged to "recover their own landscapes" (Greene, 1995, p. 48). Who or what provides that provocation? Without providing a template, Greene explains that, "we have to be there in the first person . . . eager to tell our stories and listen to others, eager to attend to the changing culture's story in which so many narratives intermesh" (1995, p. 37). While the provocation comes from within the individual, with teacher educators providing experiences to understand the work of provocation and the need for a "heightened sense of agency." Provocation in this sense must come from the teacher-as-individual aware of others and of the impact of self of the teacher on others
Situating our self as teacher—Spatial identity
Much like the four strangers in Ondaatje's The English Patient, for teacher educators working to develop an identity as teacher in students of teaching, it is easy to become confused about the beginnings and endings of personal and collective identities. It is necessary to examine the surroundings of the student as he/she learns to teach, both in the classroom and in the field. Sumara (1998) explains:
. . . identity is something that co-emerges with one's ever-shifting geographical, interpersonal, and intertextual experiences, and that identity is always the product of the interpretative work done around the continual fusing of past, present, and projected senses of self. I try to create literary experiences that facilitate and support this important work. (p. 206)
Through their ongoing practice of reading and interpreting the English patient's commonplace book the four strangers are able to make sense of the blurred relations between beginnings and endings. For teacher educators, we must foster, through pedagogical, situational spaces, the commonplaces for understanding and developing teacher identity; developing the teacher's spatial identity as self in the classroom and in relation with the self of each student. Such pedagogical, situational space as commonplace occurs within the cumulative and collective intertextual relations among teacher educators, students of teaching, learning activities, biographical narratives, cultural and political texts, and contexts of discourse and practice.
Developing spatial identity is concerned with learning to teach in situated, authentic contexts where the student of teaching is a part of a discourse community that includes actual practicing teachers, students, administrators, and other cultural workers engaged in spatial discourses and practices (de Certeau, 1984) that write and rewrite the biographical life of the school. Importantly, students of teaching, in all their diversity, must learn to examine the consequences that prevailing social discourses and practices have jointly had in the creation of their own life worlds and the life worlds of the students they will one day teach, situated in the classrooms and schools of urban, suburban and rural settings.
Teacher educators must understand the spatial nature of learning to teach and its relationship to the development of identity as teacher, each inextricable from the life of the teacher when he/she enters the classroom as teacher for the first time, or any time thereafter. Teacher education may be defined, in large part, as discourses and practices that transform learning "spaces into places" of identity development (de Certeau, 1984, p. 118). Teacher educators have a professional and social responsibility in developing both identity and agency in teachers. Heikkila (2001) is instructive with respect to the importance of understanding the nature of space and spatial identity when he argues that space "matters because it mediates the experiences of people in places, and further, it shapes the structure of the opportunity set available to them" (p. 266).
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Cultivating a Pedagogy of Identity
The extent to which teacher educators critically examine and can cultivate in students of teaching a conception of "self as racially, socially, and culturally constructed texts will, in turn, write their pedagogies as a palimpsest of identity. Teacher educators "must consider how our a p-proaches to teacher education can explore "the struggles and rewards of engaging pre-service teachers as they construct and critique their own cultural self-identities" (Mullen, 1999, p. 151). As well, teacher educators must understand that learning one's identity is intertwined with social agency, and that as such agency is "not simply a matter of places, but is more a matter of the spatial relations of places and spaces and the distribution of people within them" (Grossberg, 1996, p. 101). A 'pedagogy of identity' is not about engaging just the positionality of our students of teaching but about the nature of our own identities as teacher educators as they have and are emerging within and between different social, cultural, political, and spatial discourses and practices. Teacher educators who understand the formation of students' identities are individuals who also understand the formation of their own identities. In this sense, teacher educators must engage in a pedagogy of identity that critically examines the consequences that dominant discourses and practices have had in the creation of their own lives and the lives of their students.
With respect to cultivating a pedagogy of identity, it is important to understand, as Spodek (1974) has argued: "All teacher education is a form of ideology. Each program is related to the educational ideology held by a particular teacher educator or teacher education institution, even though the relationship may not be made explicit" (p. 9). As such, spatial discourses and practices shape the identity of both teacher educator and student, often in ways not desired. A pedagogy of identity understands that the "embodiment of a teacher identity is an important part of learning to teach" (Alsup, 2006, p. 105).
A pedagogy of identity works to mediate the ideological positioning of identity, and creates discourses within the preparation program and experiences that address the difficulty of developing a professional identity as teacher. Such a pedagogy understands that "even under best of circumstances, even thought it might be uncomfortable for us and such a discussion might mean revealing some of our own perceived weaknesses" it is necessary a part of rewriting the palimpsest of identity (Alsup, 2006, p. 7). Teacher educators must necessarily situate the student of teaching with spatial discourses as a part of the process of developing a professional identity, drawing on a various discursive genres. As Alsup (2006) argues, situating the student of teaching in spatial discourses concerned with the social, cultural, political, pedagogical, and spatial nature of identity, "and then critically analyzing their relationship to one's developing [a pedagogy of ide n-tity], is essential to professional identity formation and the making of a good teacher" (Alsup, 2006, p. 7).
Teacher educators concerned with development of a professional identity of teacher, recognize that a pedagogy of identity requires also creating "curricular experiences that facilitate complex interpretation . . . creating these "commonplace locations" for interpretation involves a deliberate process of creating intertextual and interpersonal links among texts, readers, situations, and responses to these" (Sumara, 1998, p. 206). Such pedagogy and curriculum, purposed with developing a professional identity, is continuously calling into question the location of identity, asking the question: Where is the essence of self located? At the same time, the merging of pedagogy and curriculum as a spatialization of identity recognizes that one's self, one's identity is somehow circumscribed in one's relation with others within a perceived and contextualized world of signif i-cance.
Creating a Pedagogical Space for Cultural Invention
Teacher education concerned with teacher identity in multicultural/multiracial settings requires that teacher educators, in creating the space for learning to teach, recognize that the multi-
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ple realities of teaching diverse populations is socially constructed and identity in turn is constructed within this subjective frame of reality. As Harvey (1990) puts it, "Symbolic orderings of space and time provide a framework for experience through which we learn who and what we are in society" (p. 214). Preparing teachers to enter classrooms hallmarked by diversity suggests that, as teachers, we ask, How can we position ourselves as less masters of truth and more as creators of a space in which those directly involved can act and speak on their own behalf? This will require of teacher education a rethinking of learning that creates what Bhabha (1988) calls a space of negotiation and translation. More importantly, it requires that we create "space for cultural invention," recognizing that "the weight of subjectivity which goes with" cultural invention, "is not the same as respecting identities which exist and which are endeavoring to maintain their existence, even if the two registers tend constantly to overlap" (Wieviorka, 1998, p. 907).
Cultural invention as the unfinished work of teacher education stresses the political nature of cultural tensions "by examining how institutions, knowledge, and social relationships are inscribed in power differently" (Giroux, 1991, p. 510), recognizing that teaching that embraces a multicultural and critical pedagogical stance "highlights the ethical by examining how the s hifting relationships of knowing, acting, and subjectivity are constructed in spaces and social relationships based on judgments which demand and frame" (p. 510) responses in degrees of definition to the complex nature of teaching students from multiple cultures. That is, teacher education and practice that embodies cultural invention is concerned with undoing invisibility by recognizing "Otherness" as critical, cultural and spatial qualities of teaching and learning to work to create diverse, democratic citizens. Cultural invention addresses the absence of imagination in society, undoing the effacement of that society, or in particular those members of society historically made invisible.
Importantly, teacher education that prepares teachers for the work of creating spaces for cultural invention is also preparing teachers to transform schools into democratic spheres where all students experience learning that is also just and equitable and designed to prepare students as active, critical citizens of society. What is equally important is that teacher education understand that space for learning to teach must also become "inextricably linked to the shifting parameters of place, identity, history and power" (Giroux, 1991, p. 511), and that learning to teach must also inextricably link teachers to the responsibility of reading and interpreting politically motivated and ideological imprinted agendas for education against political events within a nation state as well as globally, shifts in historical patterns of race and ethnicity, and in response to how space for cultural invention is created in the classroom that in turn becomes space for cultural invention in society as the student becomes the adult citizen of society.
Through a pedagogy of identity the teacher educator understands the necessity of providing a space within in which one can become the author of one's own interpretations of one's identity as teacher. These interpretations, however, cannot be extricated from one another. The interpretation of the teacher educator and that of the student overlap and intertwine within an ever-evolving and unstable web of contextualized relations. A pedagogy of identity creates a commonplace or space in which the process of self-interpretation of identity is continued. The palimpsest of the teacher's identity is continually written and rewritten. At the same time, the pedagogy of identity serves as a location for communal interpretation. As others read the biographical text of one's life as a teacher, their knowledge about the teacher deepens and, at the same time, their understanding of themselves changes. As they interpret themselves, they interpret one another and their sense of community.
Final Reflections
Learning our identity as teacher is often undermined by alterity, as Charles Taylor (1992) reminds us; alterity reveals the dependence of the self on an other at precisely the time when the social guarantee of another is no longer in place" (p. 35). The simultaneous interiorisation of ide n-
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tity (to an interior increasingly other) and the rise of the ideal of social equality means that "What has come about with the modern age is not the need for recognition but the conditions in which the attempt to be recognized can fail" (Taylor, 1992, p. 35). The work of teacher educators is made even more difficult when we consider that the conditions in schools across society, domestic and globally, have made it increasingly difficult to become a teacher.
The development of a strong sense of identity and agency is more critical now than perhaps ever before. We must understand that identity is a palimpsest being written each moment of our teaching lives, and that our identity is also being written over, that there are cultural, political, ideological forces at work trying to erase the teacher's identity. Erasure is just as much an inscription in the identity of teacher as is any "positive" discourse or practice. Returning to Ondaatje's (1992) The English Patient, we understand the character's conviction and his sense of self as he looses himself in the desert, which he believes can never be owned or named:
The desert could not be claimed or owned—it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East . . . It was a place of faith. We disappeared into the landscape. (pp. 138-139) Our greatest concern as teacher educators should be that the desert, as a metaphor for education, can be claimed, owned, and that the identity of teacher can be owned by those forces that work to accomplish their political or ideological agendas at the expense of our children, our society, our future, and most importantly at the expense of teachers identity.
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