Professional Learning and Identities in Teaching: International Narratives of Successful Teachers 9780367463595, 9781003028451, 9780367747138

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“The publication of this book is a relief. Scholarly as well as ethically. An international group of authors stands up against the worldwide dominance of standardized, de-contextualised comparative approaches in educational policies and research agendas in which their meaning is reduced to a narrow idea of effectiveness. The authors in this book don't deny the importance of effectiveness in education. Yet, they rightfully stress that this concern needs be addressed—conceptually as well as empirically—in ways that acknowledge the inevitable contextualised nature of teaching, as well as the crucial issue of purpose in education (and the ethical, normative choices it implies). Replacing effective teaching by the broader and more appropriate concept of successful teaching, the different contributions in the book seek to build a stronger research-based understanding of teacher professionalism and identity, as well as their development in the particularities of a time-space context. Narrative approaches once more demonstrate their theoretical and methodological power for this scholarly endeavor.” - Geert Kelchtermans, Professor of Education, University of Leuven, Belgium (KULeuven); Chair of the Centre for Innovation and the Development of Teacher and School “This book, Professional Learning and Identities in Teaching: International Narratives of Successful Teachers, is a volume to savor due to the vast international insights it offers. Editors Cendel Karaman and Silvia Edling are to be commended for inviting a broad range of international scholars to share narratives of teacher success in their home countries. Stories of experience are arguably the only way to show what teachers know and do. Such narratives unavoidably include contextual factors that bound teachers’ knowing, doing and being. They offer windows into teachers’ professional learning trajectories and identities-in-the-making. Such matters are never conclusive; rather, they repeatedly play out as time passes and new interactions unfurl. The teacher narratives in this volume are vivid and particularistic. Equally revealing is the extent to which neo-liberal agendas are grippingly present in international systems of education. Personal experience methods (i.e., narrative inquiry, autoethnography) are the only way to unleash teachers’ voices in socially engineered educational milieus rife with propositional knowledge claims and instrumentalist thinking. Reading this book is a profound experience. Like Cendel Karaman and Silvia Edling, I recommend that readers think with the many stories that follow. I also invite readers to imagine contextual shifts that could more fully support successful teachers’ practices. The editors and authors provide plentiful clues concerning how things could be otherwise. Because teachers are the only ones who

meet students in flesh-and-blood moments, the future is in their hands regardless of the views of those external to classrooms and schools.” - Cheryl J. Craig, PhD, Professor, Houston Endowment Endowed Chair of Urban Education and American Educational Research Fellow, Texas A&M University, USA “This book provides the reader with a clear and rich account of how professional learning and identities are central to teaching and teacher education. Drawing upon case studies from various contexts, the book demonstrates vividly the importance of looking at the complexity of teaching from the inside. It should be read by teachers, teacher educators, policy makers, researchers and all those interested in learning more about the process of becoming a teacher.” - Maria Assunção Flores, Professor, Institute of Education, University of Minho, Portugal; Editor, European Journal of Teacher Education

Professional Learning and Identities in Teaching

This book explores the reflective potentialities offered by analyses of teachers’ professional learning narratives. The book has a specific focus on narratives on professional learning and professional identities emerging from different contexts and gives a deeper understanding of successful teachers’ narratives globally. Diverging from universally standardized constructions of idealized teacher identity and professional learning, the book provides analyses of a diversified set of cases with detailed descriptions of each teacher’s idiographic and professional context to gain a deeper understanding of situated professional identities. With contributions from a range of international backgrounds, it shows teachers of various age groups, subject areas, and curricula contribute their narratives to help readers reflect on different trajectories toward becoming a teacher. These narratives provide insight into and a deeper understanding of the conditions and complex processes that being a “successful” teacher involves within these case studies, providing a useful contribution to the field of teacher education. Professional Learning and Identities in Teaching: International Narratives of Successful Teachers will be of great interest to researchers, academics, and post-graduate students of teacher education and international and comparative education. A. Cendel Karaman is Professor in the Faculty of Education at Middle East Technical University, Turkey. His research focuses on interculturality, teacher education, curriculum, professional development, identity, language education, and international mobility in education. Silvia Edling is a Professor and excellent teacher at the Academy of Education and Business Studies at University of Gävle, Sweden, and specializes in questions concerning democracy, teacher professionalism, historical consciousness ethics, justice, and rights in education and higher education.

Routledge Research in Teacher Education

The Routledge Research in Teacher Education series presents the latest research on Teacher Education and also provides a forum to discuss the latest practices and challenges in the field.

Integrating Technology in English Language Arts Teacher Education Donna L. Pasternak Research-Informed Teacher Learning Critical Perspectives on Theory, Research and Practice Edited by Lori Beckett Europeanisation in Teacher Education A Comparative Case Study of Teacher Education Policies and Practices Vasileios Symeonidis Study Abroad for Pre- and In-Service Teachers Transformative Learning on a Global Scale Laura Baecher Becoming Somebody in Teacher Education Person, Profession and Organization in a Global Southern Context Kari Kragh Blume Dahl Professional Learning and Identities in Teaching International Narratives of Successful Teachers Edited by A. Cendel Karaman and Silvia Edling Teacher Quality and Education Policy in India Understanding the Relationship Between Teacher Education, Teacher Effectiveness, and Student Outcomes Preeti Kumar and Alexander W. Wiseman Teacher Educators and their Professional Development Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future Edited by Ruben Vanderlinde, Kari Smith, Mieke Lunenberg and Jean Murray

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Research-in-Teacher-Education/book-series/RRTE

Professional Learning and Identities in Teaching International Narratives of Successful Teachers

Edited by A. Cendel Karaman and Silvia Edling

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, A. Cendel Karaman and Silvia Edling; individual chapters, the contributors The right of A. Cendel Karaman and Silvia Edling to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Karaman, A. Cendel, editor. | Edling, Silvia, editor. Title: Professional learning and identities in teaching : international narratives of successful teachers / Edited by A. Cendel Karaman and Silvia Edling. Description: First edition. | Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge research in teacher education | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020048791 (print) | LCCN 2020048792 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367463595 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003028451 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Teachers--Training of. | Identity (Psychology) | Narrative inquiry (Research method) | Teachers--Psychology. Classification: LCC LB1707 .P766 2021 (print) | LCC LB1707 (ebook) | DDC 370.71/1--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048791 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048792 ISBN: 978-0-367-46359-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-74713-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-02845-1 (ebk) Typeset in Galliard by SPi Global, India

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Author biographies x Introduction

1

A. CENDEL KARAMAN AND SILVIA EDLING

1 Remaining a student of teaching forever: Critical reflexive insights from a lifetime of multiple teacher identities in the Republic of Ireland

20

GERALDINE MOONEY SIMMIE

2 From success/failure binaries to teaching for justice: Conceptualizing education as access, responsibility, dignity, and transparency

36

WALTER S. GERSHON

3 Teacher narratives as counter-narratives of successful teaching

54

MARIA ALFREDO MOREIRA, ROSA MARIA MORAES ANUNCIATO AND MARIA APARECIDA P. VIANA

4 “If I can do it at this school, you can put me anywhere”: Case studies from Australian graduate teachers in diverse and challenging schools

72

LYNETTE LONGARETTI AND DIANNE TOE

5 Professional development of EFL teachers through reflective practice in a supportive community of practice CHITOSE ASAOKA

89

viii  Contents 6 Looking back with pride—looking forward in hope: The narratives of a transformative teacher

106

FATMA GÜMÜŞOK

7 Understanding a teacher’s professional identity through pedagogical rhythm

123

SÖREN HÖGBERG

8 Revisiting selves through a “success” perspective: An autoethnographic quest of a language teacher across intercultural spaces

138

TUGAY ELMAS

9 Path toward the construction of a professional identity: A narrative inquiry into a language teacher’s experiences

155

PINAR YENİ-PALABIYIK

10 “Successful teaching”: Neoliberal influences and emerging counter-narratives

172

EMRULLAH YASIN ÇİFTÇİ AND A. CENDEL KARAMAN

Conclusion: Context, interconnectedness, balance, and risk in teachers’ narratives

190

SILVIA EDLING AND A. CENDEL KARAMAN

Index 203

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank, first, all the authors and research participants for their interest and contribution to this volume. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism and suggestions. We would also like to acknowledge the important contributions of Editors Emilie Coin and William Bateman for their enthusiasm and encouragement throughout the project. This volume would also not become possible without the support of our universities. We thank Middle East Technical University, Turkey and University of Gävle, Sweden for their support. Finally, we are grateful to our families for all their support and encouragement throughout this journey.

Author biographies

Editors A. Cendel Karaman (Ph.D., Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is Professor in the Faculty of Education, Department of Foreign Language Education at Middle East Technical University. Dr. Karaman is the author of several research articles in the field of teacher education with a focus on systems thinking, intercultural education, field experiences, identity, curriculum, and professional development. He taught at the State University of New York Binghamton and University of Wisconsin. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the European Journal of Teacher Education. Silvia Edling (Ph.D., Curriculum Studies, Uppsala University, Sweden) is Professor in curriculum studies at the University of Gävle, Sweden and has been rewarded as excellent teacher. Edling studies educational environments, including teacher education, with a particular focus on how ideas/ perspectives and actions work together, the requirements and conditions for the teaching profession, the content of teaching and its democratic dimension. A selection of her most recent publications are: Democracy and Teacher Education. Dilemmas, Challenges, and Possibilities (Routledge), Worlds best occupation?! A short introduction for you who have chosen to become a teacher (Studentlitteratur), Let's talk about teacher education. Analysing the media debates in 2016-2017 on teacher education using Sweden as a case (Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education).

Authors Maria Alfredo Moreira (Ph.D., University of Minho) is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Education at the University of Minho, Portugal. She is the author of several articles and book chapters in the field of teacher education and school pedagogy with a focus on teacher narratives, social and cognitive justice, higher education, action research, and autonomy.

Author biographies  xi Chitose Asaoka (Ph.D., Education, Institute of Education, University College London, UK) is a Professor in the Faculty of Foreign Languages at Dokkyo University, Japan. Her current research interests include teacher education and teacher autonomy. She recently published a book, Early Professional Development in EFL Teaching: Perspectives and Experiences from Japan, from Multilingual Matters. Emrullah Yasin Çiftçi is a research assistant at Middle East Technical University, where he is also working on a PhD in the English Language Teaching program. His dissertation focuses on neoliberal common sense, international student mobility, and language teacher education. His research interests include language teacher education, critical interculturality, political economy in language education, critical discourse studies, and qualitative inquiry. His work related to interculturality and language teacher education has been published in several journals including Australian Journal of Teacher Education, Educational Technology & Society, Language and Intercultural Communication, ReCALL, Qualitative Report, and Language Learning Journal. Tugay Elmas is an English instructor at Başkent University's School of Foreign Languages. He received his B.A. from Istanbul University, Department of English Language Teaching. He also holds an M.A. in English Language Teaching from Middle East Technical University. His research interests include curriculum development, materials design, critical pedagogy, interculturality in language education, and teacher identity development. Walter S. Gershon (Ph.D.) is Associate Professor of Critical Foundations of Education and Program Coordinator of Urban Education in the Department of Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Education at Rowan University. His scholarship focuses on questions of justice about how people make sense, the sociocultural contexts that inform their sense-making, and the qualitative methods used to study those processes. Although his scholarship most often attends to how marginalized and vulnerable youth negotiate schools and schooling, Walter is also interested in how people of all ages negotiate educational ecologies outside institutions. In addition to peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and other scholarly publications, Dr. Gershon is editor and/or author of five books, including two national book award-winning monographs: Curriculum and Students in Classrooms: Everyday Urban Education in an Era of Standardization (Lexington Books, 2017) and Sound Curriculum: Sonic Studies in Educational Theory, Method, and Practice (Routledge, 2017). Fatma Gümüşok (Ph.D.) is Assistant Professor in the School of Foreign Languages at Bartın University, Turkey. Her research interests focus on foreign language teacher education, professional identity, teacher cognition, teacher professional development, and literature in English Language Teaching.

xii  Author biographies Sören Högberg (Ph.D., Education, Örebro University, Sweden). He is involved in pre-service, in-service teacher education as well as Educational work on master and doctorial level at Dalarna University. His main research interest has its focus on teachers’ work in general, and particularly in settings of Social studies. Lynette Longaretti is Senior Lecturer in Education at Deakin University, Australia and coordinates the National Exceptional Teachers for Disadvantaged Schools (NETDS) program at Deakin University. Her work addresses the social issue of educational disadvantage and is focused on the preparation of teachers for disadvantaged schools and the promotion of health and well-being in schools. Geraldine Mooney Simmie (Ph.D.) is a Senior Lecturer and Deputy Head School of Education in the Faculty of Education and Health Sciences at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Geraldine lectures in Policy Studies to doctoral students in education. Her research interest is in emancipatory practices in teaching and teachers' identities for a just global world. She has published articles in the Journal of Education Policy, Critical Studies in Education, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, Citizenship, Social & Economic Education, Teachers and Teaching Theory and Practice, Asia Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, Mentoring and Tutoring. She has a book on Democracy and Teacher Education with Professor Silvia Edling, University of Gavle, Sweden (Routledge, 2020). Rosa Maria Moraes Anunciato (Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil) is a full professor in the Centre of Education and Human Sciences at the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil. She is the author of several articles and book chapters on teacher education with a focus on teacher’s narratives, teacher’s professional development, and teacher professional identity. Dianne Toe is the Deputy Head of the School of Education and Academic Director of Professional Practice at Deakin University, Australia. Her background is in educational psychology, deaf education, and teacher education with a strong focus on social justice, inclusive education, and the preparation of teachers for disadvantaged schools. Maria Aparecida P. Viana (Ph.D., Federal University of Alagoas) is an Assistant Professor in the Centre of Education at the Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil. She is the author of several articles and book chapters in the field of educational technology with a focus on the pedagogy of teaching in higher education, distance learning, narratives, and professional development. Pınar Yeni-Palabıyık is a lecturer of English at Sakarya University of Applied Sciences. She is currently pursuing a PhD degree in English Language Teaching at Middle East Technical University, Turkey. Her research interests at present are language policy, teacher professional development, identity research, English language teaching methodology, and curriculum research.

Introduction A. Cendel Karaman and Silvia Edling

Introduction This book1 explores the reflective potentialities offered by analyses of teachers’ narratives. With a specific focus on narratives on professional learning and professional identities emerging from different contexts, this book provides a variety of case studies. Specifically, to seek a deeper understanding of successful teachers’ narratives in various contexts, researchers at different settings explore focal participants at different stages in their teaching career. Diverging from universally standardized constructions of idealized teacher identity and professional learning, a main aim of this volume is to present analyses of a diversified set of cases with thick descriptions of each teacher’s idiographic and professional context. It is hoped that the inquiries presented in this volume will contribute to reflective discussions among prospective teachers, practicing teachers, educational researchers, educational leaders, policy-makers, and teacher educators. The bricolage of these narratives convey situated accounts of teachers’ professional development trajectories. Worldwide, national and supranational institutions generate frameworks that determine the “standards” that would be associated with being a “successful teacher.” Coupled with the neoliberal processes of deskilling and reskilling teachers, in the public sphere, teachers are increasingly assessed based on accountability regimens that prioritize market-based needs and processes (Apple, 2018). For example, policy initiatives such as the No Child Left Behind Act and Race to the Top program in the United States influenced states and districts to link students’ standardized test scores with teacher efficacy. Organizations such as the OECD also frame certain constructions of teacher quality through “cognitive and epistemological control” (p. 507). As Berkovich and Benoliel (2020) noted, the OECD, through direct and indirect strategies, “construct teachers as problematic professionals and the OECD as being in a position of authority” (p. 507). At the same time, in societies, teachers and teacher educators are facing harsh criticism emerging, among other things, from a constructed need to constantly reform educational processes in the “21st Century” (Zeichner, 2017). In this context, reform initiatives can often bring instrumentalist approaches within which a technicist teacher identity with little autonomy

2  A. Cendel Karaman and Silvia Edling is constructed (Karaman, 2010; Tochon & Karaman, 2009). In this volume, through the inclusion of a variety of teacher narratives including early-, mid-, and late-career teachers teaching in diverse educational contexts, we aim to highlight how being a “successful” teacher is a dynamic, complex, and situated process as demonstrated within the various professional learning trajectories followed by teachers in their teaching environments. As Morin (2008) noted, …complexity is not only quantities of units and interactions that defy our possibilities of calculation; it is also made up of uncertainty, indetermination, and random phenomena. … Therefore, complexity coincides with a part of uncertainty that arises from the limits of our ability to comprehend, or with a part of uncertainty inscribed in phenomena. (Morin, 2008, p. 21)

Inquiring into constructions of successful teaching within the field of education It is important to reflect on the various public conceptions about the qualities of successful teachers considering “the super-complexity of ‘good teaching’ as a ‘messy’ narrative of change and flows operating between teachers and a diversity of inquirers and institutions (e.g. school, state, supranational institutions and the academy of teacher education).” (Simmie et al., 2019, p. 66). While education historically used to be a luxury for a few, such as religious groups and the nobility, education nowadays is an essential part in human life and a crucial stepping stone to shape societies. Article 26 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948 stresses everyone’s right to education2 and in 2018, five of six children (90%) worldwide went to school, which says something profoundly about the magnitude of education in current societies.3 Seeing that education is important in the continuous formation of and strife for economic growth in a nation, the will to encourage excellence in educational settings is not surprising. There are numerous examples of research publications trying to dissect what the notion of good education might imply and how the way to achieve excellence might be best attained (see for instance Bryk et al. 2015; Dweck, 2016; Gray & Streshly, 2008; Hattie, 2013; Stigler & Hiebert, 2009). In this process of defining the meaning of good education, there is a strong tendency to lean on the reliability and generality of quantitative findings and hence large meta-studies trying to pin down what works best. Indeed, the will to establish an order and control that cast out uncertainties have drastically been increasing lately (Levinsson, 2013). One of the leading researchers in this area is John Hattie, an Australian professor in pedagogy, whose quantitative research about Visible Learning has reached a massive international audience and stirred political interest. His study is based on 50,000 research articles drawing on quantitative analysis, 800–900 meta-studies, and the responses of 240 million pupils thus having an effect size of 150,000. The

Introduction  3 main intention of his study is to detect similarities between countries related to what seems to work best for facilitating students learning. At the same time, he is clear that his book is not to be seen as solid and quick fix solution but rather as a starting-point for thinking (Hattie, 2012). Whereas Hattie’s study draws on quantitative data, two Swedish pedagogical researchers namely associate professor Jan Håkansson and Professor Daniel Sundberg (2012) conducted a meta-analysis of excellent teaching based on a large amount of qualitative research in-between 1990–2010. Based on these studies, they identified 20 of the most prominent international research overviews about education within this time span and in the same line, 23 research overviews from a Swedish perspective. Based on a qualitative strategy, they strove to highlight inference chains influencing education and learning. Although the strategy differs from Hattie’s, Håkansson and Sundberg concluded in line with Visible Learning that there is no easy cut and secure strategy or strategies that can improve learning but lies in the way professionals in education converge a multitude of various scientific and contextual information and are able to zoom out to see overall patterns, and zoom in, to detect the details and dynamics in the particular context (pp. 15, 168). These two examples of meta-studies are radically different from each other in approach, but they nonetheless share some similar conclusions. They stress among other things that: a) learning takes form in a larger school [learning] environments where various factors are in relation to each other and thus affect the outcome, b) that teachers’ perceptions (ways of seeing their task) matter for what takes form in the class room, c) that a professional perception is built on deep knowledge composed out of various grounded perspectives, and d) that teachers need to be able to use this knowledge to interpret, puzzle, and make judgements in the various educational contexts (Edling & Mooney Simmie, 2020, Chapter 4). The meta-studies contribute with an overview of aspects of importance to teaching and learning which are vital to acknowledge, but at the same time, they cannot exchange the influence of and stories of individual teachers. Accordingly, in this web of relations, the teacher is thus seen as one important factor for stimulating good learning and seeing that perception in terms of meaning-making matter there is a point in approaching the notion of successful teachers in the form of narratives. Situating the teaching profession in relation purposes of education In order to understand what it implies to be a successful teacher, it is vital to remember that education as an institution and content always is in dialogue with what a society and hence government deems as important. In relation to this, education from a broad sense can be said to have three different purposes: to provide with qualifications, to socialize, and/or to stimulate emancipation (Biesta, 2007) as well as equal possibilities (Edling, 2016). The meaning of these three purposes is not fixed but shifts from time to time and content to content depending on what a society finds as important to strive for.

4  A. Cendel Karaman and Silvia Edling Generally, two traditions or ideologies highlight the relationship between the state and education, which can be described as either broad or narrow state/ teacher responsibilities. If the prime aim of education is to preserve status quo in a society and provide with knowledge necessary to feed the market and private interests, it can be defined in terms of an education for private good. The responsibilities of the state and educators is in this case simply to secure that the particular knowledge required is delivered properly and with high quality and in some cases to socialize people into adapting to an order needed to uphold this system. However, if education is regarded as to be about more than chiefly feeding the market and individuals’ personal interests and include questions like promoting democracy in everyday life, handling environmental issues, protecting everyone’s equal value, as well as promoting equal conditions and possibilities, education becomes a question of public good. In this case, the state and also professionals working in education are also responsible for providing necessary qualifications to actively work with social challenge and relations. There is thus a strong tension between those arguing for basing teacher education on conservative values and those favoring liberal and/or social (democratic) values. While rhetorically there is a tendency to blame the opposite part for being ideological, both parts are equally ideological, in the sense that they “are driven by ideas, ideals, values, and assumptions about the purposes of schooling, the social and economic future of the nation, and the role of public education in a democratic society” (Cochran-Smith & Fries, 2001, p. 3). How educational policies frame teacher professionalism influences what teachers can and cannot do. As Skourdoumbis (2019) noted: The continued contemporary education policy emphasis on teacher performance dispositions provides an educational divergence from the continuity needed between the individual particularities of students and the needs of a schooling system overly aligned to external curriculum and assessment benchmarks. A constructive redirection of education policy will focus on the value of educative teaching dispositions which extend beyond the purely practical and towards a framework of ‘human flourishing’ (Fielding, 2000, p. 413). This means respecting the knowledge base of teaching, incorporating the knowledge teachers have of their subject and how to teach it. It also preferences a person-centred education policy approach that recognises the moral and ethical endeavour of education instead of the current economic ‘ends–means’ imperatives of contemporary policy. (p. 16) The two different ambitions, education for private good and education for public good, should not be grasped in a dualistic sense, but rather illuminate different demands on teachers and consequently different definitions of being excellent and successful. In relation to these strategies, in research worldwide, the teaching profession has been approached as either solely universal and technical or also included practice oriented and reflective dimensions (see for

Introduction  5 instance, Ball & Cohen, 1999; Colnerud & Granström, 2002; Frelin, 2010; Schön, 1986). The technical and universal teacher regards all kind of interpretations in education as subjective and therefore unsuitable for guidance in educational matters. Contrary to interpretations and processes of understanding, the focus is on evidence-based methods that are seen as efficient for all without regard for context. The notion of excellence lies in the teacher’s ability to know the latest statistical studies within various fields of relevance for their profession and to carry out exams where the students score high. This way of approaching the teacher professional was particularly strong in many countries during the 1960s and 1970s under the influence of psychology (Thiessen, 2000). The practice-oriented approach to teacher professionalism shifts focus from the teacher being a technician to the teacher being a reflective practitioner (Elbaz, 1983; Schön, 1986). From this stance, there is an awareness that teachers do not stop making judgments in-between fixed methods, the problem is that these judgments are not grounded in research but based on common sense that tend to be misleading. From this way of reasoning, it becomes important to stimulate teachers ability to interpret the educational (learning) environment with the help of the in-depth knowledge theory can provide with (e.g., Kelchtermans, 2009; Ball & Cohen, 1999; Clark & Peterson, 1986; Elbaz, 1983, 1991). While the reflective practitioner takes her or his beginning in teachers’ capability for systematic and well-grounded reasoning in relation to practice, this does not mean that statistical evidence should be ignored (Thiessen, 2000).

Professional development trajectories and identities Assumptions of development have in part relied on modernist “industrious frameworks” of “progress” that is associated with a teleological understanding of “growth” or “betterment.” Such framings of “teacher development” suffer from a simplistic interpretation of a concept suited for organizations and replicating it for humans’ sociocognitive domain. Clearly, identity work among humans is dynamic and complex (Kelchtermans, 2009; Akkerman & Meijer, 2011; Avalos, 2011; Garner & Kaplan, 2019; Karaman, 2010). As Beijard (2019) reminds us, learning or developing a teacher identity is imbued with and fuelled by many aspects that are primarily personal, such as one’s own biography, aspirations, learning history, and beliefs about education. Add to this the hopes, dreams, and ideals that students bring with them to teacher education. (p. 3) Reducing such experiential trajectories to linear narratives of progress leads to reductive framings for teacher development. For instance, teacher development approaches that propose to continuously pour new knowledge (that is up-todate) to teachers’ minds (often within the scope of professional development

6  A. Cendel Karaman and Silvia Edling seminars) assume an ongoing need for transmitting knowledge and that such transmissions would contribute to teacher development. In contrast with the transmissionist understandings of teacher development, there has also been a strong interest in self-directed reflective processes undertaken by teachers (Zeichner & Liston, 2014). As Lieberman and Miller noted, “By teacher development, we mean continuous inquiry into practice…We see the teacher as a “reflective practitioner,” someone who has a tacit knowledge base and who then builds on that knowledge base through ongoing inquiry and analysis, continually rethinking and re-evaluating values and practices.” (Lieberman & Miller, 1990, p. 107, cited in Neufeld, 2009, p. 111)4. Currently the responsibilities of teachers have increased drastically. Cochran-Smith (2011) captures this upsurge of the everyday work-load through the following quotation: In today’s world, policy makers, politicians, educational leaders, the general public, and parents expect a great deal from teachers. Unlike our grandmothers’ generation, we want teachers who know subject matter and know how to teach it to all students to world-class standards. We want teachers to be responsible for students’ improvement on high-stakes tests, which in many states determines whether students will graduate and may determine teachers’ salaries and future job status. We want teachers to be adept at all sorts of technology, to differentiate curriculum and instruction for students with special needs and disabilities, and to be thoroughly knowledgeable about multiple cultures. We expect teachers to teach students who do not speak English as a first language—without sacrificing attention to content and, in many cases, without long-term special programs. And the expectations for today’s teachers don’t stop there. In many instances, we expect teachers to work long hours at school and at home, doing lesson preparation and grading over the weekends, completing additional coursework during the summers, and spending their own money for classroom resources. We expect teachers to participate in ongoing professional development and training for the implementation of new classroom strategies, curriculum materials, testing programs, assessments, and other new mandates from district, state, and federal regulatory agencies. We also expect teachers to communicate and collaborate with students, parents, guardians, caregivers, social workers, psychologists, specialist teachers, medical personnel, speech therapists, parole officers, supervisors, administrators, mentors, and community groups. We expect teachers to be effective members of the school’s professional staff—working to prevent bullying, drug and alcohol use, pregnancy, and suicide. In addition to all these expectations, we want teachers who like children and can relate to today’s youth. (Cochran-Smith, 2011, p. 12) While teachers are positioned in a complex web of professional responsibilities rendering it more or less impossible for teachers to be perfect,

Introduction  7 a highly simplified critique of teacher education in media has been massive over the years in many countries (Cochran-Smith, 2004; Cochran et al., 2017; Edling, 2020; Edling, 2014; Edling & Liljestrand, 2019; Labaree, 2004). The critique is generally characterized by a dualistic argumentation of the bad teacher (education) on the one side and the good teacher (education) on the other, without taking into account the complexities teachers and teacher educations are forced to handle. These media images of teacher education can be understood as a question of structural violence that brands teachers into a position of permanent failures and hence makes it difficult to discuss educational issues in a more nuanced manner. Even though it is important to be aware that there are differences between media reports’ orientations these tendencies are relatively strong and need to be taken seriously. There are also differences between countries. In Sweden, for example, media tends to write about teachers as victims of a poor teacher education rendering teacher education and educational researchers to be illustrated as the villains in the drama. In other countries like Britain and Australia, teachers are subjected to severe teacher bashing (Edling, 2014). The crises of (teacher) education is in a sense permanent and influenced by various ideologies and worldviews, that exist simultaneously and create frictions (e.g., Paraskeva, 2011). In research on teacher education, successful teaching and good teaching is associated with quality in teaching. In this regard, Fenstermacher and Richardson (2005) noted: By successful teaching we mean that the learner actually acquires, to some reasonable and acceptable level of proficiency, what the teacher is engaged in teaching. As we have noted, however, learning is more likely to occur when good teaching is joined with the other three conditions (willingness and effort, social surround, and opportunity). Thus for the teacher to be successful—that is, to bring about learning—and do so in a manner that accords with the standards for good teaching, the additional three conditions for learning should be in place. When they are, then all conditions for quality teaching have been met. (p. 191) The processes involved in confirming or developing such qualities in teacherhood are complex (Clandinin & Husu, 2017). Indicators such as student achievement outcomes or institutional teacher evaluations provide partial depictions utilized in teacher evaluation (Tarhan et al., 2019). To explore cases of different teachers, it is also important to analyze “representations of teachers’ understanding of their own professional identity” (Beijaard et al., 2000, p. 750). The link between the formation of teacher identities and professional learning patterns has become a key area of emphasis in the field of teacher education (Vermunt et al., 2017). Internationally, this can be observed in various forms such as professional learning communities or through individuals’ professional learning efforts.

8  A. Cendel Karaman and Silvia Edling Studying narratives of teachers In the communicative practice of everyday life, persons do not only encounter one another in the attitude of participants; they also give narrative presentations of events that take place in the context of their lifeworld. Narration is a specialized form of constative speech that serves to describe sociocultural events and objects. Actors base their narrative presentations on a lay concept of the “world,” in the sense of the everyday world or lifeworld, which defines the totality of states of affairs that can be reported in true stories. (Habermas, 1987, p. 136) Drawing on a large amount of data indicates that excellent education and hence the excellent teacher takes form in a web of relations that influence each other rather than being isolated phenomenon. This web of relations are at times named as learning environment (Allodi, 2010), school/classroom culture (Hattie, 2012), and learning context (Håkansson & Sundberg, 2012). While large meta-studies of education and teacher profession are important, they can only say something about education from a distance. At the same time, education is always more than a distant and abstract phenomenon offered by helicopter views, since it is unavoidably linked to the complexities of everyday life, where teachers’ perception (seeing) plays a paramount role (Edling, 2016; Edling & Mooney Simmie, 2020, Elmgren & Henriksson, 2016). Teachers tend to see what they have knowledge about and what they do not know about they tend to overlook (Edling, 2016). This phenomena makes it interesting to shed light on what experienced and “good” teachers see. Teacher educators in different contexts considered using “storytelling about teaching as an intervention or vehicle for critical reflection by prospective, practicing, and retired teachers and administrators.” (Gomez, Walker, & Page, 2000, p. 732). Narratives of teachers can help explore the situated identities, practices, and professional learning of teachers (Clandinin & Connelly, 1996; Connelly & Clandinin, 1990; Lyons & Laboskey, 2002; Li & Craig 2019; Craig, 2019). As Hatch and Wisniewski (1995) stated, “Narrative knowledge is organized as stories, and this knowledge is best expressed in storied narrative forms. The processes of doing narrative inquiry involve sharing narrative knowledge through the telling of stories: the products are the stories of self we choose to tell.” (p. 126). In one such study exploring how the professional development and identity of an exemplary teacher can be explored within the narratives of experience through a series of in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations, several stories helped inquire into the professional growth journey of a particular teacher whose professional identity could be interpreted by the following reflection:

Introduction  9 I do not give in. Even if I experience a struggle, I would not let go of the issue in my mind. I make an effort and I definitely get results. Things considered “can’t be done,” eventually become ‘can be done’. And in the end, despite the resistance, there is appreciation of the outcomes. … If an issue is very important for the child, I absolutely would not quit pursuing it. Because I would have a mission to accomplish, I would pursue it. I always get results based on such efforts… (Eda5, Interview 2, 2014) These were the remarks of Eda6 during one interview as part of the study exploring her life story and narratives of experience as an English language teacher who had regularly been identified as successful in her school district (Karaman, 2016; 2017). Eda was identified as one of the most dedicated teachers in her school district. The researcher first met her in 2009 when he was seeking cooperating teachers who would be willing to work with student teachers he was supervising in his teacher education program. Eda has since then she worked with several cohorts of student teachers7. While discussing her teaching philosophy, Eda began by reflecting on her identity and categorized it under two main headings: “professional identity as a teacher” and “identity as an English teacher.” Specifically, with regard to her identity as an English language teacher, Eda underscored the need to question her role. She began with: “Who am I?, What am I doing here?, What is my purpose?,” and responded with “to teach.” To address this central purpose, for Eda, situational decision-making and motivating particular groups of students are essential. In this context, a teacher’s autonomy and professional “freedom” emerge as fundamental needs for Eda. In a typical class, for Eda, in order to consider herself successful, each desk would function as a unique workshop where students would work on mini-projects. These efforts would then be shared on “the class stage” with the peers. Over the years, in different settings, as teacher educators, we continued to reflect on the various trajectories teachers pursued in their professional learning and identity construction. The following particular questions emerged as areas of focus for this book: What stories do teachers tell about their professional learning journeys and identities? How do teachers situate their professional growth in different contexts? In what contexts are teachers’ narratives of successful teaching emerging? How do teachers and teacher educators describe their understanding of successful teaching?

Conclusion Recounting narratives of experience has been the major way throughout recorded history that humans have made sense of their experience. (Seidman, 2006, p. 8)

10  A. Cendel Karaman and Silvia Edling How does one become a “successful teacher”? How do practicing teachers construct their professional identities? How should teachers organize their professional learning processes? Mainly grounded in accountability discourses, global professional competence frameworks are often presented in the form of performance indicators and itemized descriptors. Such depictions are constrained in the ways professional identity and professional learning possibilities are framed. The studies in this volume diverge from this approach with their orientations toward studying the particular toward a deeper understanding of situated professional identities. In this research volume, we aim to explore how teachers from different sociocultural contexts can be studied toward a more nuanced understanding of professional identity construction. Integrating varied epistemological lenses, the researchers in this volume highlight cognitive, affective, and emancipatory dimensions emerging from inquiries into narratives of practicing teachers. The studies included in this volume are from eight countries: Australia, Brazil, Ireland, Japan, Portugal, Sweden, Turkey, and United States. Within narrative inquiries emerging from these contexts, it is hoped that various teacher identities can be explored with sufficient contextual depth. The studies in this book are not prescriptive. Teachers’ professional learning narratives and identities from a number of countries are included in this book. The rationale for inclusion of chapters from multiple countries is to provide a diversified set of cases that can help teachers, teacher educators, educational leaders, and educational researchers worldwide. While the authors do not claim to represent “countries” with simplistic generalizations, each chapter offers an in-depth profile of teachers’ professional learning narratives and identities emerging from a unique sociocultural context. In a sense, readers will have access to analyses of teachers’ phronesis—"wisdom of practice” in Aristotelian terms (Halverson, 2004). Within such diversity, each chapter share the unified theme of the book with their focus of presenting an in-depth analysis of professional learning narratives and identities of successful teachers with the aim of contributing to teacher education and teachers’ professional development worldwide. In terms of its conceptual framework, the authors rely on interpretive, critical, and social constructivist frameworks. Epistemologically, the main means of inquiry rely on narrative inquiry, autoethnography, and qualitative case study methods. In addition to the in-depth analyses of interview data, each chapter author also gives space to both theory and practice. While the discussions directly address practical needs in teacher education/ development, there is also an emphasis on the relevant conceptual framework in each chapter. To align with the overall theme of this volume, each chapter includes a conceptual frame, a conceptualization of “successful” teacher emerging from the inquiry, and a description of the research method. This volume opens with a brief review which introduces the key themes related to professional identities and narratives of “successful teachers.”

Introduction  11 In Chapter 1, Remaining a student of teaching forever: Critical reflexive insights from a lifetime of multiple teacher identities in the Republic of Ireland, Geraldine Mooney Simmie brings a conceptual and reflexive inquiry involving insights of her evolving identity as a teacher in Ireland and how this has shaped her understanding that being a teacher involves becoming, in the words of Dewey, a student of teaching forever. Her insights chart teaching as a practice of emancipation enacted as a messy narrative of discursive struggles, joys, and contradictions. In a preCovid-19 world, the Cartesian logic under-writing the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) reduced the search for a personal ethics of self to a morality of obedience by codes and laws for a universalist teacher identity. Mooney Simmie offers an alternative theorization of a politics of principled resistance in the search for an emancipatory ethics in teacher education and to assure education's social responsibility for a just global world. The challenges with a teacher professionalism based on universalist standpoints is also problematized in Chapter 2: From Success/Failure Binaries to Teaching for Justice: Conceptualizing Education as Access, Responsibility, Dignity, and Transparency. Walter Gershon argues that the measurement of educational success reifies universalist, linear, sequential conceptualizations of education that require the continuing maintenance of educational actors as failures. Without those measured as failures, there can be no successes, normalizing systemic injustices in ways that most often explain them as individual deficiencies. Instead, the author proposes understandings of access, responsibility, and dignity, with additional need for transparency by those in position of power over others. When combined, these possibilities can create contexts where a) there is access to what people need and b) with responsibility to communities and one another in ways that c) those with the least amount of power feel and believe themselves to have been treated in ways that were dignified and in which they can maintain their sense of dignity. Whereas Chapter 2 problematizes the binary construction between a successful and non-successful teacher, Chapter 3, Teacher narratives as counter-narratives of successful teaching, by Maria Alfredo Moreira, Rosa Maria Moraes Anunciato, and Maria Aparecida P. Viana explores the discourses of teacher education and successful teaching with a focus on two particular contexts: Brazil and Portugal. Teacher narratives are a powerful source for understanding teachers’ thinking and the way they construct professional knowledge, as they reveal how they try to make sense of educational aims, curriculum development, teaching practices, and of learning processes and outcomes. In this text, professional learning narratives are used both as a teacher development strategy and as heuristic devices for reading teacher work and addressing critical questions related to teaching and learning in public schools, within post-graduate programs in Brazil and Portugal, from 2013 to 2018. Using data from 45 teacher narratives and five semi-structured interviews to the teachers who wrote narratives,

12  A. Cendel Karaman and Silvia Edling they identify conceptualizations of successful teaching, while discussing the conditions that facilitate it. The analysis highlights the benefits of narrative writing in promoting critical reflection on teacher work, but also the constraints and difficulties. These teachers’ texts arise as counter-narratives to the grand neoliberal narratives that populate teacher education and teacher work, decontextualizing them and stripping them of their historicity. In Chapter 4 “If I can do it at this school, you can put me anywhere,” the Brazilian and Portuguese context is exchanged by an Australian one. Lynette Longaretti and Dianne Toe “offer a unique account of professional teacher identities emerging from Australia and from graduate teachers who have been prepared to work in disadvantaged schools.” In this chapter, they explore three case studies of new graduate teachers who participated in the National Exceptional Teaching for Disadvantaged Schools (NETDS) Program at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia. Longaretti and Toe examine their perspectives as successful graduate teachers teaching in challenging school communities and the factors that shape them to be confident teachers with an optimistic outlook. The three case studies have been drawn from data collected from the first two cohorts of NETDS graduates at Deakin University. They were employed in three diverse schools in Victoria, Australia. The case studies offer a unique account of professional teacher identities emerging from Australia and from graduate teachers who have been prepared to work in disadvantaged schools. Each case builds a picture of the qualities of a successful graduate teacher and provides valuable insight into how the NETDS program has provided them with a strong foundation through professional development. Professional development is also the focus of Chapter 5, Professional development of EFL teachers through reflective practice in a supportive community of practice where Chitose Asaoka explores the experiences of two in-service English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers in Japan and delineates the process of their becoming successful teachers even in an isolated environment. It also examines how they built a mutually supportive community of practice, and how they shared and re-constructed their expertise through interacting with each other. The results show that participation in an online collaborative community of practice enabled them to reflect on and adjust their teaching practices. In both cases, the role of the diagonal mentor, somebody with similar professional experiences, was considered to be profoundly important. The results also imply the building of collaborative relationships with peer teachers within and beyond their work contexts can support the development of professionalism in teachers. One dimension of teacher development involves teacher’s identity work. In Chapter 6, Looking back with pride—looking forward in hope: The narratives of a transformative teacher, Fatma Gümüşok explores professional identity of a transformative language teacher within a

Introduction  13 Turkish public school context. More specifically, she aims to present the life story of a teacher who endeavored to contribute to her community by touching upon multiple social-environmental problems. Since achieving transformational goals in teaching is an arduous journey, the account of an accomplished teacher deserves to be recognized. Therefore, Gümüşok conducts three interviews with the participant by collecting her lived experiences from the very early student life to her current teaching and school life practices. The inductively analyzed interview findings displayed that having a similar background with students, carrying leadership qualities, and living a self-transformational experience enhanced her transformative efforts. Having a strong sense of work ethics and believing in the vital importance of dialogue facilitated the improvement of this transformative teacher’s school life. The study reveals that being transformative is multi-dimensional, emotion-laden, and socially rooted. Adding the flow of everyday teacher practice to the notion of teacher’s professional identity, Chapter 7, Understanding a Teacher’s Professional Identity through Pedagogical Rhythm with Sören Högberg employs the concept of pedagogical rhythm to explore the professional identity of a primary school teacher in Sweden. In this chapter, Högberg interprets the narrative of Hannah, a primary teacher who works at a working-class Swedish primary school with pupils aged 12–13. During the years, Hannah has developed a strong professional identity, which is characterized as an endeavor to create close relationships with her students. Her overall ambition is to create a community held together by a shared morality where her pupils take their schoolwork seriously. To Hannah, her students’ positive attitude and willingness to learn are of much more importance than their achievement levels. Her narrative gives us an important insight into the teaching profession developed in a certain context. Indeed, Hannah’s professional identity, presented from a perspective labeled as the moral dimension of teaching, focuses on the relationship between pedagogical and ethical intentions emerged in educational settings. The result, captured through observations and interviews, shows a close connection between professional identity and educational context. In Chapter 8, Revisiting Selves through a ‘Success’ Perspective: An Autoethnographic Quest of a Language Teacher across Intercultural Spaces, Tugay Elmas explores his journey of becoming a “successful teacher” through the lens of interculturality and intercultural education. Through this autoethnographic inquiry, Elmas invites readers into his personal journey of how the challenges, struggles, and tensions emerging from his intercultural experiences in different socio-cultural contexts, in England as “an immigrant,” in Germany as “an Erasmus student,” in the United States as “a language teacher,” shaped his personal and cultural identities and contributed to his ongoing professional learning as a language teacher. By critically weaving in and out of various concepts and notions,

14  A. Cendel Karaman and Silvia Edling Elmas explores how the complex interplay between the wider social-cultural trajectories and his lived experiences plays a crucial role in his cultural and linguistic learning, the forms of participation within different communities, and identity negotiations. In Chapter 9, Path towards the Construction of a Professional Identity: A Narrative Inquiry into a Language Teacher’s Experiences Pınar Yeni Palabıyık investigates the path towards the construction of a professional identity within a narrative inquiry into a language teacher’s experiences in a school context in Turkey. The influence of various roles experienced throughout teaching career on the development of multiple identities and the successful resolution of these identities in a single identity was reported from a life-story perspective. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to reveal the professional identity formation. A shift from a technicist to a professional teacher was explored. Whereas the various chapters explore contextual teacher identities and developments, Chapter 10, ‘Successful Teaching’: Neoliberal Influences and Emerging Counter-Narratives, problematizes the ways in which learners of neoliberal age are directed toward acquiring knowledge and skill-sets that must be standardized, tracked, and assessed. Emrullah Yasin Çiftçi and A. Cendel Karaman argue that to enact such a constrained paradigm of education, governments worldwide have also implemented reforms in teacher preparation and development. Due to the perceptions of “best-practices” or “successful teaching” emerging from these reforms, teachers often self-regulate to work toward particular types of professional practice based on trends and standards generated by global and domestic institutions with varied interests and visions for public education which often do not situate educating for democracy and social justice as core priorities. Under such neoliberal influences, “successful teachers” may not find sufficient resources to critically reflect on global inequities and meaningfully integrate ways of tackling them in their teaching. In this chapter, adopting a critical lens, they discuss the construction of “successful teaching” in neoliberal times and offer examples of counter-narratives that emerged from other studies in this book. At a time when teacher voice and agency continue to be devalued in neoliberal discourses, this chapter offers a critically oriented conceptual voice to this volume that explores narratives of teachers’ professional learning and identities emerging from unique and usually challenging sociocultural contexts. The book ends with a brief conclusion where some major themes of the book chapters are highlighted and discussed.

Notes 1 Initial conceptions of this book emerged a decade ago, in 2011. Based on our numerous field observations during student teaching observations and conversations with school teachers over the years (Silvia in Sweden and Cendel in Turkey and the U.S.) and further discussions with colleagues in research conferences pointed to the need to bring to fore analyses of situated practices,

Introduction  15





professional learning patterns, and identities of school teachers that are identified as successful teachers in their particular school contexts. In 2014, in a doctoral seminar on teacher education, Cendel had conducted and led a series of case studies exploring the narratives of successful teachers (See Gümüşok, 2021 and Yeni Palabıyık, 2021 in this volume). In subsequent years, we have had numerous conversations at conferences such as European Educational Research Association (ECER) and American Educational Research Association (AERA) exploring the need to deepen inquiry on how teachers in different contexts construct their teacher identities through various complex unique trajectories situated in their life stories. Teachers, teacher educators, and educational researchers often expressed the need to critically reflect on how, for example, the instrumentalist reason that could be seen in the common public discourses on teachers’ roles and success criteria characterized by an emphasis on standardization and performance-based accountability frameworks. 2 https://www.right-to-education.org/page/united-nations-instruments [April 21 2020] 3 http://uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/documents/new-methodology-shows258-million-children-adolescents-and-youth-are-out-school.pdf [April 21 2020] 4 Influenced by Mead’s social psychology of action, this perspective situates the teacher as scientific researcher who reflects and inquires (Neufeld, 2009). 5 A pseudonym. 6 She has worked at her current high school for the last 10 years. For much of her 25 years of teaching, she would arrive at school an hour earlier than opening hours. Recalling her own experience as a high school student, Eda recalled how her literature teacher constantly sat during lessons and decided not to sit in her classes. “I have never sat on a chair while teaching. I have never had a medical leave as a teacher,” she exclaimed. For Eda, dedication involves a deep respect for her work. 7 Over the years, the researcher noticed how Eda had qualities that distinguished her. For instance, on most visits to their school, the researcher would run into her either in the school lobby or teachers’ lounge. In each instance, she would be surrounded by either a group of students she taught or she would be tutoring a student. In addition, she conveyed an extraordinary degree of enthusiasm for her work as a teacher.

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18  A. Cendel Karaman and Silvia Edling Karaman, A. C. (2016). Teacher identity and current teacher education policy challenges in Turkey. Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, (Washington, D.C., U.S.A.) Karaman, A. C. (2017). Practical wisdom in a teacher’s narratives: reflections on development. Redesigning Pedagogy International Conference, (National Institute of Education, Singapore) June 1, 2017. Kelchtermans, G. (2009). Who I am in how I teach is the message: Self-understanding, vulnerability and reflection. Teachers and Teaching Theory and Practice, 15(2), 257–272. Korthagen, F. (2017). A foundation for effective teacher education: teacher education pedagogy based on situated learning. In Clandinin, D. J., & Husu, J. (eds.), The SAGE handbook of research on teacher education, pp. 528–544. London: Sage. Labaree, D. (2004). The trouble with ed schools. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1631255 doi: 10.1080/1359866X.2019.163125 Levinsson, M. (2013). Evidens och existens. Evidensbaserad undervisning i ljuset av lärares erfarenheter [Evidence and existence. Evidence based education in the light of teacher experience] Göteborg: Göteborgs Universitetet. 339. Li, J., & Craig, C. (2019). A narrative inquiry into a rural teacher emotions and identities in China: through a teacher knowledge community lens. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 24(4), 329–331. Lieberman, A., & Miller, L. (1990). Teacher development in professional practice schools. Teachers College Record, 92(1), 105–122. Lyons, N., & Laboskey, V. K. (eds.). (2002). Narrative inquiry in practice: advancing the knowledge of teaching. New York: Teachers College Press. Morin, E. (2008). On complexity. (R. Postel, Trans.). Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press. Mena, J., Hennissen, P., & Loughran, J. (2017). Developmental learning approaches to teaching: stages of epistemological thinking and professional expertise. In Clandinin, D. J., & Husu, J. (eds.), The SAGE handbook of research on teacher education, pp. 513–527. London: Sage. Mooney Simmie, G., Moles, J., & O’Grady, E. (2019). Good teaching as a messy narrative of change within a policy ensemble of networks, superstructures and flows. Critical Studies in Education, 60(1), 55–72. Neufeld, J. (2009). Redefining teacher development. New York: Routledge. Paraskeva, J. M. (2011). Conflicts in curriculum theory: Challenging hegemonic epistemologies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Schön, D. A. (1986). The reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books. Seidman, I. (2006). Interviewing as qualitative research: a guide for researchers in education and the social sciences (3rd ed.). New York: Teachers College Press. Skourdoumbis, A. (2019). Theorising teacher performance dispositions in an age of audit. British Educational Research Journal, 45(1), 5–20. Stigler, W. J., & Hiebert, J. (2009). The teaching gap: best ideas from the world's teachers for improving education in the classroom. New York, NY: The Free Press. Tarhan, H., Karaman, A. C., Kemppinen, L., & Aerila, J. (2019). Understanding teacher evaluation in Finland: a professional development framework. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 44(4). doi: 10.14221/ajte.2018v44n4.3 Thiessen, D. (2000). Developing knowledge for preparing teachers: redefining the role of schools of education. Education Policy, 14(1), 129–144.

Introduction  19 Tochon, F. V., & Karaman, A. C. (2009). Critical reasoning for social justice: moral encounters with the paradoxes of intercultural education. Intercultural Education, 20(2), 135–149. Vermunt, J. D., Vrikki, M., Warwick, P., & Mercer, N. (2017). Connecting teacher identity formation to patterns in teacher learning. In Clandinin, D. J., & Husu, J. (eds.), The SAGE handbook of research on teacher education, pp. 143–159. London: Sage. Zeichner, K. M., & Liston, D. P. (2014). Reflective teaching: an introduction. New York: Routledge. Zeichner, K. M. (2017). The struggle for the soul of teacher education. New York: Routledge.

1 Remaining a student of teaching forever Critical reflexive insights from a lifetime of multiple teacher identities in the Republic of Ireland Geraldine Mooney Simmie Introduction I begin this narrative inquiry of what it means in contemporary times to have a successful teacher identity, which I understand as multiple and evolving and gleaned over 40 years teaching in higher education and secondary schools. John Dewey reminds us that teaching is about remaining a student of teaching forever. This is something that resonates with me as I make sense of a life journey of searching for a personal ethics of self as a teacher, passing on the known (and partial) canon of knowledge, the values, and virtues of becoming a person in a just society and all the while making space for something new to emerge, for daring to transgress (hooks, 1994) as an activist professional, a public intellectual, problem-poser, and troublemaker from understandings of successful teaching as pedagogical, philosophical, and political acts (Freire, 1972). I posit that successful teaching and teacher identities are connected to moral and political philosophy because they are imbued with intentionality and are not neutral, either in the direction of freedom and liberation or for domestication and colonization. For this reason, teaching always carries inherent dangers of symbolic violence especially prevalent in a pre-Covid-19 world of education policy that reduced to a narrow politics of reflection for a universalist market-led teacher identity (Brady, 2016, 2019). Lawn & Ozga (1981) argued that professionalism is an ideological weapon reducing teacher agency and autonomy in order to fulfill the main objectives of the state at any given moment in time. A question running throughout this chapter is how we might avoid the dangers of a debased teacher identity through a new politics of principled resistance for a post-Covid-19 world (Freire, 1972; Thomas & Vavrus, 2019). My identities as a teacher, educational researcher, and teacher educator are identities that have evolved over a lifetime and are positioned in critical sociology of education where I draw from critical, feminist, and post-colonial perspectives to understand, interrupt, and challenge my ethics of self, my practices, and policy reform constructs in Teacher Professional Learning (e.g., mentoring, learning, leadership, teacher design teams, border-crossing partnerships, communities of practice, etc.). My research studies are concerned with the critical, social, and heuristic purposes of education and

Remaining a student of teaching forever  21 identification of gaps in the rhetoric of policy and the lived reality of practices. My policy analyses reveal the hand of the powerful in Ireland and elsewhere in the contemporary reduction of teaching to a tight, hard, and strong clinical practice in the last decade (Mooney Simmie, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2020). Good teaching is understood by me as a relational “moral and political endeavor” for a collective non-identical practice situated in culture and context. This is a very different understanding from current mainstream thinking in Ireland and elsewhere (Sant, 2019). In public policy, teaching is presented as a “moral and apolitical endeavor” in the academy of teacher education. A logic of essentialist thought abstracts education from multiple ways of knowing and from the deeply embedded roots of culture and heritage, the particularity of experience and context, the affective and the feminine, the political and the existential. Instead the Enlightenment view of the rational thinker, frames research problems in education in (de)contextualized ways away from the messiness of the lived reality of practice settings. These research designs seek to atomize problems and can offer helpful solutions that are at best only ever partial solutions to wider systemic issues. They often fail to include education's social responsibility as a public good outside of concern for the competitive individual Macrine (2016). In such research designs, poverty and social injustice in the intersectionality of social class, race, gender, religion, and ethnicity are reframed as problems of special concern for the individual and/ or their disadvantaged local community (Petersen & Millei, 2016). Teaching as a moral and political practice, a collective while non-identical practice (Santoro & Rocha, 2015), requires not only interrogation of self and practice but also necessitates critical mediation with the wider world (Freire, 1972/2018). It is this commitment to critical mediation with the wider world—not as an add-on but as a central concern of education to interpret the world and to proactively change it—that sets critical theory apart from other ways of viewing education, teaching, and teacher identities. The field of Critical Pedagogy with emancipatory roots in moral and political philosophies, ongoing struggles for a just global world, is constantly evolving and keeping pace with rapid and unprecedented changes of globalization and technologization in higher education and schooling (Macrine, 2020). Teaching is understood as a relational and intellectual praxis involving rich interplays between theory, practice, experience, policy, and research (Mooney Simmie, de Paor, Liston & O'Shea, 2017; Mooney Simmie, Moles & O'Grady, 2019). This is a very different understanding from mainstream neoliberal/elite discourses of education that Sant (2019) describes and are discussed in the following section. This latter policy imperative compels teachers to deconstruct their existing identities and replace them with a new universalist identity, doing it to themselves for primacy of the markets (Lonergan et al., 2012; Mooney Simmie & Moles, 2011, 2019). I will structure the chapter as follows. First, I outline the methodology for the study and show how Gee's (2000) four perspectives of identity provide a useful lens to analyze my multiple and evolving identities over a lifetime as a

22  Geraldine Mooney Simmie successful teacher in Ireland. Second, I question the purposes of education, teaching, and teacher identities in contemporary times and make the case in this literature review that critical questions concerning purpose set the scene for under-writing the interpretive system of what is meant in the first instance by teacher identities. While I understand teachers have agency and relative autonomy and are not totally positioned as docile bodies and victims of oppressive structures, nonetheless there are oppressive ways in which a neoliberal/elite imaginary is currently acting downward on teacher identities that urgently need to be revealed, interrupted, and changed. Third, I share some critical reflexive insights from my fields of practice as a teacher, research development officer, and more recently as a teacher educator in a university setting. Finally, I conclude with a reflection on the problem under study and offer an alternative theorization as a politics of principled resistance for the educability of every child and better connectivity between education, teacher identities, reform, social justice, ethics, democracy, and a just global world.

Methodology The methodology aims to share identities I bring to the role of teaching in Ireland, a role in which I have a felt sense of success while remaining open to discursive struggles and joys, willingness to question my practices on my own and with critical friends, to engage with a vast literature and research, to consider questions of existential freedom, and to critically mediate practices with the wider world and social justice. It is this notion of a continual discursive struggle and clash between inner and outer work and between my experiences, practices, access to critical theory, and research that I want to bring to the fore in this chapter as I show how they inform my emerging sense of multiple identities Pillow (2003). Gee (2000) writes about the use of identity as an analytic lens for research in education and at a time when a market-led view of education is dominant in a post-truth viral modernity (Macrine, 2020; Peters et al., 2020). Gee (2000) explains how “one cannot have an identity of any sort without some interpretive system under-writing the recognition of that identity” (p.107). He suggests four strands to grasp a deeper understanding of identity within contemporary education: the nature perspective (N-identities); institutional perspective (I-identities); discursive perspective (D-identities), and affinity perspective (A-identities). N-identities are bestowed by nature (e.g., genes, neurological), I-identities by institutions (e.g., formal positions, regulatory bodies), D-identities by discourse and dialogue (e.g., recognition as expert), and A-identities by social affinity groupings (e.g., specialist groups). In this chapter, I call on these four perspectives as they are under-written in a policy backdrop of neoliberal/elite policy discourses (Sant, 2019). I explain my teacher identities as a successful teacher, by self, others, institutions, and the wider society. I will also show how teacher identities are laden with the potential for real and symbolic violence when under-written by a universal bio-psycho-neuro-socio-cultural model of self (Self) that is

Remaining a student of teaching forever  23 abstracted from deep-rooted connectivity to particular social and political contexts and without unconditional responsibility for others (Others). The domestication and colonization of education by the primacy of the economy in a pre-Covid-19 world reframed human development—teacher professional learning and teacher identity—as a universalist notion of an ideal individual abstracted from context (social class, gender, race, religion), and from an invisible pedagogy of the immaterial Bettez (2015). The interpretive system underpinning higher education and schooling in a pre-Covid-19 world was a market-led mainstream view of human capital theory held in place by neoliberals, neoconservatives, and a growing Alt-Right nationalism (Macrine, 2020). A neoliberal/elite governance ideology celebrates competitive individualism and the supremacy of a strong economy underpinned by human capital theory (Tan, 2014). Human Capital Theory takes the primacy of the economy as its starting point and argues that the human being is a utility driven animal out to maximize their own economic benefit and capable of being bent in any direction that will bring the greatest financial reward. While there are numerous efforts to unseat this reductionist view of education and teaching the theory continues to gain traction as a “good enough” theory by policymakers, politicians, and researchers alike as it is found to be most successful in predicting behavior. The Covid-19 pandemic offers a global interruption to this discourse and provides an opportunity for a change in direction in public policy in education: either a continuation of human capital theory this time “on steroids” for a more intense focus on the competitive individual or new affordances for a more expansive societal view. It is to this critical question of the purposes of education, teacher identities, and teacher professional learning that I now turn in the following literature review.

Education as a field of radical possibility A good place to start any discussion about successful teacher identity and professional learning is to ask what is the purpose of the successful teacher and, a related question, what is the purpose of education? What is the purpose of education nowadays in a policy world awash with a terminology of learning that suggests all that is worth talking about is a narrow and undefined construct called “teaching and learning” rather than “education” (Biesta, 2012). My understanding since I qualified as a teacher is that education is a field of study that is multidisciplinary and crosses boundaries between the foundational disciplines, e.g., history, philosophy, sociology, and psychology of education. Bernstein (2000) talks about vertical and horizontal knowledge forms, about hierarchies of knowledge (science) and hierarchies of knowers (humanities and the arts) and about the weak framing that allows the field of education be at once relational, pedagogical, philosophical, and political. The field of education has historically attracted a high number of competing interests and there have always and ever been discursive struggles for the soul of the curriculum.

24  Geraldine Mooney Simmie Education is not a discipline and it is decidedly not a discipline in the hard sciences. Although there is evidence nowadays that teaching and teacher education are increasingly pushed in the direction of the hard sciences, toward a medical model of clinical practice that is based on an overreliance on data, metrics, and evidence. Only that which is counted, counts (Lynch, 2015) as the ideal human is defined using a bio-psycho-neuro-socio-cultural model embedded in the social psychology of education. Education is thereby reduced to the science of behavior change for a new social psychology of education that claims universal answers. It makes sense to aim for some universal understandings and to require teachers to use counter-intuitive views of practice (Butler, Mooney Simmie & O’Grady, 2015; Galvin, Mooney Simmie & O’Grady, 2015; O’Grady, Mooney Simmie & Kennedy, 2014). However, this becomes an issue when research findings are narrowly interpreted by policymakers, when they lack nuance in relation to limitations (e.g., decontextualized nature; short time scale) or when used as exhaustive listings of standards, codes, and competences that are presented as the complete picture (Osberg & Biesta, 2020). A neoliberal/elite imaginary is used to silence the dynamic nature and messiness of human interaction in teaching and to eschew the feminine, aesthetic, political, the particular, cultural, and contextual. Instead, good teaching as a messy narrative of discursive struggles and change as presented in this chapter holds the tensions, contradictions, and joys inherent in universalist-particularist subjectivities. The purpose of education and teaching then go beyond the qualification and socialization purposes to include the existential and emancipatory (Mooney Simmie & Moles, 2019; Mooney Simmie, Moles & O’Grady, 2019). Successful teacher identity in the academy of teacher education is currently governed by a flawed universalist notion that is fully described by a narrow scientism, a toolkit of predetermined attitudes, skills, knowledge, and competences Fielding (2007). A universality teacher identity is presented as a flexible adaptable entrepreneur focused on achieving and reporting on their individual best and investing over a lifetime of learning in pursuit of credentials and fidelity to outcomes already known in advance. Ball (2003) shows how the soul of the teacher in the UK was displaced by these “terrors of performativity.” Similarly, Santoro (2017) shows how the inner moral commitment of experienced teachers in the US has been suppressed amid growing despair at a new performativity of “what works” and how this leads to the ethical suppression of teachers’ voices (Zipin & Brennan, 2003).

Performativity in teacher education in Ireland In Ireland, while several studies find similar performativity issues education policymakers refer to a discourse of “exceptionalism,” underlining that bad policies in education happen elsewhere (Mooney Simmie et al., 2020). National pride as a country with a long Christian (largely Catholic) tradition in schooling underwrites teacher identities in Ireland as moral and apolitical

Remaining a student of teaching forever  25 practices, nowadays under-written using a new system of teacher obedience with externally imposed codes, rules, and new sets of laws (Teaching Council, 2016). This outside-in approach to teacher professionalism is new and is only introduced by the newly appointed Teaching Council in the last decade (the council itself only became a statutory body in 2006). Nowadays, a hard, tight, and strong system of rules, roles, responsibilities, codes, and sets of laws as a new system of juridification applies in all policies in teacher education. Moreover, eschewing politics from teaching keeps this discourse of “exceptionalism” in play, despite evidence to the contrary (Lynch, 2015; Mooney Simmie, Moles & O'Grady, 2019). Foucault counterposes moralities orientated towards ethics...(where there is a) strong dynamic element in so far as there exists a relative autonomy between a system of laws and the individual's ethical behaviour. Rather than conformity towards the law, the emphasis is on the formation of the relationship with the self and on the methods and techniques through which the relationship is worked out.......(in this case) the individual is relatively free to interpret the spirit of the law in his/her own style, rather than conform to the exact letter of the law. (McNay, 1992, p.53) Teachers in Ireland across Europe and the OECD are increasingly depicted in policy terms as acting with increased autonomy and agency for membership of a creative professional class engaged in self-study for primacy of the markets.With this new tight and strong focus on externally enforced moral codes and sets of laws in teacher education, it is hard to see the spaces and affordances for teacher identities for authentic agency, autonomy, and activism for the primacy of an emancipatory ethics (Brady, 2016, 2019; Mooney Simmie & Moles, 2019). While teacher regulation and accountability make sense, it is the “cruel optimism” inherent in the above reductionist global reform system of universalist identity that I am taking issue with here. The discourse of “exceptionalism” in teacher identities in Ireland remains powerful enough to silence contrarian views and dissent. Reforms remain largely unquestioned and I-identities, D-identities, and A-identities become more about how to praise and to faithfully implement reforms rather than questioning their underpinning rationale (Mc Kenna & Mooney Simmie, 2017; Mooney Simmie, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2020). Contrarian views are not only unwelcome within a cultural hegemony of “consensualism” but any teacher/educator raising concerns becomes pathologized using systems of N-identities: identified as somehow exhibiting a psychic deficit, such as teacher anxiety and stress levels, lack of resilience or simply lack of moral character and laziness, and/or overall unwillingness to change. Non-recognition protects the interests of the powerful from any criticism that a neoliberal/elite imaginary is at play in education policy and, at the same time,

26  Geraldine Mooney Simmie secures the ethical suppression of teachers’ voices through clinical understandings of a universalist teacher identity (Brady, 2016, 2019 ; Edling & Mooney Simmie, 2017, 2020; Mooney Simmie & Edling, 2016, 2019).

Why teacher identities need the political Freire’s (1972/2018) work in Critical Pedagogy speaks to the pedagogy of the oppressed and to an understanding that education is under-written by politics. To ignore politics in education is to run the risk that what will become accepted as the new field of learning will lie on a procrustean bed of pre-determined competence, codes, and standards for fidelity with a predetermined practice, using processes of constant comparison (e.g., ideal teacher learner). This procrustean bed of named skills and dispositions advances a universal pedagogy of learning and teacher identity where one size fits all. In the mythical story of Procrusteus in Ancient Greece, he invited guests for an overnight stay in his hostelry. Later each night he fit each guest to his designer bed for a good night’s sleep. Those who were too long for the bed had their heads cut off and those who were too short had their body pulled until they were the right fit. The metaphor offers a critique of any universalist pedagogy that claims it knows everything about teaching and learning. A universalist pedagogy acts as a well-planned “Riverdance” of techniques— learning outcomes, peer learning, assessment for learning, reciprocal learning, feedback, self-directed learning, peer observation, systematic planning, self-evaluation—allowing teachers arrive at mass reproduction of an ideal desired student, for outcomes with a calculable market-led dividend for a future of economic prosperity. Claiming to be educated needs to say something about what kind of society one wants to live in, to build, and to develop. It needs to say something about how people not only vote and become civic minded but just how active people are in defining with others the democratic society they want now and into the future (Edling & Mooney Simmie, 2020; Mooney Simmie & Lang, 2018, 2020). Freedom is a treasured concept but it is not the same as a free for all. Free speech is a democratic right but not when used in an irresponsible way to stir up hatred of minorities. Democracy contains paradoxes and dilemmas and calls on people to be engaged in negotiation and willing to give up privileges for the public good. Democratic spirit is upstream of any reductionist understanding that it is sufficient to teach about and for democracy in schools and higher education. It is not enough for civic participation to be understood as pre-determined attitudes, skills, and knowledge. Democratic spirit calls for teacher activism and proactive discursive struggles for seeking out the soul of the self and for the public interest values of a democratic society. It separates an “us” and “them” as two political camps: the “us” are those who agree to share power and distribute resources for a vibrant and decent democratic society and a just global world and “them” are those who do not agree. Political camps are not rigid, it is possible for people to be persuaded to change allegiance. A pedagogy of

Remaining a student of teaching forever  27 hope in teacher identities suggests that activist work in education is worthwhile, a heightened wide-awakeness of what we can achieve with we work in solidarity for the common good. It is a pedagogy of hope, joy, and agonistics that I have experienced at first hand in the field of practice as a teacher and teacher educator. It is to this field of practice that I now turn.

My critical insights from the field of practice My 40-year timeline as a teacher and teacher educator separates into three parts: the first 15 years as a teacher in secondary schools, the middle 10 years supporting teachers’ Continuing Professional Development (CPD) in schools on the west coast of Ireland, and the last15 years as an educational researcher and teacher educator in a university setting. It is only in the last decade, since completion of my PhD study in education in Trinity College Dublin (Mooney Simmie, 2009) that I acquired the opportunity to delve deeply into the vast literature and find my voice in the academy in the cultural politics of education.

Teacher in a secondary school I was a secondary school teacher of young people for 15 years in Galway city. I taught physics, science, and mathematics during the day, astronomy on a voluntary basis at lunchtime, and in the evenings I worked with interested students (about ten students every year) on research projects in preparation for entry into a national Young Scientist Competition. The school was a voluntary secondary school, under the trusteeship of a Catholic religious order, a midsize urban school with a mixed intake, many middle-class parents with ambition for university progression, and a local catchment of young people from socially deprived areas. The school had an atmosphere of care and community and offered a rich menu of extracurricular activities. An outstanding feature of the school was its commitment to social justice and to critical consciousness. I liked to keep up-to-date with my subject area and to share in solidarity with other teachers for improvement in working conditions, in particular for access to resources to teach in new and interesting ways. I was an active member of the voluntary Irish Science Teachers Association (ISTA) and the secondary teacher’s union, the Association for Secondary Teachers of Ireland (ASTI). During that time, I wrote three books in chemistry and junior science for secondary school students, published by Folens Publishers and School and College Publishing in Dublin. I worked on a part-time basis with the Science Education Department of the National University of Ireland, NUI Galway where I made and presented three chemistry and science videos for teachers and students, used in lower and upper secondary schools. While I thoroughly enjoyed my “calling” to teaching and was driven by an inner commitment to the vocation of teaching, it was not always straightforward and there were obstacles and constraints I encountered along the way and there were many reflexive blind spots yet to identify.

28  Geraldine Mooney Simmie I always had a great interest in politics, in issues of social justice and equality of condition, and I always seized opportunities in school and elsewhere to have a voice in debates. This interest arose from my background, as a girl coming from a large family and a poor background who was spurred on in secondary school by some of my teachers to aim high and to continue to progress my love of science and mathematics to university level. This was at a time in Ireland when most girls did not select higher mathematics, few studied chemistry, and fewer female voices were heard in the public forum. At home and in school, I was encouraged to debate about politics and to question the type of society and world worth aiming for. While teaching, I worked on a voluntary basis for some years in the early 1990s with a politician at his weekly clinic in Galway, a politician who later was to become the President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins (Mooney Simmie, 2012). It was an exciting time for Irish women as the country had just elected our first woman President of Ireland, Mary Robinson. Having a voice in the public forum and having a voice in the schooling and education systems were not always one and the same thing. At the school setting, there were occasions where I struggled with feelings of not being included. I chaired staff meetings for a time at a young age and was a member of a senior advisory group to the school principal. However, I often had a felt sense of lack of recognition (D-identity) at staff meetings, it was an elite and gendered space reserved for certain members, mostly male members of staff to voice their concerns and opinions. The majority of female staff did not participate at staff meetings preferring instead to talk outside the public forum (Baxter, 2006). It was going to be much later, and after I started my doctoral studies and read more deeply into the cultural politics of Ireland that I gained an understanding of the “consensualist” dynamics at play in schooling. Teaching was framed at that time and continues to date to be framed as a moral and apolitical endeavor. I did not question this framing for many years. I was not wide-awake to the multiple ways life in schools and reforms, such as the recent Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) reproduce inequality and society, power, and privilege (Apple, 2012, 2013; McLaren, 2015). However, from the first day I started teaching I understood my role was not only to pass on culture and tradition and the existing (partial and evolving) canon of specialist knowledge to the next generation but also the importance of education as a practice of freedom and liberation, opening spaces for all student voices to be heard, for daring to transgress and for acting as a problem-poser and trouble-maker for a just democratic society (hooks, 1994). As a teacher working inside schooling as a reproductive system of stratification, I see many teacher identity contradictions in my role and have more recently learned how to articulate this and how to critically interrogate my complicit role in schooling as a transaction of domestication and colonization. Critical feminist postcolonial perspectives can hold in tension and contradiction masculinist and feminist perspectives, student-teacher

Remaining a student of teaching forever  29 contradictions, universalist-particularist perspectives, problem-solving and problem-posing perspectives, and dilemma-management as well as understanding there are also some unsolvable dilemmas for teaching as a public good (Edling & Mooney Simmie, 2020).

Regional support officer to schools For ten years, I worked as a regional support officer in schools in the west of Ireland, in 13 counties, supporting the professional development of experienced teachers. I was on secondment as a member of a national Transition Year Support Service and Second Level Support Service under the guidance of the inspectorate of the Department of Education and Skills (DES). I worked with many committed teachers and school principals and was generally appalled at the lack of resources I found in many schools. My work was concerned with facilitating new pedagogies of active learning and involved opening dialogue with teachers and staffs, supporting and challenging teachers to interrogate routinized practices. Toward the end of this time, I returned to university to complete my PhD in education policy as a comparative mixed-methods study between Ireland and Norway in the science and math policy cycle at upper secondary education (Mooney Simmie, 2009). I continue to be attracted to Nordic countries as they are renowned for social democratic policies and practices. I also learned about the “dangers” in policy borrowing from different countries and the serious mistakes made over the years by policymakers, especially in times of economic crisis. I gained a deep insight into the policy research literature showing how mainstream policy seeks to frame policy as a linear rational cycle of implementation. Instead, the research work of Stephen J. Ball and other educationalists made more sense, their view of the teacher as a translator and interpreter involved in a complex intellectual and relational endeavor of policy enactment that is creative, critical, and situated in the messiness of context and culture (Mooney Simmie, 2007; Mooney Simmie, Moles and O’Grady, 2019). At the start of the 2000s in Ireland, the construct of the teacher as a professional was being advanced, and later the teacher as an extended professional taking part in partnerships for improvement in teacher professional learning. Teacher learning for new learner-centered pedagogies of active learning through a multitude of policy directives (e.g., coaching, mentoring, induction, partnership, school-university partnership, leadership) was later to become central to my research specialism as an educational researcher (Galvin & Mooney Simmie, 2017; Young, O’Neill & Mooney Simmie, 2015). I gained first-hand experience that teachers worked inside the cultural politics of schools, the values, codes, signals, and symbols often quietly under-written in their society. Pedagogical, political, and philosophical questions of the purposes of Teacher Learning and who benefits started to shape my research.

30  Geraldine Mooney Simmie

Educational researcher at the university In the last 15 years at the School of Education, University of Limerick as a Senior Lecturer and educational researcher in Policy Studies I work with faculty, nationally and internationally, and with postgraduate doctoral and masters students in seeking to teach, supervise, understand, and critically interpret the policy framing and practices of teacher professional learning across the continuum of teacher education (e.g., pre-service, induction, and in-career teachers). Critical interpretivist studies offer affordances to see behind the political legitimation of policies to the hidden curriculum of who benefits, to delve deeper into the politics and economics behind contemporary policy imperatives on teacher identities and subjectivities and to reveal deficits (Creswell & Creswell, 2018). One deficit discourse in education policy in Ireland and elsewhere is the framing of teacher identities using a universalist politics of reflection, as a repertoire of I-identities (institutionally constituted through the Teaching Council), D-identities (discursively allocated from recognition of various levels of expertise), and A-identities (affinity groupings of teachers on social media platforms) for a practice of self-study and interrogation of practices but with no mediation to the wider capitalist world. Nowadays, reform policies claim to be equity-proofed and to arise from research evidence only, untainted by ideology, and all that is required is their faithful implementation by an obedient teaching force. Steiner-Kramsi et al. (2019) have debunked this myth in a recent study showing that (political) policy-making in education is far from the neutral and objective practices of a pure science. Another deficit discourse opened for scrutiny is the Enlightenment view of the ideal human, in operation for the last 500 years, a rational thinker disembodied from affectivity and from D-identities that recognize existential freedom and emancipatory possibility for all (Edling & Mooney Simmie, 2020; Mooney Simmie & Moles, 2019; Osberg & Biesta, 2020). During the last decade, I was recognized and invited (D-identities) to partake in public policy debates on education in national television and local radio programs, and to work as a public intellectual and activist in the media. While I appreciate the researcher task of finding out “what works,” my research work continues to be more drawn toward the critical, social, and heuristic purposes of education. Gaining understandings of my D, I, N, and A identities with positioning by self, others, institutions, the public, and affinity groups evolved through research collaborations in Ireland with faculty and postgraduate students (Mooney Simmie & Moles, 2011, 2019; O’Grady et al., 2014)—with international faculty on teacher education and democracy (Edling & Mooney Simmie, 2017, 2020; Mooney Simmie & Edling, 2016, 2019; Mooney Simmie & Lang, 2018, 2020), and membership of international projects: the Story Project with Professor Silvia Edling at the University of Gavle, Sweden; and the Paulo Freire Democratic Project with Professor Peter McLaren at Chapman University, California. It was further enhanced by my coordination and working in transnational partnership

Remaining a student of teaching forever  31 in four European Comenius teacher education projects, EUDIST, GIMMS, DLIS, and CROSSNET reported in conferences, papers, and textbooks (Mooney Simmie & Lang, 2020).

Conclusion My insights presented here chart a rather messy narrative of change, discursive struggles, joys, and contradictions in my journey as a teacher, teacher educator, and educational researcher over a lifetime in Ireland. I have explained why I position myself as an emancipatory teacher, researcher, academic, and activist. I have tried to explain why policies about a universalist teacher identity in a pre-Covid-19 world often appears as a chimera offered by governments as corporatized fabrications, nudging me to critically question why now and who benefits? This question is of importance given that one cannot have an identity of any sort without an interpretive system under-writing it (Gee, 2000). My critique of the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) reveals that transnational governance ideology, as a neoliberal/elite imaginary, is softly sculpting and reshaping teacher identities using a bio-psycho-neuro-socio-cultural view that eschews the particular, cultural, social, and political (Ball, 2003; Mooney Simmie, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2020; Osberg & Biesta, 2020). The philosopher Gert Biesta argues that democracy is made not by living well with people who are like us but living well with people who are not like us (Biesta, 2013) and by understanding that the social psychology paradigm while useful and necessary is not the complete story of education and teacher education (Osberg & Biesta, 2020). The critical theorist Peter McLaren explains our propensity for “mimetic rivalry” and the urgent need to embrace our shadow side in order to move humanity to a higher consciousness for a revolutionary pedagogy of hope and possibility for a just global world (McLaren, 2015). Santoro (2017) explains how commonplace it is for a teacher to experience moral madness in a profession nowadays where policymakers portray teacher learning as neutral and objective clinical practices for an over-reliance on prediction, fidelity, and metrics. Interrogation of my teacher identities in this chapter confirms my commitment to work with an ethics of self and with others to re-imagine the purposes of schooling and higher education; to make space for critical reflexivity and existential freedom; to critically mediate teaching and teacher learning with a future post-Covid-19 world; to include the critical for emancipation and a vibrant notion of democracy; to dare to transgress and interrupt for a principled politics of resistance for individual and social transformation. We have a long history of failure of reforms in schools. Once a reform fails and another economic crisis looms government, policymakers and politicians quickly move to the next new policy reform ensemble and the cycle starts over. A chimera of listening is constructed using contrived forms of consultation. However, nothing of significance will change in schooling and higher education for a just global world, until there is policy commitment by all policy actors to give the radical openness at the heart of education its rightful place, for an inner (soul) journey for existential freedom coupled with an

32  Geraldine Mooney Simmie outward journey of critical mediation with the wider world for emancipation for all. A significant question remains: How will all policy actors in a postCovid-19 world, including teachers, work together for education as a public good, for a new politics of principled resistance in the direction of social justice for a just global world and a sustainable future for the planet?

References Apple, M. W. (2012). Education and Power (2nd Ed.). New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W. (2013). Can Schooling Change Society? Can Society Change Schooling? New York: Routledge. Ball, S.J. (2003). The teacher's soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), 215–228. doi:10.1080/0268093022000043065 Baxter, J. (Editor) (2006). Speaking Out the Female Voice in Public Contexts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield. Bettez, S.C. (2015). Navigating the complexity of qualitative research in postmodern contexts: assemblage, critical reflexivity, and communion as guides. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 28(8), 932–954. Biesta, G. J. (2012). Giving teaching back to education: responding to the disappearance of the teacher. Phenomenology & Practice 6(2), 35–49. Biesta, G. J. J. (2013). The Beautiful Risk of Education. London: Routledge. Brady, A.M. (2016). The regime of self-evaluation: self-conception for teachers and schools. British Journal of Educational Studies, 64(4), 523–541. doi:10.1080/00 071005.2016.1164829 Brady, A. M. (2019). Anxiety of performativity and anxiety of performance: self-evaluation as bad faith. Oxford Review of Education. doi: 10.1080/03054985. 2018.1556626 Butler, J., Mooney Simmie, G., & O’Grady, A. (2015). An investigation into the prevalence of ecological misconceptions in upper secondary students and implications for pre-service teacher education. European Journal of Teacher Education, 38(3), 300–319. doi: 10.1080/02619768.2014.943394 Creswell, J.W., & Creswell, J.D. (2018). Research Design Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches. 5th Edition. London: Sage Publications. Edling, S. & Mooney Simmie, G. (2017). Democracy and emancipation in teacher education: a summative content analysis of teachers’ democratic assignment expressed in policies for Teacher Education in Sweden and Ireland between 2000–2010. Citizenship, Social & Economic Education, 1–15. doi: 10.1177/2047173417743760 Edling, S. & Mooney Simmie, G. (2020). Democracy and Teacher Education: Dilemmas, Challenges and Possibilities. London: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/ Democracy-and-Teacher-Education-Dilemmas-Challenges-and-Possibilities/ Edling-Mooney-Simmie/p/book/9781138593251 Fielding, M. (2007). The human cost and intellectual poverty of high performance schooling: radical philosophy, John Macmurray and the remaking of person-centred education. Journal of Education Policy, 22(4), 383–409. Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Galvin, M. & Mooney Simmie, G. (2017). Theorising participation in urban regeneration partnerships: an adult education perspective. Journal of Education Policy, 32 (6), 809–831. doi: 10.1080/02680939.2017.1320731

Remaining a student of teaching forever  33 Galvin, E., Mooney Simmie, G., & O’Grady, A. (2015). Identification of misconceptions in the teaching of biology: a pedagogical cycle of recognition, reduction and removal. Higher Education in Social Science, 8(2), 108. doi: 10.3968/6519 Gee, J.P. (2000). Chapter 3 Identity as an analytic lens for research in education. Review of Research in Education, 25, 99–125. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York & London: Routledge. Lawn, M., & Ozga, J. (1981). Teachers, professionalism and class. Lewers, UK: Falmer. Lonergan, J., Mooney Simmie, G., & Moles, J. (2012). Mentoring to reproduce or change discourse in schools. International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education, 1(2), 104–119. doi: 10.1108/20466851211262851 Lynch, K. (2015). Control by numbers: new managerialism and ranking in higher education. Critical Studies in Education, 56(2), 190–207. doi: 10.1080/17508487.2014.949811 Macrine, S. L. (2016). Chapter 26 pedagogies of neoliberalism. In The Handbook of Neoliberalism, Edited by Simon Springer, Kean Birch and Julie Mac Leavy, pp. 294–305. New York and Oxon: Routledge International Handbooks. Macrine, S. L. (2020). Critical Pedagogy in Uncertain Times: Hope and Possibilities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://link.springer.com/ book/10.1007/978-3-030-39808-8 Mc Kenna, D. & Mooney Simmie, G. (2017). From dialogue to governance: critical analysis of the school completion programme in the Republic of Ireland from 2002 to 2016. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 15(2), 304–324. ISSN 1740-2743 http://www.jceps.com/archives/3550 McLaren, P. (2015). Pedagogy of Insurrection from Resurrection to Revolution. New York: Peter Lang. McNay, L. (1992). Foucault Feminism. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Mooney Simmie, G. (2007). Teacher Design Teams (TDTs) – building capacity for innovation, learning and curriculum implementation in the continuing professional development of in-career teachers. Irish Educational Studies, 26(2), 163– 176. doi:10.1080/03323310701295914 Mooney Simmie, G. (2009) The policy implementation process in the upper secondary education system (senior cycle) and videregående skolen in science and mathematics in the Republic of Ireland and the Kingdom of Norway from 1960–2005. PhD thesis. Dublin: Trinity College Dublin. http://www.tara.tcd.ie/handle/2262/90412 Mooney Simmie, G. (2012). The pied piper of Neo liberalism calls the tune in the Republic of Ireland: an analysis of education policy text from 2000–2012. Journal for Critical Educational Policy Studies, 10(2), 485–514. http://www.jceps.com/ wp-content/uploads/PDFs/10-2-18.pdf Mooney Simmie, G. (2014). The Neo-liberal turn in understanding teachers’ and school leaders’ work practices in curriculum innovation and change: a critical discourse analysis of a newly proposed reform policy in lower secondary education in the Republic of Ireland. Citizenship, Social and Economics Education, 13(3), 185–198. doi: 10.2304/csee.2014.13.3.185 Mooney Simmie, G. (2015). McLaren’s pedagogy of insurrection and the global murder machine in ein ‘austerity Ireland’. Book review: pedagogy of insurrection, by Peter McLaren. Journal for Critical Educational Policy Studies, 13(3), 221–229. http://www.jceps.com/archives/2782 Mooney Simmie, G. (2020). Chapter 28. The Power, Politics, and Future of Mentoring. In The Wiley International Handbook of Mentoring: Paradigms, Practices, Programs,

34  Geraldine Mooney Simmie and Possibilities. 1st Edition. Edited by Beverly J. Irby, Linda Searby, Jennifer N. Boswell, Fran Kochan, & Rubén Garza, 453–469. Hoboken, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781119142973.ch28 Mooney Simmie, G., Corbett, K., Galvin, M., McKenna, D., Murphy, D., Sheehan, C., & McLaren, P. (2020). Alliance of Critical Educational Researchers: A Politics of Principled Resistance for Existential Freedom and Emancipatory Possibilities for a Just Global World. American Educational Research Association AERA 2020 Repository. Mooney Simmie, G., de Paor, C., Liston, J., and O’Shea, J. (2017). Discursive positioning of beginning teachers’ professional learning during induction: a critical literature review from 2004 to 2014. Asia Pacific Journal of Teacher Education. doi: 10.1080/1359866X.2017.1280598 Mooney Simmie, G., & Edling, S. (2016). Ideological governing forms in education and teacher education: a comparative study between highly secular Sweden and highly non-secular Republic of Ireland. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, NordSTEP 2, 32041, 1–12. doi: 10.3402/nstep.v2.32041 Mooney Simmie, G., & Edling, S. (2019). Teachers' Democratic Assignment: a critical discourse analysis of teacher education policies in Ireland and Sweden. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 40(6), 832–846. doi:10.10 80/01596306.2018.1449733 Mooney Simmie, G., & Moles, J. (2011). Critical thinking, caring and professional agency: an emerging framework for productive mentoring. Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning, 19(4), 465–482. doi: 10.1080/13611267.2011.622081 Mooney Simmie, G., & Lang, M. (2018). Deliberative teacher education beyond boundaries: discursive practices for eliciting gender awareness. Teachers and Teaching Theory and Practice, 24(2), 135–150. doi: 10.1080/13540602.2017.1370420 Mooney Simmie, G. & Lang, M. (2020). School-Based Deliberative Partnership as a Platform for Teacher Professionalization and Curriculum Innovation. Routledge Research Teacher Education Series. London and New York: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/School-Based-Deliberative-Partnership-asa-Platform-for-Teacher-Professionalization/Mooney-Simmie-Lang/p/ book/9780367264598 Mooney Simmie, G., & Moles, J. (2019). Teachers' changing subjectivities: putting the soul to work for the principle of the market or for facilitating risk? Studies in Philosophy and Education, 1–16. First Online: 19 October 2019. doi: 10.10007/ s11217-019-09686-9. Mooney Simmie, G., Moles, J., & E. O’Grady. (2019). Good teaching as a messy narrative of change within a policy ensemble of networks, superstructures and flows. Critical Studies in Education, 60(1), 55–72. doi: 10.1080/17508487.2016.1219960 O’Grady, A., Mooney Simmie, G., & Kennedy, T. (2014). Why change to active learning? Pre-service and in-service science teachers’ perceptions. European Journal of Teacher Education, 37(1), 35–50. doi: 10.1080/02619768.2013.845163 Osberg, D., & Biesta, G. (2020). Beyond curriculum: groundwork for a non-instrumental theory of education. Educational Philosophy and Theory. doi: 10.1080/00131857.2020.1750362. Peters, M.A., Jandrić, P., & McLaren, P. (2020). Editorial. A viral theory of post-truth. Educational Philosophy and Theory. doi: 10.1080/00131857.2020.1750090. Petersen, E.B., & Z. Millei. (Editors) (2016). Interrupting the Psy-Disciplines in Education. London: Macmillan Publishers.

Remaining a student of teaching forever  35 Pillow, W. (2003). Confession, catharsis, or cure? Rethinking the uses of reflexivity as methodological power in qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16 (2), 175–196. Sant, E. (2019). Democratic education: a theoretical review (2006–2017). Review of Educational Research, 89(5), 655–696. doi: 10.3102/0034654319862493 Santoro, D.A. (2017). Cassandra in the classroom: teaching and moral madness. Studies in Philosophy of Education, 36, 49–60. Santoro, D.A., & Rocha, S.D. (2015). Review of Gert J.J. Biesta. The Beautiful Risk of Education. Studies in Philosophy of Education, 34, 413–418. Steiner-Kramsi, G., Karseth, B., & Baek, C. (2019). From science to politics: commissioned reports and their political translation into White Papers. Journal of Educational Policy. doi: 10.1080/02680939.2019.1656289. Tan, E. (2014). Human capital theory: a holistic criticism. Review of Educational Research, 84(3), 411–445. Thomas, M.A.M., & Vavrus, F. K. (2019). The pluto problem: reflexivities of discomfort in teacher professional development. Critical Studies in Education. doi: 10.1080/17508487.2019.1587782. Young, A.M., O’Neill, A., & Mooney Simmie, G. (2015). Partnership in learning between university and school: evidence from a researcher-in-residence. Irish Educational Studies, 34 (1), 25–42. doi: 10.1080/03323315.2014.1001203 Zipin, L., & Brennan, M. (2003). The suppression of ethical dispositions through managerial governmentality: a habitus crisis in Australian higher education. International Journal Leadership in Education, 6(4), 351–370. doi: 10.1080/1360312032000150742

2 From success/failure binaries to teaching for justice Conceptualizing education as access, responsibility, dignity, and transparency Walter S. Gershon Introduction Education in the United States and in the Global North more generally is constructed around a set of pre-established biases. These conceits are tightly intertwined with modernist notions that include universalist constructions of knowledge, binary frames of understanding, ironic naming of singular correct answers, and the success of comparatively few fed by a necessity of the failure of many (e.g., Love, 2019; McDermott & Aron, 1978; Rist, 1973; Woodson, 1933). The concern is not that there are somehow too few models about how one might imagine education otherwise, for there continue to be strong possible pedagogical choices that center justice and care rather than forms of success (e.g., Grande, 2004; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Paris & Alim, 2017). For what we do in and through schooling is more than being trapped in our own patterns of habitus (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). This is the case regardless of our awareness of such tendencies for this is how what is “normal” and what is “valued” function: the metaphorical water in which we all swim, so prevalent as to be overlooked. Conceptualizing education as measurable processes through which teachers and students can be understood as successful is one such example. Educators’ belief in the potential of student success and their own successes as determined by their students’ successes strongly contributes to educators’ ongoing, intentional, concerted efforts that normalize and perpetuate the very systemic inequities teachers believe themselves to be combatting (e.g., Au, 2008; Gershon, 2017a; Taubman, 2009). This, then, is the focus of this chapter. Rather than success, it first attends to modes of inquiry, how did I arrive at the conclusions I have reached, and their practical applications? The chapter then details ongoing concerns with constructions of teacher success and conceptualizations of educational successes more generally. Finally, this chapter articulates possible pathways for understanding how teachers might otherwise consider and enact more socially just educational approaches, for teachers-as-learners, and in everyday educational practice alike.

Teaching for justice: Beyond success/failure binaries  37

Success, failure, and measurement Successful/failure binaries are central to many understandings about practical endeavors, from fishing to assembling furniture to learning, for example. Answers can indeed be correct and incorrect, games won and lost. However, educational systems predicated on notions of success and failure that insist on forms of measurement are at least doubly harmful and deeply unjust. As but one example, truly standardized assessments both a) require a 50% failure rate for anyone to be considered successful and b) insist that learning can be measured. Where the first half of this claim is likely rather immediately sensible, the latter claim, against educational measurement, may feel a bit farfetched. How can learning not be measureable? This claim about the immeasurability of learning rests on three central educational understandings (e.g., Dewey, 1929; Gershon, 2017; Woodson, 1933). First, it is nearly impossible to note the moment a person learns something. Did the idea become clear at one moment or the next, during or after class, in school or over the weekend? Second, teaching and learning are separate yet interrelated relations and experiences. As I’ve noted elsewhere, a fantastic educator can teach a concept that a student is not yet ready to grasp regardless of that teacher’s expertise (e.g., introducing students to chemical bonds). Conversely, a student can learn important information in spite of really poor pedagogy. Third, it is almost always the case that one can apply excellent pathways in problem solving (all kinds) toward correct answers and be incorrect. This is because one can work procedurally without any knowledge about why something functions the way that it does and arrive correct answers. In sum, measuring learning is not measuring learning at all but instead a combination of both measuring differences between often singular prescribed processes and products and the ability to reproduce the expected answers. Further, the product of students’ work is measured not only against their own previous work but also against their peers’. Or, as I’ve noted elsewhere (Gershon, 2017b), schooling has always been a neoliberal project, turning children into numbers, most often in the form of points and letter grades, and those numbers correlated with others students. Improving from not grasping a concept at all to getting the hang of how to use those ideas or moving from understanding 10% of something to understanding half of it is still measured as failure. From this perspective, constructions of successful teaching are even more deeply concerning. To begin, all forms of successful teaching are predicated on some form of student success and all forms of student success, from standardized assessments to student work in collectively agreed upon portfolios and their evaluations, are ultimately about measuring students against prescribed curricular ends. All forms of teacher success also require collapsing significant differences between teaching and learning described above, adhering to the common mistake in education, and teacher education specifically, that teaching makes people learn and learning comes from strong teaching.

38  Walter S. Gershon What makes these understandings particularly insidious is that such framing creates contexts where educators’ careful, hard work contributes to the very ongoing injustices many teachers seek to interrupt. Teachers who work hard at helping students at systems that require their failure so that students at other schools might succeed are at once truly helping their students learn and working against their students and themselves. As long as teachers insist that they or their students might be successful, they are perpetuating a system that demands student and teacher failure. The point is not that teachers or students cannot do well in school or in life. The point is that linear systems based on measuring success or failure according to universally applied norms and values, maintain dominant groups as dominant and normalize their success and others’ failures in ways where focus on the act of measurement obscures its biased purposes. Conceptualizing education in this fashion means largely ignoring students’ understandings and experiences, their interests and desires as well as their strengths and weaknesses. To be clear, students do indeed need to learn things they likely neither wish to know and/or are not particularly strong at understanding. This does not mean, however, that teaching requires quantitative measurement or measurement against one’s peers to grasp student growth. There are important differences between understanding the kinds of information a young person should be able to understand, their ability to clearly and transparently share those understandings, and constructing those understandings in relation to one’s peers. That these ideas might sound radical is a sign of how deeply we as educators have become in our modes of education rather than their impossibility. As but one rather renown counter-example, consider the kinds of studentinquiry-driven experiential education espoused by John Dewey from the middle of his career onwards, in works such as Experience and Education (Dewey, 1938). Again, the point is not that students should somehow not be responsible for their learning or that their growth in their learning should be somehow unattended. Rather, what is at issue here is that growth of knowledge should be reduced to that which can be measurable. My own early educational experiences provide a practical example of how education might otherwise be in the United States. I attended a progressive elementary school in the mid-1970s. There were no grades provided in this experience. Instead, teachers had satisfactory/not criteria and provided substantive feedback each grading period in the form of a couple pages detailing what the teacher perceived I was doing well and areas of my work that needed improvement. My parents and I then met with my teacher to review those notes and come to an understanding of not only areas of strength and those in need of improvement, behavioral as well as academic, but also to come to an understanding and agreement of the teacher’s assessment. Parents tended to sit beside or behind the student so that the conversation was between student and teacher with parents present to hear the conversation and participate as they saw fit. I did this at least twice a year, memory is a bit of a fuzzy thing, from second through fourth grades, seven through ten years old.

Teaching for justice: Beyond success/failure binaries  39 This, too, is part of an ongoing struggle that is to some degree missed in conversations about educational inequities in US schooling, for example. Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (Paris, 2013; Paris & Alim, 2017) provide significant trajectories for approaching teaching Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and other students of color and continually marginalized students with dignity, respect, awareness, and care, from individual to culture and back again. There is also a definite argument to be made that the following particular point lies outside of an ongoing CSP project, to open pathways for socially just pedagogical possibilities that resonate and support students’ sociocultural norms, values, and understandings. Yet, CSP does not appear to directly call for the removal of notions of success, its ties to a necessity of failure, or a schooling in which all students can learn without being compared to one another or against some kind of norm or value. There is also no small amount of danger in positioning socially just educational practices outside notions of success and failure. For, as much as forms of measurement carry embedded biases that cause sociocultural differences for BIPOC to be recast as academic deficits (Valencia, 2010), without such norms and values, on what might educators focus to better ensure that their pedagogies are just or hear how they are unjust and require further change?

Modes of inquiry: Autoethnography As much as this stuns me to note it aloud, I am coming to the end of my 28th academic year of teaching, even longer if one counts teaching critical and creative thought to gifted and talented middle- and high-school students while serving as a camp counselor at Maryland Board of Education sponsored summer camps. As a kind of generalist’s generalist, I have taught three years of high school at an alternative high school in the Pacific Northwest, English as a Second Language to all ages in Japan and in the States, a yearlong sub at a middle school, and three years of upper grade elementary school in barrio in the San Fernando Valley (fourth and fifth grades). I also taught courses in technology for credentialing in California and served as a curriculum director before becoming a professor where I have taught undergraduate and graduate courses for the past 14 years. During those years, I consistently conducted research with students and teachers in the city contexts in which I taught as a P12 educator. The courses I now teach bring together my ongoing time with students and teachers in schools and other educational ecologies, such as an afterschool music program in the greater Toronto area and students conceptions of the community spaces and places they value and feel valued. With the exception of a few places I taught in Japan, until my arrival in Northeast Ohio, all my teaching was in city schools with city students and my research has continued in urban contexts to this day. Prior to my time as a graduate student, my processes were always strongly informed by ideas about teaching gained from critical educational traditions such as multicultural education and critical pedagogies as they emerged and evolved through the 1980s and 1990s (e.g., Freire, 2000; hooks, 1994).

40  Walter S. Gershon However, my teaching was most influenced by the critical educators with whom I worked that included my in-laws and partner, all of whom are teachers. This combination created a pedagogical approach where I worked to find ways to ensure that curricula reflected students’ everyday experiences and interests, students had room to think on their own and freedom to be themselves provided those choices did not negatively impact other students, and they learned the test taking skills often provided high status, wealthy students in test prep courses. Rather than constantly practice skills that would better ensure success on standardized assessments, I spent dedicated time teaching test taking skills, ways to negotiate standardized assessments regardless of content and, conversely, specifically related to academic content—that one need not do calculations when shapes are to scale, the bigger shape is indeed bigger, for example. My approach to research has been much more intentionally autoethnographic over the past decade and a half (e.g., Behar, 1993; Holman Jones, Adams & Ellis, 2013; Huges & Pennington, 2017). This is no small part because, after being hired by a rather progressive committee and department chair, my everyday experiences shifted underfoot as the department eased its way back to its more traditional roots over time. In light of the ongoing differences between preferences, practices, and policies—as well as differences between rhetoric and practice and accompanying regional interactional differences where my urban-ness and non-Midwestern-ness were often treated as deficits—I began to use research tools in order to better gain perspectives on the university teaching ecologies in which I found myself. This documentation included conversations with students and colleagues across my own campus as well as with others across the nation and globe. In short, the tools for autoethnographic studies doubled as checks and balances on my own thinking about how to teach social justice to future high-school teachers and teacher educators, the job I was hired to do. As is common across ever-growing conceptualizations of what a strong autoethnography entails, my process centered my person in experience and understandings in ways that were systematically brought into conversations about those experiences. My voice, though central, was not weighted above the information I received in talking with others, the documentation I gathered, or how my work as an educator was enacted (for a rather transparent example of parts of this process, see Gershon, Bilinovich, and Peel, 2010; Gershon, Peel & Bilinovich, 2009). Instead, these sets of understandings were placed alongside one another so that I could better understand my own teaching practices and scholarship in relation to the contexts I now lived. Where the previous section attended to questions of measurement and learning, the following section documents how ongoing modernisms found in either/or binaries and assumptions about the universality of knowledge, teaching, and learning combine to make teacher success all but impossible. In its stead, I argue that teaching for justice should be about access, responsibility, dignity, and transparence, the topic of the penultimate section below.

Teaching for justice: Beyond success/failure binaries  41

On the (im)possibility of teacher success: Modernism, binaries, and universal understandings Notions of success in education as they are maintained today are in many ways a more recent development, emerging out of a nascent standardization movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This movement called for deepening “the professionalization” of teachers and teaching repletes with changes in language, content, and pedagogy. Ever interested in getting ahead on the next school game and lead by language arts colleagues, education began to move toward literacies, discreetly measurable skills that could also be utilized as building blocks toward the development of increasingly complex understandings. Efforts to professionalize the field saw the widescale adoption of business language and patterns applied to schooling (e.g., McNeil, 2000; Powell, Farrar & Cohen, 1985). Teachers were to enact “best practices” in order that teaching become increasingly efficient and effective. As Herbert Kliebard (1975) and William Schubert (1986) have made abundantly clear, there has long been a tendency in US education for “reforms” that mistake classrooms for factories where streamlining everyday processes simultaneously increases productivity and profits. However, young people are not machines and should not be objects for sale. The consideration and application of complex understandings as universally applicable best practices that are improved by increasing measurement and streamlining classroom interactions is, at best, a deep error. In much the same way that educational systems in the United States have longstanding connections to eugenics (e.g., Gershon, 2020; Winfield, 2007), US education has always segregated knowledge in ways that make failures for less wealthy and more melanated students and successes for more wealthy, Anglo students sensible (e.g., Cooper, 1892; Delpit, 2013; Rist, 1973; Woodson, 1933). As difficult as such claims may be to hear, teacher education is not driven by Dewey or Montessori or Reggio Emilia or bell hooks or Bettina Love, though it truly should be. Instead, even programs that are indeed infused with social justice are most often later subsumed under state and federal guidelines that continue to follow a model set forth by Franklin Bobbitt (1918) at the turn of the last century1. Bobbitt’s The Curriculum calls for the measurement of students by quantifiable goals and objectives, scientifically supported practices that are effective and efficient, and lesson planning that encompasses and reflects these ideas. These are, in turn, amplified by Ralph Tyler (1949) Basic Principles of Curriculum, Madeline Hunter’s (2004) patterns of lesson planning and Wiggins and McTighe’s (2005) backwards lesson design. As Kliebard (1975) noted in his critique of Tyler, what one is supposed to teach, the ideas and ideals, the content, is not addressed in any of these pedagogical practices. Also missing are the sociocultural norms and values that are foundational to such practices. Instead, these works and contemporary education at the turn of the millennium in the United States focus on how teachers should best enact these understandings for students.

42  Walter S. Gershon Eugenics, efficiency, and segregation There are at least the following two concerns about this ongoing pattern of US teacher education. First, Franklin Bobbitt was an unabashed eugenicist. This is not in doubt as Bobbitt (1909) is the author of Practical Eugenics, a work that is in many ways fulfilled in The Curriculum, nine years later (for more on this point, see Gershon, 2017b, 2020). Second, as with Kliebard’s critique of Tyler, the content students should learn and the ideals that contextualize that content is largely absent in curriculum theorizing of those in favor of measurable efficiency Kliebard called the social efficiency group. As is usually the case with the social efficiency group, sociocultural norms and values that undergird pedagogical actions are taken for granted as being shared and universal, another way of normalizing curricular choices. Because knowledge is universally conceptualized, there is an accompanying understanding that all knowledge can be broken down into discreet building blocks and teaching is a question of how to assemble those blocks in order to construct prescribed models. Perhaps the strongest critique of social efficiency over the past 20 years resides in the curricula and assessments of standardized measurement that are strong determinants in students’ grades and attached to teachers’ salaries. School districts across the US have spent millions of dollars on curricula specifically designed to help students gain the knowledge needed to pass their assessments, almost to the exclusion of all other information (e.g., Gershon, 2017a). However, in spite of such curricula, test taking practice, and the like, the strongest indicator for student success on their annual assessments remains their zip code (US postal codes): The wealthier the school, the higher the scores. Long histories of intentionally segregated housing, racist practices such as redlining where people of African descent, as well as Asian and Latinx populations over time, were allowed only to live in the least desirable areas. Wealthy Anglo students constantly outscore less wealthy Anglo students all of whom, in turn, outscore students of color. If standardized assessments were not biased, then students of color would be spread more evenly across all standard deviations from the norm. If social efficiency is truly effective and efficient, then either the tests are invalid or the system is not working, or both. Further exacerbating matters, US schools now are more segregated than they were before the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case that desegregated schools over half a century ago (Rosiek & Kinslow, 2016). Additional evidence includes that Black boys are disproportionately placed in special education and are three times as likely to be kicked out of preschool. Latinx and Indigenous boys and Black, Latinx, and Indigenous girls are also more likely to be suspended, punished, or pushed out of schooling entirely (e.g., Morris, 2016). In sum, there is ample, ongoing evidence that not only is schooling historically biased in ways that overwhelmingly favor Anglo, middle class, boys while disenfranchising children of color and poor to working class students, but that these tendencies also continue unabated today (e.g., Lipman, 2003; Page, 1991; Rooks, 2017; Woodson, 1933).

Teaching for justice: Beyond success/failure binaries  43 Systems and being acquired by success/failure binaries As Harve Varenne and Ray McDermott (1998) in Successful Failure: The School America Builds, the US educational system is organized in ways that continually recreate patterns of success that are predicated and necessitate patterns of failure. These, in turn, create sociocultural categories that require constant maintenance, successes require others to be average or failures. In Varenne and McDermott’s framing, people are acquired by sociocultural categories. From this position, special education is a category that acquires students rather than students who have an inherent “disability.” There are assessments that need to be used, teachers who need a job, curricula that require users. The point is not that students do not learn differently or that there are not students who require educational modes. Rather, Varenne and McDermott contend that those who learn differently are not solely those in special education and, on the other hand, those differences are not disabilities. Placed alongside educational scholarship that notes how behavioral differences from implied norms and values become academic disabilities, the notion that students are acquired by sociocultural categories (success/failure, academic/ vocational track), while clearly unjust, is rendered even more sensible. Educational modernisms: Universal, linear, and sequential This argument has, in many ways, now arrived back to where this section began, an argument about how universalities in theory and their application in everyday practices are problematic in education. Before continuing, however, it is important to underscore that there are indeed ideas that are more universal that are significant to hold in mind. The idea that children should be treated with respect and care in educational ecologies is one such example. How that care should be expressed in action is particular, contextualized by nested layers of sociocultural norms and values and individual student needs and preferences. Care for an extrovert is different than care for a more introverted student; care for a first-generation Latinx student is different than care for an African American student; care for a student with autism is different than care for a student with dyslexia. And yet, as there is always at least as great a difference for individuals within a group as between groups—one is likely to have something in common with someone who grew up a literal world away as one is to have with one’s own sibling and the inverse. This said, it is universal ideas of linear, sequential processes and development and their application, often supported by psychological theories, which maintain ongoing educational injustices in the United States. Not only do they conflate teaching with learning but are predicated on understandings that all knowledge imparted through schooling can be measurable, maintaining a system where that is the case. This measurement is how it becomes systemically sensible for teachers to be measured by students’ scores on annual assessments and accountable, another measurement of relations. Universal notions of

44  Walter S. Gershon transferability of ideas and that the measurability of knowledge is one of the central defining characteristics of its value (only measureable knowledge is worth knowing) are foundational to conceptualizing education as either skills or best practices, without the need for asking what is lost in reduction to discreetly measurable skills or for whom those practices are best. Most insidiously, modernist universalities blame individual children, their communities, or their families for what are longstanding systemic sociocultural inequities and injustices. Where students’ differences from perceived norms and values are continually assessed as deficits, their work is adjudicated as if giving everyone the same information in the same fashion is either fair or just (for more on this point, see Apple, 1990; Freire, 1970; Gershon, 2017a; Rist, 1973). Instead, providing the same information to all students is the academic equivalent of giving everyone a free ten points and then evaluating a course semester grade—the action changes the perception of the event but neither its conditions nor its outcome. So too is applying the same standards of success whether in student grades or teachers’ abilities based on conflated notions of students’ academic or social performance. Ongoing educational modernisms place teachers in an ethical bind in at least the following three key ways. First, they establish an educational system that requires losers so that some may be judged successful. The criteria for success has long been about socioeconomic and sociocultural advantages that are maintained by often unspoken dominant norms and values of the hidden curriculum (Apple, 1990; Jackson, 1968). The further retrenchment of everyday classroom education in schools across the nation only serves to more deeply exacerbate racial, class-based, gender, and other such systemic injustices within and between schools and school districts (Au, 2008; Gershon, 2017; Rosiek & Kinslow, 2016; Taubman, 2009). Making matters even more pressurized, schools and districts are now publicly graded based on composite student test scores, doubling down on the foundational conflation of teaching and learning. Such grades are often strong determinants in housing prices, ever-deepening student disenfranchisement, and advantage along well-established class and racial lines—postal code has become an even more dependable predictor of test scores, for example. Second, these understandings create a context in which teachers must expend much of their educational time and effort working to help students score well on standardized measurements and in general. This is because not helping students to score well on an assessment that is already stacked against them increases the likelihood that their prescribed failure will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The inverse is also true. Teachers of students in high status neighborhoods are equally pressured in the opposite direction: their students are assumed to much more than pass and any dip in scores is a teachers’ fault (another issue with conflating teaching and learning). For example, a friend of mine is an outstanding science teacher and had the highest scores in his city district, at the arts rather than the STEM magnet, no less. The following year, one special education student in his class scored higher than the student had the previous year. The combination of

Teaching for justice: Beyond success/failure binaries  45 that students’ score and classes’ overall composite scores created a context where the teacher’s scores went down in percentage from the previous year. This drop in percentage placed this teacher’s teaching in the “needs improvement category.” However, for a second year in a row, this teacher again had the highest test scores in their district. Regardless of where one’s students fall on a success/failure binary or resulting continuum (i.e., from success to failure), practical self-preservationist ideas aside2, there is a strong ethical argument for teachers to help students score well on their standardized assessments as students’ scores are a key determinant in their future lives and possibilities. Finally, teachers are simultaneously encouraged to apply 1) best practices, be effective and efficient, and ensure that the curricular and pedagogical choices are properly prescribed and 2) attend to each students’ individual needs as learners. Teachers are judged according to universal measures, whether their local administrator’s ability to do a “two minute walk through” and assess their conformity to that principal’s interpretation of standards, nevermind that they are not presented as interpretations but as factual and, yes, universal, or students’ scores on annual assessments, nevermind that teaching and learning are separate events. Sameness as justice Accordingly, teachers are told they must apply the same pedagogical practices to deliver the same curricula, a move that conflates sameness with justice. There is a significance to notions of sameness as justice in schooling, that students in wealthy areas are not given a superior curriculum (e.g., Anyon, 198?) or grades from a city school weighted differently than grades from a suburban school by college admissions officers (e.g., Varenne & McDermott, 1998), for example. However, this notion of sameness-as-justice is precisely how injustices and inequities are masked and perpetuated through schooling. For example, every school in the large urban school district receives the same monies for students, an instance of sameness as actual justice, ensuring that wealthier neighborhoods do not receive greater funding than more poor and working class neighborhoods. Yet families and schools are not barred from asking for other kinds of fees to the school for “maintenance” or special events. As but one clear and stark example, I know of multiple schools in some of the nation’s most wealthy areas, also in city school districts, where it is not unusual for families to give schools an extra $5000 per student (child). Parents in these neighborhoods would pay much more per child for private schools in the area, have the money to spare, feel positive about further supporting public schools and ensuring that they are giving to a communal pot rather than just fees for their child, and can write it all off as a tax reduction because it is a “gift” to a public school. These actual monies along with disparities in time between working poor and middle-class parents, cultural capital of knowing how to negotiate schools and school systems, and myriad other disparities such as immigration status, the

46  Walter S. Gershon ability to afford childcare so older siblings are not babysitting while trying to do homework, and healthcare. For a sense of how deep these inequities run in the United States, that letters home to parents need to be in the parents’ home language was something that needed to become federal legislation before it became common practice. Yet, somehow, teachers are supposed to individuate and differentiate academic content and pedagogical approaches in ways that overcome deep sociocultural systemic divisions. That these divisions are known longstanding, and insurmountable for a host of reasons, not least of which is that these inequities are part and parcel of the educational systems in which they teach. When teachers place blame for the impossibilities of their being viewed as success on communities, families, and students, they are both missing the concerns and part of the problem. They are not incorrect for noting that teachers are asked to do is impossible. They are, however, very wrong in blaming children, their families, or their communities for why such differences are insurmountable: these are systemic inequities that cannot be fixed only through individual efforts, including their own. Understandings of teacher success are therefore necessarily unjust, masking perpetuating inequities and ongoing disenfranchisement rather than serving to interrupt those patterns of injustice. Teacher success is predicated on student success, sociocultural conditions that engender student success, and require other teachers to be unsuccessful or, more bluntly, to be varying degrees of failures as educators. Even more importantly, combining constructions of student and teacher success creates an educational ecology where the better one teaches the more one hurts children. In other words, when teaching in a system that requires many teachers and students to fail for any teacher or student to be considered successful, the more effective and efficient one is, the greater one’s participation in that system, and the more one hurts children in schools. This is a particularly treacherous pattern. It creates a system where teachers and students are indeed further punished for lack of participation in the very tools that already require the majority3 of students’ failure so that other students might succeed. Part of what makes this pattern so difficult is that those working with students who are generally predicted to be successful are simultaneously working to ensure that other students who are generally predicted to fail will most often do so. Conversely, those working with students predicted to fail are working to do so in order that other students might be successful. Those who “should” be successful but fail or those who “should” fail but are successful are not lessons from which we might learn as educators but, instead, in many ways, are statistical expectations of outliers that do not interrupt overarching trends. In sum, keeping to its eugenics and modernist roots, public education in the United States remains an intentionally unequal system where the failure of many is necessary for the success of few. Or, to use the terminology utilized by McDermott and Aron over 40 years ago, and language made again popular by arguably the worst president in American

Teaching for justice: Beyond success/failure binaries  47 history (and this is saying something), a system designed to create educational winners and losers. This is also the crux of the argument presented in the next section: there is no way to reconceptualize or otherwise reimagine anything that might be called “teacher success” or “student success” without teachers or students who fail. As such failure is anathema to any form of educational justice, for it is almost always those who are the most vulnerable or innovative who fail, four alternate pathways for educational justice are suggested. Unlike binaries of success and failure, these four aspects for conceptualizing and enacting justice—access, responsibility, dignity, and transparency—deepen when used in conjunction and do not require failures of any sort to be realized.

Conclusion: Teaching for justice—access, responsibility, dignity, transparency Education is indeed systemically bleak. However, that things are designed in a particular fashion does not mean that local actors cannot use their available agency to push back, interrupt, resist, reject, or otherwise subvert dominant systemic tendencies. Or, as Ortner (2006) notes, just because there is no outside of power (Foucault, 1995) does not mean that one cannot always enact one’s available agency in some fashion. Teachers and students, although certainly ensconced in multiple systems that blame individuals for systemic issues in unequal ways, can nonetheless work to utilize resources in contemporary ecologies of US schooling. While these everyday classroom choices may not interrupt oppressions or injustices outside a classroom or even to all students within a class, they can and do positively impact young people’s lives and do make a difference over time (e.g., Ladson-Billings, 1995; Love, 2019; hooks, 1989; Paris, 2013). Where sociocultural norms form strong tendencies, there are ways to lessen or otherwise circumvent such directionalities—there is a culture of power and those who don’t have as much can be taught what it is and how to use it to their advantage even as systems operate against them (Delpit, 1995). What is often missing in talk about how particular teaching practices can be leveraged in ways that can help classrooms, and schools in some cases, become more socially just spaces. As teachers are rarely in the position that administrators maintain, and therefore tend not to have the ability to fully subvert top-down practices to engender more just practices, possibilities for justice tend to focus on classrooms. This is not to say that individual teachers cannot influence policies or practices at school and levels in P12 spaces or college or university levels in higher education. Rather, it is to note both that systems work to maintain themselves and those that hold positions central to that maintenance will most often side with the maintenance of those processes regardless of the language or understandings utilized to do so, even, or especially, discussions of social justice such as those found in nearly every department of teacher education in the United States. Yet, as but one example, most schools and departments of education still conceptualize academic

48  Walter S. Gershon content as separate from justice and justice as additive, like Black History Month or attending to non-Christian holidays, events that are tacked on rather than embedded within everyday education. There is also often a lack of discussion about how teachers who do justice work put themselves and their careers at risk. It may be ethically correct for people in their sociocultural roles to move against the systems that create mandatory free education for US children and work to maintain these systems regardless of the damage they inflict on successive generations. However, though these lines are at best false, what is ethically correct in one’s professional life is not necessarily also ethically correct for one’s personal life. Losing one’s teaching job is not only a loss in the sense that there is a strong chance that the teacher who replaces your classroom has a strong certainty of being less socially just, for this is often the reason why one’s job is lost in the first place, forms of noncompliance with unjust local (school, district) demands and practices. Losing your job also can make a person destitute. Therefore, the following ideas and possibilities should be enacted in ways that do not overly place educators’ jobs in jeopardy. There are arguments that an orientation toward justice necessarily places an educator in danger of losing her job and being blackballed from working at other school districts (being blackballed is far too common in places like Northeast Ohio where each small municipality also has its own school district). This, however, is not my take on such matters as teaching is often a pathway single-parents who are often women, and education is a majority women profession (more elementary schools than high schools, elementary schools are overwhelmingly staffed by women) and negatively gendered female (e.g., Hendry, 2011; Martin, 1993). Negatively judging those who elect to keep their jobs when literally cannot afford to lose them is both shortsighted and unethical. Along similar lines of argument, what is proposed here are categories for conceptualizing socially just practices outside success/failure and other educational modernisms, not directives of how one should teach or what one must do. These are not ideas to be rendered into yet another round of standards for the teaching profession, found in most state’s boards of education parameters for teachers and/or processes of teacher certification. Seemingly endless processes of teaching for justice have been offered over the past 100 years (e.g., Ayers, Quinn & Stovall, 2008; Cooper, 1892; Freire, 1970; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Love, 2019; Paris & Alim, 2017; Woodson, 1933). Rather than propose yet another set of understandings about what justice might be and how it can operate in practice, justice here speaks to aspects of access, care, and transparency toward liberation present across educational ecologies and central to all discussions of justice in education including my own (e.g., Gershon, 2012a, 2012b). A lack of access to resources of all kinds is a central mode of injustice. This is distinct from forms of unwanted altruisms or actions done for others that are motivated in no small part for the gains one receives for those actions. Unlike many forms of such work, in one’s role as an educator, it is important that a teacher not only provide access to ideas and processes in

Teaching for justice: Beyond success/failure binaries  49 general but that they also remain attentive and open to the kinds of access requested by students, their families, and communities. Actively seeking out the kinds of access desired that one can facilitate or provide is therefore also central to this process. Such seeking, however, is a delicate balance between remaining open to such possibilities, actively letting others know where one stands and one’s openness to hearing such information, and working to not impress one’s views on others in ways that turn trajectories of access into further oppressions. One such mode for attending to how one’s acts intended to be caring, thoughtful, or helpful is to closely attend to others’ dignity, especially those who have less power in schools, primarily students. There are important differences between understandings of respect and dignity. Where respect is what one believes one gives others as well as what one is owed from others, dignity is how one feels when one is respected. As such, it requires attention to another’s feelings, have your actions allowed them to move in ways that are dignified to that person, and others to attend in similar fashion to you, did our interaction leave you feeling dignified. Moments of tension, ongoing dislike or preference of a person or their attributes, and solving disputes, are undignified things but can be negotiated so that, while everyone involved may not get what they desire or believe is just, they can nonetheless walk away with their dignity intact (as opposed to questions of ego or pride for example). It is for these reasons that responsibility is central to ethical, just teaching theories and practices. Responsibility is again different than dignity and respect in that one is responsible to a person outside of one’s self and also responsible to one’s self just as others are responsibly interacting with you. Responsibility is the definition of the relationship between all actors in educational ecologies teachers should strive toward. Not being accountable, the measurable actions that tick particular boxes of relation but responsible for and to others’ and one’s own educational ways of beingknowingdoing (Gershon, 2017, p. 2)—the inseparability in that to be someone is to know something both of which are actions in constant states of doing. One is responsible toward getting others access to ideas, material goods, and future possibilities in ways that grant them dignity and for one to retain one’s own. Èdouard Glissant (1997) argues for an opacity of one’s self from others as a fundamental right. One has the right to have feelings and ideas that are kept to themselves. Forms of oppression and violence demand forms of transparency from those with less power, violating their rights and their possibilities of self, alone, and in relation to others. Further, if demanding transparency from those under one’s is an oppressive act, then superordinates, acts of transparency by those who have greater power in particular contexts, like teachers in classrooms, can be an act of justice. Letting students know what you are thinking, the reasons behind your understandings, how you feel, and what you feel about specific things regardless of how mundane they might first appear. Part of the way teachers can engender the kinds of dignity and access they seek to provide is by being transparent about the steps taken toward each and how others,

50  Walter S. Gershon especially students, are active participants in those processes, as are their families and communities. These aspects of strong teaching may seem somewhat similar to the kinds of modernist universalisms critiqued in the previous chapter. However, they are markedly different in important ways. For example, although one can work to provide access to resources, ideas, and future possibilities for students and their families, this is not applying the same prescribed set of criteria across a wide variety of contexts. Instead, questions of access are strongly determined by students and communities. Here is one possible throughline for conceptualizing how one could respectfully work with community understandings and practices: give possible examples of kinds of access one can provide; step back to let community, family, or student needs dictate kinds and areas of access to be provided, improved, or maintained; and letting students, families, and communities openly and readily (transparently) hear what you thought you heard them ask and how you might move toward those ends. When combined, access, dignity, responsibility, and transparency are often iterations of showing up, being there with and for students, and reaching out, taking the first often-vulnerable step in interactions and relationships. These readily observable actions are not only clear expressions of teacher care and intentions but also something students, families, and communities already use, implicitly if not explicitly, in their personal understandings of teachers. Do they regularly and consistently show up and reach out to students, their families, and communities? In sum, it is well past time that teachers eschew longstanding practices that require student and teacher failure, the error of universal application and adjudication, and mistaking sameness as the sole feature of justice. It never has been enough to provide the same education to all students and that such sameness is taken as a step forward speaks to the paucity of how education is conceptualized and delivered rather than deep moves of justice. Instead, a focus on access, dignity, responsibility, and transparency provide a strong foundation for more socially just educational ideas and practices, as well as the means for considering the degree to which education is justly theorized and practiced.

Notes 1 There are indeed a few universities that truly proclaim and enact socially just curricular and pedagogical practices. However, these programs are also subject to state accreditation processes both in order to continue programs that produce future teachers and must also teach future teachers about how to be an educator in systems where they and students will be measured and held accountable to those numbers rather than to question of access, caring, or dignity. 2 In the United States, increase in students’ test scores positively impacts teachers whose possibilities for growth and salaries are often tied to overall test scores. 3 Unfortunately, this is not hyperbole but statistics. Students who score 59% or below on an assessment (whether expressed in percentile or given a numerical value) fail according to both numerical and grading modes of evaluation (60%< is a D;