Teaching is a career with a high rate of anxiety and burnout in all phases of teaching with specific challenges related to the feature of language education. The concept of motivation can be an important basic mechanism since educators who are not motivated are distressed because of the anxious characteristic of the education profession. Moreover, educator identity is a new issue that has built a perspective to examine educators’ growth by thinking about who they are as well as how they (...) perform what they perform in a specific situation. Recently, programs that are based on mindfulness are known as efficient interventions enhancing motivation and decreasing tension in people. Given the prominence of mindfulness in educational settings and its neglected role in foreign language learning, the contemporary review attempts to inspect the function of mindfulness on English as a foreign language teachers’ motivation and identity. Subsequently, some pedagogical recommendations for the educational representatives such as teachers and teacher trainers are offered. (shrink)

This study aims to demonstrate a detailed knowledge map of teacher identity research via a 20-year data set from the Web of Science database. A bibliometric analysis was employed for analyzing the articles published between 2001 and 2021 to show the status of teacher identity research in the past 20 years, research topics on teacher identity, and future research directions. Using the keyword “teacher identity” and filtering data by selecting articles and early access in teaching and education, 848 articles were (...) retrieved. Through production, content, and citation analysis with the help of a bibliometric tool, this study found that teacher identity remained a popular research theme in the academic field over the past 20 years, and its booming production involved many authors, institutions, and sources, and countries. Furthermore, teachers’ “beliefs,” “emotions,” “professional development,” and “context” impacting the construction and reconstruction of teacher identity were the popular topics in teacher identity research, and fundamental issues, including “identity,” “teacher identity,” “professional identity,” “development,” “teacher development,” “beliefs,” and “intersectionality” of teacher identity keep good topics in future research. (shrink)

This paper provides examples of how a teacher and a principal construct their ‘ethical selves’. In doing so we demonstrate how Foucault's four-part ethical framework can be a scaffold with which to actively connect emotions to a personal ethical position. We argue that ethical work is and should be an ongoing and dynamic life long process rather than a more rigid adherence to a ‘code of ethics’ that may not meaningfully engage its adherents. We use Foucault's four-part framework of ethical (...) practice as a framework through which an ‘ethical self’ can be purposely constructed. This is important work, as those who have authority over others must know how to monitor themselves against the misuse of the power of their positions. (shrink)

This article analyses the relations that teachers and school leaders establish with themselves and with others—especially those who would seek to govern them—through the professional and personal–professional activities that increasingly accompany pedagogical and administrative practice today. Specifically, the article seeks to analyse the conditions under which such ‘ethical-governmental’ relations have become possible and to clarify the lines of power, truth and ethics that are in play within them. In this way, it is argued, their intelligibility may be recovered; their contingencies (...) disclosed. The article first posits a non-psychologised, ‘enfolded’ notion of the self on which analysis rests before turning to an analytics of government of the conditions themselves. An important element within this entanglement of diverse events, discourses, practices and foldings is the ensemble of policies and practices developed by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. The article argues that the programmes of this national agency are a salient and widespread force for acting upon teachers’ and school leaders’ self-constitution as a subject of their own actions—a subject which, in consequence, is enjoined to be more agile, self-reliant, engaged and entrepreneurial than its ‘routine-bound’ predecessors; a subject we describe as the ‘adaptive professional’. (shrink)

This article explores ways pre-service teachers learn to work upon their positive emotional conduct during an initial teacher education course. The article argues that education practice today promotes the acting out of positive emotions, creating conditions within which pre-service teachers ethically shape their emotional conduct. Utilising Foucault’s four-part ethical framework, the article draws on longitudinal research of pre-service teachers in Western Australia to analyse the crafting of emotional conduct through techniques of the self. The techniques the participants came to employ (...) during their course learning aligned with a telos of the resourceful, positive, and professional teacher. The article argues that this ethical enterprise relies on a certain model of teacher subjectivity which is inseparably linked with normalising governmental power. Such disciplining of emotions, however, is neither one-dimensional nor deterministic; rather, work at the intersection of the government of others and of oneself. We argue this allows pre-service teachers the freedom to care for the self as they seek to foster their own ethical practices as teachers. (shrink)

Drawing on the aesthetic theory of Jacques Rancière and the Lacanian conception of lack, this paper offers an intervention into the notion of subjectivity which can be applied in critical studies of education. Critiquing the progressive and knowledge-oriented ideology of neoliberal systems, Rancière depicts a world in which politics turns out to delimit the subject’s perceptual experience and in this way, argues that what remains out of this ideological demarcation is susceptible to a challenge of the social order on which (...) an ideology is based. While Rancière presents a meticulous reading of current pedagogic institutions, Lacan provides us with a definition of subject having the capacity to challenge the delimiting social order. The latter is achieved by theorising a subject inflicted by a double lack, realised both at the subjective and objective levels. This double negativity gives rise to the emergence of desire in the subject which in Lacan is the source of emancipation as it makes the subject not be satisfied by a given achievement, hence replacing one desire after another. (shrink)

This paper extends the dialogue of educational philosophy to the experience of beginners entering the teaching profession. Rather than impose the ideas of any specific philosopher or theorist, or indeed official standard, the exploration presented here owes its origins to phenomenology and the use of grounded theory. Working from a narrative data base and focussing on the knowing of name in the first instance, the authors develop their emergent ideas on self and identity in relation to children taught, through connection (...) to a wider literature that includes reference to Giddens, Illeris, Deleuze and Heidegger, for example. The paper is thus also an exercise in suggesting that research on practice by academics working in professional education, who are non-philosophers, can lead to constructive and relevant engagement with philosophy in developing theory from and about about practice, even though the approach, in the initial stages, may well be serendipitous and eclectic in nature. (shrink)

Curriculum reform urges teachers to constantly reflect on existing identities and develop probably whole new identities. Yet, in the wake of the poststructuralist view of identity as a complex matter of the social and the individual, of discourse and practice, and of agency and structure, teacher identity is a process of arguing for themselves and hence ethical and political in nature. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of ethical self-formation and its adoption by Clarke “Diagram for Doing Identity Work” in teacher education (...) research, this 2-year-long case study explores how two Chinese English-as-foreign-language teachers engaged in identity work in a changing curricular landscape. The analysis of narrative frames and semistructured interviews reveals the relations between the relative stable and the evolving elements of teachers’ identity work, and the essential role of teachers’ ethical agency based on reflective and critical responsiveness to the contextual reality and the dynamic power relations during the reform. The findings argue for the importance of nourishing teachers’ reflective identity work and ethical agency during the turbulence of educational change. (shrink)

Much has been written about creativity in education policy and about how the concept is mediated in institutions like schools and universities. Although constructs like ‘creative teachers’ and ‘tea...

Ontological perspectives in higher education and particularly in professional education and development have focused attention on the question of the learner’s being and becoming rather than on the epistemological concern of what and how they know. This study considers the formation of the professional self in the light of the requirements for professional practice. It raises the question of agency in relation to this formational process and considers the implications of the autonomy paradox which arises from the simultaneous influence of (...) the sovereign self and the external authority of the profession on the formation of the professional self. This study considers a structural perspective on both of these matters and concludes with implications for professional education and development derived from constructive developmental theory and the notion of subject–object transformation. (shrink)