ORIENTATION
The previous chapter, serving as a sketch to the main study, dealt with an exploratory depiction of particular discourses and meanings that I offer to position myself in this research study. This chapter pays attention to the different dimensions of understanding teachers' private life and public responsibility, and also offers a possible dimension and the tools employed for exploration of "success" and teachers' lives. The following dimensions make up the different sections in this chapter:
• Rethinking self/identity models
• Understanding socialisation theories
• Understanding poststructural theories
• Using poststructural tools to understand different dimensions of teachers' lives as complex and contradictory spaces in which power is produced and performed in successful ways.
The literature presented in these sections offered me the space to construct the theoretical tools that I used to design the data production framework. Employing poststructuralism as a theoretical perspective was useful in that it offered me the space and the tools for multiple methods and strategies for constructing and deconstructing the life histories of the teachers in the study. Most importantly, this theoretical perspective enabled me to create an analytical framework that assumes knowledge as partial, power as dispersed and identity as always in flux.
INTRODUCTION
This study is about learning to explore and understand the lives of teachers who are able to successfully commit themselves to the teacher position in these times of continued uncertainties, contradictions and changes. Issues concerning the power and knowledge of teachers are crucial for this commitment to education against a variety of oppressive and constraining forces that prevail. While most theoretical approaches suggest that there are several ways of construing the professional I ife cycle of teachers (Huberman 1993) and offer humanist notions of the self as a neat, coherent package, poststructural theories view
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subjectivities as complex and non-unitary. These humanist and realist interpretations chart in a fixed and linear fashion teachers' identities and the potential spaces available to teachers for stages of satisfaction and commitment to their teacher position. The poststructural position seems to be that the teacher has no fixed identity but assumes different identities at different times so that identities are constantly in a state of flux, a fleeting multiplicity of opportunities (Hatch and Wisniewski 1995, 123). Exploring teacher identity within the poststructural framework enabled me to explore those fleeting moments when teachers resist the totalising forms of reason that constrain them, and transgress the imposed limitations to create new forms of being and acting. Energised and transformed, these active and embodied beings enact practices in the teacher position, which open up spaces for dialogue and unique experiences which give their lives certain values. These are moments that make the teachers' practice pleasurable and their lives desirable.
I want to argue in this thesis for an approach that positions teachers not as objects to be changed but as complex subjects with power and knowledge to change. Life history work has much to offer, given its focus on the construction and reconstruction of teachers' identities and the self, transformed continuously in relation to the discourses they occupy to make sense of their lives and the world.
There are many ways to consider the career of teaching, the reasons for becoming teachers and the factors associated with becoming a successful teacher. In this study I attempt to address the question of being a "successful" teacher by recognising the struggle over identity (who am I?), as inseparable from the struggle over the meanings of identities and subject positions that may be occupied by teachers in teaching discourses and practices (how do I make meaning of who I am?). It is these complex identities I seek to understand, and the multiple and conflicting meanings they create in their daily lives. Employing the life history approach enables me to understand teachers' lives as complex, and identities as fluid and multiple.
I draw on poststructuralist theorising to understand teachers' identities and the meanings they constitute through the discourses and practices they adopt as a condition for and outcome of the changes, uncertainties and contradictions in the different teaching and learning contexts.
Drawing on a multidimensional understanding of teachers' identities, challenges me to face explicitly that ambiguity, multiplicity and contradictions are inseparable to the form and substance of our identities.
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This chapter serves to explore key approaches on identity theory research and teacher socialisation, as well as studies on teacher thinking and teacher identity, and the methodological findings and implications of such studies. The intention is to identify the gaps in terms of theoretical understanding, focus, methodology, and the kinds of studies that may still be explored to expand on an era of research that is very close to the hearts of researchers, who want to counter what was seen as a colonisation of teachers' experience by research practices that characterise the teacher as one variable in the classroom.
STEPPING OUTSIDE
In this section I want to present a brief overview of the literature surveyed for this study as a way of offering the reader a sense of how and why I came to use poststructural theorising of identity theory to analyse the questions I set out to explore.
Rethinking self/identity development models
In considering some of the discursive issues around "self' and "identity", with particular reference to teachers' lives and their career as teacher, I begin with general discussions of self, identity and identity formations. In effect this involves looking at the language of identity constructions as much as its consequences. While I focus on a mere segment of a wide ranging field, my discussion and analysis is sensitive to the complex educational shifts in South Africa and to the discursive developments internationally in identity constructions and the struggle for meaning that constitute "Who Am I". I deepen the critical discussion by a consideration of specific aspects of self in relation to teacher's identity, particularly the personal self and the social self within this category, drawing from a range of theoretical positions, especially from developmental and structural perspectives to more progressive and poststructural thinking on identity.
This section remains a small window through which discursive issues around identity are problematised, developed and deepened to provide an analytical framework to understand the lives of South African teachers with all its' contradictions and ambiguities. Speaking of identity categories at this particular historical moment is difficult. The history of identity formation is therefore relevant as I try to understand how identities and differences are transformed and reconstituted in the present shifts in our educational terrain. I find it necessary to understand the construction of "self" and "identity" in various contexts, to read the way identities are explained, understood and represented, and the reasons and principles for different understandings and representations. While I rely on a multidimensional view of
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power and identity, i.e. a social construction that takes place in a context defined by power relationships, there is a range of literature which could also explain the data in my study but which I felt was unhelpful in connecting with the dynamic and divergent lives and experiences of the teachers in this study. The latter were based on psychologically and sociologically assumed identities and draws from the work advanced by Mead (1934) and his theoretical model that charaterised the "I" and "me" as two distinct interacting aspects of the self. Teachers socialisation studies were produced and tended to stress external social structures and societal barriers as a repressive and a one dimensional relationship. These developmental based theories, including Super's Life-Span, Life Space- Approach (1996) and Levinson's Life Structure Theory (1978) explain an individuals' development over time through psycho-social maturation and cultural adaptation. While these views are prompted by the dominant institutions or normative categorisations of society and provide definitions of "Who am I," Holland's Theory of Congruence (1992) and Dawis and Lofquist's Theory of Work and Adjustment (TW A), explains how contextual factors impact on individuals' personality and the alignment or mis-match they experience in any given situation, without taking into account the dominant institutions in society. Problems of semantic drift between the historical contexts or the loss of familiarity with the details of the context were easy to identify. These essentialist, fixed notions of understanding individuals and how they make sense of their lives and their careers draw heavily from the two most commonly known origins of identity building.
Identity Theory, originating in sociology (Burke and Reitzes 1981; Stryker 1980; McCall and Simmons 1978), and Social Identity Theory, originating in the discipline of psychology (Hogg and Abrams 1988; Turner et al 1987), are two perspectives that address the social nature of self as constituted by society and eschew perspectives that treat the self as independent of and prior to society. Both regard the self as differentiated into multiple identities that reside in circumscribed practices (Hogg et al 1995). Accordingly, Identity Theory is strongly associated with the symbolic interactionist view that society affects social behavior through its influence on the self (Mead 1934). This theory conclusively views the self not as an autonomous psychological entity but as a multifaceted social construct that emerges from the different roles people occupy within specific contexts. As such, Stryker (1987) proposes that we have distinct components of self, called role identities, for each of the role positions in society that individuals occupy. Role identities (e.g. mother, teacher, wife, person of colour, working class, etc.), according to Identity Theory, are thus self definitions individuals apply to themselves as a consequence of the structural role positions they occupy, and through a process of labelling or self-definition as a member of a particular social category. While Identity Theory focuses on self-defining roles that people occupy in
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society within immediate interactive contexts, they do not acknowledge directly how structurally based attributes like gender, race and ethnicity impact on the self.
Social Identity Theory is informed by the basic idea that a special category (e.g. nationality, political affiliation, sports team) into which one falls and to which one feels one belongs provides a definition of "who am I" in terms of the defining characteristics of the category, a self-definition that is a part of the self concept (Hogg et al 1995). Social identity theory therefore, is about norms, stereotypes and prototypes and speaks of social identification (race, class, gender) as a process of self-categorisation. It also recognises the primacy of society over the individual.
Therefore, while Identity Theory discusses the process of labelling or naming oneself (role identities) as a member of a social category, or of commitment, Social Identity Theory explains in greater detail how social identities are internalised, how contextual factors make different identities salient and how identities produce identity-consistent behavior.
For this study, Identity Theory implies a relationship between the role of teacher in society and the identity that such a role confers, linking self-attitude (identity) to behavior via the notion of roles, without specifying what has informed how this happened (Hogg et al 1995).
This perspective views the identity of teacher as a relatively static property of the structural role position he or she occupies in a school and also distinguishes him or her from relevant complementary or counter-roles within these sites (e.g. teacher and learner, teacher and principal). The dynamics of interpersonal social interactive contexts influence the construction and reconstruction of roles.
Social Identity Theory, on the other hand, implies that a relationship exists between self- attitude (identity) and normative behavior. This implies strongly that teachers' identities are a shared understanding of what it is to belong to the teaching community, as well as to other social groupings within specific school sites. While the theory views teachers' identities as a dynamjc construct that changes in these long-term intergroup relations, behaviour is influenced by the categorical structure of society (stereotyping, conformity) via the social identity.
These theoretical approaches highlight for me three concerns about teacher identity and the meanings such an identity holds within schooling sites and the culture at large. These concerns are:
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• Firstly, the link between teachers' self and social structure is a repressive and dominant relationship because it is pre-given and totalising. It is dominating and repressive because it positions teachers as completely subject to it, particularistic definitions constrain and limit teachers as agentic beings empowered with capacity to live and know differently.
• Secondly, lack of agency/power on the part of the teacher.
The discourse of a state-controlled education system and the school site is central to the production of subjectivity. The former highlights the position of teachers in a formal educational environment such as the school. In this discourse teachers are in the position of implementers of a system of a body of knowledge and learners are the receivers of a system of knowledge which is both dominating and totalising. These individuals have to weave themselves into this system: a one-dimensional power relation. Thus, the role teachers enact that confers on them this teacher identity is a controlled and static one. Furthermore, the norms and forms which urge teachers to think and act in terms of a community or collective grouping, further constrains the teacher as subject with the power and knowledge to change.
These norms and forms are experienced as totalising and absolute.
• Thirdly, the meaning of teacher identity focusing on individual's behaviour in teacher role, or his or her actions within intergroup relations are ineffective because these forms of social analysis become totalising and ineffective and lack the emotional investment of a desire for change. Alienating or disconnecting what teachers do from how they feel about what they choose to do, their desires and thoughts is what has become known as the mind/body dualism. As hooks (1994b, 16) says, "the objectification of the teacher within bourgeois educational structures seemed to denigrate notions of wholeness and uphold the idea of the mindlbody split, one that promotes and supports compartmentalisation."
This perspective once again highlights the dominant and totalising forces inherent in the social structures that seek to control what teachers do, and limits the possibilities for resistance to the existing social reality. Marginalising teachers' meanings, thoughts, and desires from what teachers do, emphasises how the term "teacher" (identity) represents a social group, which has historically been the target of oppression and as a tool of the state.
Understanding socialisation theories
While it is understandable that the teaching profession would want to distance itself from the many stereotypes and images of teachers and teaching with which it is saturated, it is necessary to uncover and face the constraining images that might be curtailing our ability to truly integrate new ideas and values of teaching into teachers' personal philosophies and practices. Similarly, insisting on reaching a single and definitive interpretation of
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empowering, emancipatory discourses oversimplifies teachers' lived experiences, leading to a poor or very partial reading of the cumulative cultural texts of teacher and teaching (Weber and Mitchell 1995, 32).
The sociologically and psychologically determined theoretical approaches discussed above put forward singular and fixed notions of self and behavior/attitude (identity). To understand its implications for teachers' lives I will focus briefly on Huberman (1993) and his research on the careers of teachers. This study is an appropriate example to understand how these fixed and categorised notions are employed and what it means to be termed "teacher" and the socialisation process thereof.
This study involves a mixture of psychological and psycho-sociological frameworks that offer ultimate grounds to understand teachers' lives. Applying the classic studies of the individual life cycle to secondary school teachers, Huberman (1993, 2) asks, what is the professional life cycle of the teacher, and what do we know of the stages of life in the classroom?
In response to these questions he identifies enduring trends or phases in the professional life of teachers. He describes the first phase of the cycle as the Career Entry Phase, which is essentially a period of survival and discovery, followed by the Stabilisation Phase, in which the teacher affirms a single subjective choice, i.e. the decision to commit oneself to the job.
This phase is characterised by consolidation and pedagogical mastery. The Experimentation Phase and the Diversification Phase, characterised by the search for new ideas, new challenges and new commitments, sees the teacher attempting to increase her impact in the classroom by embarking on a series of personal experiments in the use of instructional materials, methods of evaluation, etc. In the Phase of Reassessment, the teacher may endure experiences ranging from a routine case of self-doubt to an existential mid-career crisis.
Huberman suggests that the crisis of the assessment phase gives way to a phase of Serenity and Relational Distance, in which there is a reconciliation, in neo-Freudian terms, between the ideal self and the real self. There is less to prove to oneself or to others, and there is greater tolerance and spontaneity in the classroom. In the Conservatism and Complaints Phase, one sees some parallels between the general studies of the life cycle and work on teachers, but with the same qualifiers. One passes from the phase of Serenity to Conservatism, although this may be a less linear progression. According to this Swiss study (Huberman 1993, 11), the most conservative teachers happened to be young teachers, who reflect the larger social and political climate that produced them. The tendency of teachers during this phase is towards increased rigidity, resistance to innovations, and a more