Coming to Terms With the Academic Self: Place, Pedagogy and Teacher Education

Abstract

It is a rare challenge in academia to be asked to write about yourself, and rarer still to engage with the multiple (social, spatial, political, embodied and private) selves that impact on our practice. In this chapter I consider how who we are in academia is not simply a matter of adopting a professional role but rather involves identity management and negotiation practices to obscure, perform or disclose identities in professional contexts. This chapter is informed by my first ethnographic research project at a non-profit youth media centre in New York City; a study exploring innovative visual pedagogies for investigating how pre-service student-teachers articulate their views about the effects of poverty on educational attainment and my practices as a teacher educator on the MSc Transformative Learning and Teaching: a two-year, initial teacher education programme designed from a social justice perspective and working to produce graduates who position themselves as activist teachers. In this autoethnography I explore the complex temporalities of my academic identities, arguing the need for a critical spatial practice.

Citation

White, M.L. (2022), "Coming to Terms With the Academic Self: Place, Pedagogy and Teacher Education", Reilly, I.B. (Ed.) The Lives of Working Class Academics, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 57-72. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80117-057-420221005