The Question Teacher and the Case for a Therapeutic Turn Within Teacher Education

Abstract

Reflexivity figures increasingly in teacher education, and different reflexive turns have produced a range of directions for thinking about teachers and teaching. This article problematizes some reflexive practices, including self-study and teacher renewal, as a means of contextualizing a call for the inclusion of a therapeutic reflexivity aimed at the “question teacher.” Derived from the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic subject, this “question teacher” is vulnerable and motivated by forces not entirely conscious or rational. It is argued that a psychotherapeutic pedagogy enables teachers to address their existential and relational difficulties and contributes to a teacher education that sees teacher identity and practice as highly relational and situated. Examples of a fully committed therapeutic reflexivity are given, alongside some research results of their transformational potential. It is proposed that the generation of empirical evidence for the efficacy of therapeutic reflexivity will permit its advocates to answer critics and overcome a systemic resistance.

Keywords

teacher reflexivity teacher renewal teacher self-study radical reflexivity psychotherapeutic reflexivity

This article presents an overview of some strands of thinking and practice around teacher reflexivity, including a psychotherapeutically informed reflexivity grounded in a complex subject of education. This complex subject is constituted within powerful psychic forces and through affect as much as through reason. It is argued that the inclusion of a psychotherapeutic sensibility within teacher education could complement the technical accent of basic reflexivity, the sociopolitical accent of critical reflexivity, and the spiritual accent of teacher renewal.

The argument is made not only from a theoretical perspective but also from a pragmatic referral to its efficacy in generating transformational learning around teacher identity and practice. This efficacy can in part be attributed to the fact that the psychological subject is recognized as resistant to change, and a psychotherapeutic pedagogy attempts to harness resistance and denial as an optics through which to gain self-awareness and leverage over one’s thinking, feeling, and doing. For the psychological subject, change is hard work and involves an engagement of the whole person—heart, body, and mind. This complete engagement is challenging, but I argue here that its rewards are proportional to its difficulty.

While arguing for this therapeutic turn, the article also recognizes the considerable intellectual and systemic resistance to such a turn. This ranges from political objections to a therapeutic culture seen as undermining the dignity of the rationally autonomous subject, to philosophical objections with regard to therapy’s apparent validation of the subject’s inner truth (see, for example, Ecclestone & Hayes, 2009). I maintain that as long as the theoretical argument remains unwinnable, proponents of the therapeutic turn will need to generate a body of empirical evidence that demonstrates its efficacy in generating significant transformations in teacher identity and practice. The question here is not, is it right, conceptually, to see teacher education in these terms? but rather, does a therapeutic reflexivity work for teachers? Is it transformational in practice, in the sense that can be shown to bring teachers to a closer and more conscious relationship to their work?

An Outline of Reflexivity: Some Starting Points and Some Underlying Tensions

Some Starting Points

Reflexivity as a modality of teacher education can be understood as a development of reflective practice. It moves the spotlight of critical thought away from the immediacy of teaching practice and toward the historically positioned subject’s wider personal, social, and cultural contexts (Moore, 2004). If reflective thinking encourages teachers to address the why, what, when, where, and how of teaching, reflexivity incorporates and emphasizes the who of teaching (and learning). Although reflective thinking places maximum value on a teacher’s capacity to operate strategically, reflexivity goes beyond strategic thinking to establish critical thinking around teacher identity.

The uptake of the reflexivity discourse within teacher education is indicative of an evolving vision of teacher identity as embedded in self–self and self–other relations, and therefore profoundly situated—the fully reflexive teacher is someone who needs to understand where they are coming from, where they are now, and where they need to be heading. In the words of Butler (2005), “self-reflection and social recognition [are] essential to any substantive account of ethical life” (p. 49).

Emerging concepts such as teacher presence (Rodgers & Raider-Roth, 2006) can be clearly aligned with Butler’s work of social recognition. As explored by Rodgers and Raider-Roth, teacher presence emphasizes the relational-situational dimension of teaching. As an “alternative paradigm,” it points to a practice of hyperconnectivity, based on finding and existing in a mode of full being (perceptive, receptive, and communicative). This permits an engagement in “authentic relationship with students” (p. 265), characterized by “a state of alert awareness, receptivity, and connectedness to the mental, emotional and physical workings of both the individual and the group” (p. 266). Pointing to a body of research evidence, these authors assert that the quality of teacher–student relationships “is not a frill or ‘feel-good’ aspect of schooling, it is an essential feature of learning” (p. 266). Furthermore, authentic relationships can only flourish where teachers are able to employ their full “mental, physical, emotional, and relational resources” (p. 266), that is, where they are fully present. The authors conclude that reflexive teaching “cannot be reduced to a series of behaviors or skills, but is a practice that demands presence” (p. 266). While presence is not the same as reflexivity, for these authors the two practices are intertwined: Reflexivity begets presence, and presence begets reflexivity.

Theoretical advances such as teacher presence undermine the dominant discourse around good teachers as either competent or charismatic (Moore, 2004). However, teacher education has not consistently evolved in a way that has kept pace with such theoretical advances. It is one thing to point to the importance of teacher presence, and another to address the question of how teacher presence can be taught. Similarly, it is one thing to recognize teachers’ complex biographies and interiorities and another to fully embrace the implications of these biographies and interiorities in teachers’ working lives. At some point, the argument ceases to be about the relevance of a reflexive dimension to teacher education, but rather the critical question becomes what this reflexive dimension should look like in practice. Or, in other words, how should a reflexive education for teachers actually be formulated? Or, for example, how would learning to be present actually come about, and how would such a learning occur?

One starting point for answering these how questions is to assume that teachers’ baseline is the ethical deficit common to all of humanity. Teachers are rarely realized beings in full possession of Aristotle’s practical wisdom (the virtue by which a person knows how best to act in specific circumstances and also how to cultivate a “good life”), and neither, for example, are teachers necessarily gifted with the faculties that generate presence. Teachers, therefore, should benefit from a transformational education that will allow them to cultivate underdeveloped ethical qualities. Whitcomb, Borko, and Liston (2008) advocate for this transformational component in teacher education, above and beyond teacher education’s tendency to restrict its transformational agenda to the cause of social justice. These authors elaborate “a humanist-secular approach to transformative education and transformative teacher education—one grounded in a ‘liberal arts tradition’” (p. 4). Following Edmundson, they point to literature in particular as a medium through which we “discover ourselves” and “learn the language of ourselves and others” and come “to know aspects of ourselves previously unrecognized” (p. 5). Coming upon oneself, and coming upon the literary other (as different, and as mirror), enables the emergence of “alternative narratives that challenge students’ received views and enlarge or redirect their circle of meaning” (p. 5). The development of “inner life” and the associated “human growth,” they claim, “require that we fuse mind and heart, and a transformative education recognizes this” (p. 5).

Whitcomb et al. (2008) go on to elaborate a vision of transformative teacher education that includes not only reflexive reading but also the contemplative path commonly associated with a spiritualized reflexivity which makes conscious connections between the teacher’s identity and practice and their “true self” or “inner spirit.” According to the authors, the inclusion of both of these strands requires “a rethinking of the current status quo in teacher education” (p. 268). While agreeing with the authors on the relevance of such practices, I am arguing for the equal consideration of another strand of reflexivity drawn from psychotherapeutic practice, and the purpose of this article is to contextualize this possible turn and explore its whys and wherefores.

Some Underlying Tensions

The question about what teacher reflexivity should look like, and the directions its transformational learning should take, is contingent upon our understanding not only of what the teacher self is taken to encompass but also of the nature of the student self and what education needs to teach and students need to learn. The question is, what is at stake and what is in play within the pedagogical encounter? Or, at the very least, what issue within this landscape do we wish to address and emphasize? Britzman (2003), for example, points to education’s traditional preference for an approach to the child as calculable and to their education as programmatic and reductive:

The field’s dominant tendency is to choose the empirical child over the dream, the child the adult can know and control. But in so doing, education has reduced the child to a trope of developmental stages, cognitive needs, multiple intelligence, and behavioral objectives. And these wishes defend against a primary anxiety of adults: what if the dream of learning is other to the structures of education? And yet if we return to the question of the dream as a strange model for education, if educators are to choose the child who dreams, what Pontalis (1981, p. 95) would call, as he thought about the work of Melanie Klein, “the question child,” then education might come to reside in that very inter-subjective place between the borders of knowledge and phantasy and, as Klein did, test its own knowledge against that of the child and so affect the adult. (p. 54)

It follows that a teacher education whose aim is the education of Klein’s “question child” would be a different proposition to a teacher education whose aim is the education of the empirical child. According to Moore (2018), teacher education, up until now, has predominantly occurred under the remit of the empirical child, and thinking about teaching has remained predominantly instrumental and “focused largely on the analysis of matters of technique and practicalities” (p. 15). The empirical child engenders the empirical teacher, just as a shifting of focus toward the question child would engender a question teacher. We do not have to take a large imaginative leap to conjure alongside the question child what could be education’s question teacher and to imagine an educational thinking that evokes the teachers’ desire and takes them closer to the world of dreams and of childhood, their own included.

Britzman (2003) reminds us that for teachers to undertake psychotherapy’s “journey of emotional significance,” they must involve themselves in true thinking and true reflexivity, and to do so, they must embrace vulnerability and uncertainty. Such an embrace, however, is not at the forefront of dominant conceptions of school life. Institutional discourses try hard to present a virtuous rationale and implacable linearity transecting the life of schools and its agencies. And yet much educational research into both teacher and student experience presents us with compelling evidence of the messy and often unbearable emotionality of school life and the gaping contrasts between institutional discourse and the lived experience of schooling (Alsup, 2006; Clandinin & Connelly, 1998; Cochran-Smith, 2003; Connelly & Clandinin, 1999; Convery, 1999; Goodson, 2007; Hastings, 2008; Keck & Saldívar-Moreno, 2016; Kitching, Morgan, & O’Leary, 2009).

According to Britzman (2003), a political and cultural insistence on the systemic can in part be understood as a defense from the chaos of the unconscious and of group relations, or, as Bass (1998) puts it, “Wherever one finds systematicity, one can, from a psychoanalytic point of view, ask the question of what unbearable piece of reality is being defended against by means of the system” (p. 426). A similar defense operates at the level of the individual teacher and the threat of their own unconscious. It is reasonable to argue, therefore, that teacher identities are sustained as much by ignorance, that is, by what teachers refuse to know, as by what they know. That is to say, teacher identity is as much negative as positive, as much a product of what they successfully ignore as what they have successfully learnt. In this case, true thinking or true reflexivity would need to address the teacher’s “will to ignorance” (Bion, 1961) and work hard to uncover what teachers have preferred not to know.

Identity is rendered more vulnerable once we see it as dependent upon a will to ignorance. A strong identity would appear to be what a reflexive practice should consolidate, yet an increasing solidity is questionable if it is achieved through denial, including a denial of the flux of experience. MacLure (1993) claimed that identity is a matter of “arguing for yourself”; however, from a Foucauldian perspective, the reflexive subject must be wary of the provenance of their own voice also. To expand on Foucault’s metaphor of the gaze—by which the subject becomes the object of socially and institutionally established power relations through the dynamics of seeing and being seen—the social and institutional gaze which bears down upon us must be deciphered, but this can only be achieved once we have deciphered our own gaze and the ways in which we have come to be self-regulated. Foucault’s ethical challenge is not only to resist the argument of the Other, it is also to resist the arguments of Self or, in a reverse of MacLure’s injunction, to argue against oneself. Theoretically at least, teacher reflexivity will involve the subject in processes that question assumptions and modus operandi. In other words, an underlying skepticism exists within the discipline, an idea that if one looks hard enough, something questionable will probably be uncovered about what we do, or why we do it, or even who we are. This self-examination and truth-telling are not the end; rather, they are the means to an end, and that end is ethical in as much as it is harnessed to the idea of achieving a certain creative mastery of self–self and self–other relations.

Foucault (1985) proposed an “ethics of the care of self” that places reflexivity at the heart of a practice of freedom, inciting the subject “to learn to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently” (p. 9). Both psychological and Foucauldian critique of subjectivity mean that identity as consciously elaborated can no longer be assumed; rather, what must be assumed as our starting point are degrees of blindness, alienation, and/or capitulation. Nor can health, sanity, and well-being be assumed; rather, what must be assumed is fallibility and its survival or its wreckage (as seen in teacher turnover, depression, addictions, etc.). Nor can neutrality be assumed; what must be assumed is politics. And neither can innocence be assumed; rather, what must be assumed is participation. If Foucault vindicates our potential for freedom, maintaining that we are freer than we think, this is, paradoxically, a freedom only made available to us through the awareness of the limits imposed on us and by us. Our (self-imposed) tutelage is only escapable by retracing and unraveling the mechanisms, practices, beliefs, and “truths” by which we have become chained to our selves and our selves chained to history (Foucault & Rabinow, 1991, pp. 32-50). This escape through immersion is the ethical work that, according to Foucault, we all, including teachers, must undertake.

From a Foucauldian perspective, then, reflexivity necessarily involves a turn against oneself—including an attention to our limits and to the experience of collapse, crisis, exhaustion, rupture, dead ends, futility, redundancy, and despair. Coming across such limits is necessary for the opening up of subjectivities. For example, at an extreme end of teachers’ experience, the crisis state of burnout might not be feared as the end of the road, but explored and probed as a field of potentiality, the place where rebuilding, on new and perhaps more realistic terms, might begin were teachers to be given the time, space, and support to do so. A therapeutic reflexivity could, therefore, be less concerned with teacher virtue and more concerned with the obstacles for becoming “realized” as a person and as a professional.

Evolving Reflexive Practices and Evolving Shortfalls

Moore (2004), in his discussion of good teaching, opts for reflexivity as the best means to assure meaningful professional development and long-term job satisfaction. Nevertheless, Moore is aware that reflexivity itself has been substantially co-opted by the competence discourse of good teaching; the autobiographical essay, he notes, has become one more competence to be ticked off by trainee teachers on college courses. Whitcomb et al. (2008) observe that “in some teacher education programs, reflection appears to have turned into an instructional tool used unduly to impose upon students a set of programmatically approved beliefs” (p. 268). The “almost indoctrinatory” (p. 268) blurring of reflexivity into competence and performativity is problematic to the degree that it becomes one more scenario in which teachers are invited/expected to get on message, and this closes the door on staying with vulnerability, or staying with the question, or staying with the refusal to get on message.

Self-Study

Notwithstanding, practices of reflexivity in university settings will sometimes take challenging forms, and a rigorous practice of self-study, for example, is well established within certain niches of the education world (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 1998). Berry’s (2009) account of her own self-study is representative of this challenging reflexivity in university settings (see also Alsup, 2006; Moore, 1999; Walkington, 2005). In her attention to “the alignment between her actions and intentions as a teacher educator” (p. 313), Berry engages with her practice through the analysis of a variety of data sources (autobiography, video, journal, field notes, feedback from colleagues, student assignments, interviews, email correspondence). She underlines the “challenging task” of uncovering “individual’s patterns of behavior” (p. 315) and describes this hard-won professional self-understanding as the “major professional activity” (p. 316) of teacher educators.

Berry clearly digs deeply into her teaching practice, but by honing in on her professional activity the full potential of a reflexive approach is, I believe, left untapped. How would Berry’s self-study have developed were she to have extended her critical gaze beyond the immediacy of her practice? Who is it that engages in self-study? What, if any, are the mirrors that she has used to reveal and examine that self which interprets her professional self? How does Berry decipher her own gaze? The example of Berry’s self-study is illustrative of the problem of interpretation within reflexivity. How do we interpret or frame the interpreter? Perhaps, then, thinking about what we do is only one part of the work of reflexivity. Another necessary dimension might be to think about our own thinking or about how we interpret what we do. This is the shifting ground Britzman (1998) identifies as beyond narcissism, the place where “to think is to haunt one’s thoughts, to be hunted by thoughts” (p. 32). According to Britzman, then, teacher thinking needs to undermine itself, and this can only begin to occur when teachers are allowed to remove themselves from the instrumentalism that currently dominates teacher education.

Teacher Renewal

If teacher reflexivity in institutional settings has tended to focus on a quest for teacher perfection, the “holy grail” of its journey inward always being that place of “good teaching” and “good teacher,” Parker J. Palmer’s reflexive alternative of “teacher renewal” disrupts this model. The teacher Palmer is interested in is more obviously a haunted subject, and it is the teacher’s soul that haunts, prompts, and hounds teacher identity and practice. The ultimate destination for the Palmerian journey is precisely this soul, and the prize is “soulfulness” as opposed to “teacherliness.” Palmer invites teachers to recover their “tough, resilient and shy” (Palmer, 1998, p. 150) soul, and this, he claims, cannot be done through the application of our will. In contrast, “if we are willing to sit quietly and wait for a while, the soul may show itself” (p. 150). Teacher renewal occurs precisely in this patiently awaited return of soul, and with it the possibility of an authentic life, including an authentic teacher identity and practice—or, in Palmer’s (2003) words, the possibility of moving “from soul to role.” In contrast to teaching as an expression of knowledge and know-how, Palmer (1998) is interested in teaching as an expression of the teacher’s “self,” and his approach is based on the following assertion: “The connections made by good teachers are held not in their methods but in their hearts—meaning heart in its ancient sense, the place where intellect and emotion and spirit and will converge in the human self” (p. 16).

The reflexive journey undertaken at Palmer’s Center for Courage & Renewal appears to be about the retrieval and renewal of a preexisting wholeness. In this sense, its work of reflexivity is not about forging new connections or constructing a new self, but about the courage to refind the connections and recall selfhood. To bring about this renewal, Palmer places his faith in creating a receptive interpersonal environment in which teachers can be “listened into speech.” This communicative embrace, Parker claims, is alien to teacher education in academic contexts:

If we want to grow as teachers—we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about our inner lives—risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract. (Palmer, 1998, p. 12)

Whereas Berry’s self-study has a solipsistic quality, Palmer’s (2000) reflexivity is a form of communion, as evidenced by the following description of the Circles of Trust: “We are exploring together. We are cultivating a garden together, backs to the sun. The question is a hoe in our hands and we are digging beneath the hard and crusty surface to the rich humus of our lives” (p. 103).

While agreeing with the potential value of this coming-together, there is nevertheless a home-spun, comfortable feel to it that is questionable from the perspective of the innately conflicted and contradictory subject of, for example, psychoanalysis. Palmer’s subject does not seem to have to overcome Bion’s “will to ignorance” and a proactively defensive psyche whose presence contaminates and distorts the pedagogical potential of the group. The teacher self Palmer evokes is relatively unproblematic, requiring only the right conditions for it to reveal itself in full. In contrast, the psychoanalytic subject is crisscrossed with conflicts and tensions that must be worked through and resolved. Moore (2004) recognizes this complexity when he introduces the concept of “baggage” to describe “what is not always immediately accessible in the specific classroom situation” (p. 20). The implication for Moore is that reflexive teaching—and therefore teacher education—must address the question of the baggage teachers bring with them.

Palmer alludes to something similar to baggage when he speaks of teacher interiority as a ground of “light” and “shadows.” Students, according to Palmer (2003), are obliged to live under the jurisdiction of teachers’ inner life, shadows, and all, and he asks the question. “Are we doing enough to help teachers-in-training understand their inner terrain in ways that will minimize the shadow and maximize the light?” (p. 378). However, while an attention to “the dark side” provides a counterbalance to what Palmer sees as a university education’s hostility to the big existential questions and to what really troubles us as humans, it is my argument here that his alternative does not go far enough in its embrace of an existentially troubled and compromised subject of education. Palmer has drawn heavily on Quakerism, and his Circle of Trust as a vehicle for learning has much in common with Quaker practices of spiritual commune. But by drawing on other traditions, we can find a more problematic subject with a more uncompromising baggage. It is this subject that remains largely unaddressed within a contemplative space such as Palmer’s Circles of Trust.

Toward a Therapeutic Reflexivity

As much as Whitcomb et al.’s arts education, Berry’s self-study, and Palmer’s teacher renewal are important contributions to the field of teacher reflexivity, I wish to speak in favor of an additional “turn of the screw” within teacher education, one that takes on teacher agency through the discourses of psychoanalysis and humanistic psychology. Moore (2018), for example, invokes a psychosocial reflexivity underpinned by psychoanalytic theory and “aimed at helping us to understand why we feel the things the way we do, and why, for example, we react in certain ways to school and classroom experiences” (p. 14), at the same time as promoting a more nuanced and complex understanding of others. According to Britzman (2003), we are able to make use of such “analytic insight to move beyond repetitive conflicts,” but for this to occur, teachers and education itself must be willing to “witness the unconscious” (p. 110). Or to use Moore’s more colloquial term, we must witness (or unpack) our baggage.

Britzman (2009) asserts that a generalized unwillingness to witness the unconscious and unpack our baggage makes education somehow unreal and results in multiple alienations, including that of the teacher. She claims that “Unless the teacher can confront the defenses of idealization and omnipotence in her or his own teaching, there will be no real contact with others” (p. 97). For Britzman, it is the deconstruction of the teacher’s self-image and a confrontation with their baggage that render possible the intersubjective contact that is a hallmark of significant pedagogical encounters. Or, returning to the previously mentioned concept of teacher presence will permit a teacher to become more fully present to themselves and to others.

As things stand, a limited attention to teachers’ baggage tends to occur on the extreme ends of the teacher continuum—in the situation of burnout or in the case of highly successful teachers (see Friedman, 2003; Howard & Johnson, 2004; Pines, 2002). The system has become interested in the inner workings of teachers at its extremes—the “high flyers” and the “bottomed-outers”—but historically less attention has been paid to teachers’ baggage in the squeezed middle—that mass of teachers who are considered neither brilliant nor terrible, but whose practice is nonetheless arbitrated by their “stuff.” Yet a contingent teacher-self arbitrated by concealed forces should be taken as the rule and not the exception. Foucault eloquently expresses modernity’s overarching skepticism as regards the surfaces of our human posturing, interaction, and reasoning and hints at this skepticism when he says that knowledge is

an “invention” behind which lies something completely different from itself: a play of instincts, impulses, desires, fear, a will to appropriate. It is on the stage where these elements battle one another that knowledge is produced. (Foucault in Miller, 1994, p. 214)

The psychotherapeutic disciplines have typically called our attention to the “something different” that Foucault claims lies behind knowledge. They attempt to address the poignant question Foucault puts to us: “Who are we? . . . Who seeks in the noise and the confusion of war, in the grime of battle, the principle for the intelligibility of order?” (Foucault in Miller, 1994, p. 317). Educators, similarly, might wonder how the “cacophony of calls” (Britzman, 1991, p. 223) a teacher faces from within and without their classroom, and even from within themselves, can be reconciled with their attempt to push knowledge and the group experience on a predetermined and ordered path.

The effort to decipher the “we” of Foucault’s question does not always make comfortable reading. One can, for example, note the influence of the psychoanalytic philosopher Jacques Lacan in Žižek’s (2011) grim assertion that the “spontaneous state of our daily lives is that of a lived lie, to break out of which requires continuous struggle. The starting point for which is to become terrified by oneself” ( p. xii). Similarly, Britzman (1998) argues that

For the self to be more than a prisoner of its own narcissism, the self must bother itself. It must learn to obligate itself to notice the breaches and losses between acts and thoughts, between wishes and responsibilities, between dreams and waking life. (p. 32)

In drawing attention to the psychosocial structures that inform and delimit teacher agency, the notion of autonomy within professional identity becomes further squeezed. The haunted teacher is obliged to recognize that they are not totally free. “Prisoner,” “terrified,” “lived lie,” “continuous struggle,” “haunt,” “hunted”—the language of this psychoanalytically inspired reflexivity is indicative of a more slippery, less comfortable subject of education, as compared with Palmer’s shy yet willing soul. And the insights to which Britzman alludes may consist in no more than coming face to face with our baggage as it emerges (unwillingly) into our awareness and understanding.

For Britzman and Moore, there is good cause to suggest that we need to dig deeper than the rational, autonomous subject to understand and engage with what teachers are and do. What has been less clear is what this new frontier—a therapeutic reflexivity—might look like in practice. Moore (2018) claims that, as things stand, significant reflexivity almost always occurs in isolation, much like Berry’s semi-solipsistic enterprise of self-study. In contrast, Moore (2018), much like Palmer, proposes a collective reflexivity which enables

the development of a certain kind of group, away from those in which the overriding pressure is to conform, to belong, to fit in . . . towards one in which the overriding motivation is to connect, to share, to challenge and to create a new sense of collective belonging. (p. 144)

Within this new-style group, connection, sharing, and belonging are in no small part the result of “getting affect out in the open” (p. 144), even where this affect might be conventionally viewed as negative. However, there is certain tentativity in Moore’s advocacy of this group learning through affect, not least because his argument, though comprehensive, does not draw substantially on examples of a teacher education formulated in this way. While much of what he advocates points almost directly to the long-established praxis of psychotherapeutic groups, he does not appeal directly to this real-world possibility, nor to any other clearly affective example. I am arguing here that if we wish to go the whole way in validating the personal–professional interface, in which to work on the affective self is to work on “the teacher,” then we should take seriously the example of the psychotherapeutic group as a potential model for the type of collective affective experience that Moore is advocating.

In this regard, Boote’s (2003) study of teacher education does identify a significant body of teacher education practice influenced by psychotherapeutic praxis:

As teacher educators become increasingly aware that the beliefs and attitudes of student teachers affect their practice, teacher education practices increasingly take on the semblance of psychotherapy. While observing and interviewing teacher educators (cf. Wideen, Boote, & Mayer-Smith, 2000), I have watched them use mask workshops and narrative re-telling of life histories, small group discussions working in the form of group therapy, and individual counseling sessions. These practices seemed to be informed by lay psychotherapeutic concepts. (pp. 258-259).

Boote’s description points to the affective group culture advocated by Moore. Significantly, Boote problematizes this phenomenon not in regard to the validity of this therapeutic reflexivity; rather, he is concerned about its apparent proliferation among teacher educators who are not properly trained psychotherapists. Boote does not question the psychotherapeutic focus itself; instead he is concerned about the capacity of teacher educators to fully embody that focus. In turn, Boote’s concern over teacher educators’ therapeutic credentials opens the way to suggesting they might benefit from a more rigorous immersion in the psychotherapeutic genre.

Certainly, the lack of specialized training among teacher educators could affect their willingness to engage in the raw emotionality or corporality of psychotherapy “proper.” Similarly, the institution is likely to shy from the more unruly and less rational constituents of belief, attitude, and behavior. Naranjo (2010), for example, attributes a Dionysian sensibility to the psychotherapeutic tradition, meaning that psychotherapy procures a loss of control and a transgression of limits. This requires a commitment to excess and risk-taking, and this disposition is, currently, far removed from an institutional culture which tends to be measured and risk-averse.

The Embrace of Therapeutics

In the move toward fully embracing a therapeutic reflexivity, there are no shortage of places that teacher education could look to, providing it is willing to leave behind its established territorialities. One place to start could be the therapeutic work with teachers undertaken by Naranjo (2010), work that is based on his belief that

Teachers, more that anyone, need an experimental complement to the present scientific, humanistic, and pedagogical curriculum; a novel curriculum that would comprise self-knowledge, interpersonal repair, and a spiritual culture based on lived experience (and thus free from dogmatism). (p. 158)

Unlike the Courage to Teach program, Naranjo’s “novel curriculum” is rooted not in Quakerism’s open-ended discussions but in psychotherapy’s intentioned probing and encourages participants to reach deep into the emotional and relational realms through the intensity of catharsis, which in turn becomes the groundswell for heightened awareness of self and teacher transformation (Keck, 2012). Taken seriously, Naranjo’s call for the work of self-knowledge and interpersonal repair has significant implications for teacher education, not least because it involves the recognition that, possibly unknown to themselves, teachers are in some way “damaged goods” and are therefore in need of socioemotional healing. Naranjo offers a broad psychosocial diagnosis of universal malaise, given form in the cultural, political, and economic excesses of what he calls “the patriarchal mind.” This concept highlights the symbiotic relationship between a series of structural distortions and the individual whose thinking and subjectivity have been colonized, setting in motion an “emotional plague” in which the principles of caring and pleasure are diminished or contaminated across the entire spectrum of human experience and activity. According to Naranjo, then, teachers are—just like the population at large—neurotic subjects struggling to accommodate themselves within a hostile climate and alienated from their capacity to generate an individual and collective movement toward plenitude.

The therapeutic journey, as proposed by Naranjo, involves the creation of an authentic, if temporary, community, and Naranjo attributes much of what he sees as the work’s efficacy to the “magic” that can occur in groups (Naranjo, 2010). The importance of this group magic cannot be underestimated, not only because people come to a fuller recognition of “otherness,” or because they can see their idiosyncrasies and commonalities reflected in others, but also because, according to Naranjo, psycho-emotional healing occurs in relationship, just as individual neurosis evolves in relationship (Naranjo, 1994). Participants, then, experience a microcosm of the relational world—and intensity and ambiguity of relationship, or of a resistance to relationship, are a key experience in disturbing established patterns of thinking, feeling, and doing.

Naranjo’s commitment to a psychotherapeutic praxis means that there are features of this group experience that are clearly “other” when compared with the institutional practices of reflexivity of Berry or Boote, or what Palmer has countenanced for his Circles of Trust. The principal difference resides in an embrace of a Dionysian pedagogy, whereby learning occurs through our engagement with the agonies and ecstasies of our existence. Within Naranjo’s pedagogy, the retreat from the world does not only serve to calm an agitated life, allowing us to think more clearly (as per Palmer’s retreat modality); rather, this retreat also serves to generate a dangerous or unsettling space in which subjectivity is intensified, and we can explore our truths to the degree we can see them in their cathartic excess. In this Dionysian world, there is an underlying issue of freedom, and the question “What would I think, feel, and do if I gave myself permission?” pervades the different therapeutic modalities. The pressure, here, if we can talk about pressure, is to unconform.

By way of example, one activity loaded with Dionysian possibility is Spontaneous Movement. Derived from the psychoanalytic technique of free association, in which clients follow their train of thought wherever it might take them, Spontaneous Movement provides an invitation to allow the body to express itself according to its own need or desire. The experience combines an individual journey inward (those moving have their eyes closed) and a collective journey of togetherness (half of the group are moving at any one time and half of the group are witnesses creating the circular space in which those moving are framed). There is no right way to move, and the only instructions are not to do anything that might cause physical harm, or impinge on others, or to use language (though sound is permitted), nor to open your eyes. It is a shared free space in which those moving are invited to “journey” and through which participants can come to see and experience themselves in unfamiliar terms. The movers’ experience is recounted afterward so that those who moved can communicate to the witnesses what occurred and elaborate understanding. What arises under these reflexive conditions, or in this mirror, are often highly charged manifestations of our deeper, preverbal existential condition and desire. In the space of movement, we come upon ourselves as both “other” and “I” at the same time, and the exploration of this tension constitutes an intensification of subjectivity and permits new elaborations of self.

Teachers enter into Spontaneous Movement as “humans”—the experience is not tied to the condition of “teacher”—and on visualizing teachers in this strange place it becomes easier to imagine why I have proposed the term “radical reflexivity” (Keck, 2012) to capture the spirit of therapeutic reflexivity as pursued by Naranjo. Radical in the sense of “extreme” or “intense,” and also radical in relation to its total dedication to the personal-intimate dimension of the teacher, in that any transformation of teacher identity and practice comes about exclusively through the examination of their psycho-emotional and existential conditions, without ever specifically addressing schools or teaching.

Although Naranjo’s radical reflexivity has operated on the far margins of the education system, similar practices exist that attempt to merge more fully into the institutional climate. One such case is the Mexican-based training titled Ser Docente, Ser Persona: Hacía una ética del cuidado de sí (Being a Teacher, Being a Person: Towards an ethics of the care of self) (see Keck, 2015; Keck & Saldívar-Moreno, 2016, for a detailed analysis of the program). This program was developed specifically for teachers and can be considered as a midpoint between the open-ended reflections of Palmer’s Circles of Trust and the cathartic therapeutics of the Naranjian approach. It is conceived as an introduction to a therapeutic reflexivity and incorporates an eclectic mixture of body work, meditation, practices drawn from humanistic psychology, and the use of “third objects” (such as films, music, and art).

Despite modifications in duration, content, and intensity level that help to make Ser Docente, Ser Persona more recognizable to the education system, the modality continues to sit awkwardly within the dominant culture of teacher education. However, this marginality does not reflect a lack of pertinence and efficacy, and a growing body of qualitative evidence, including a recent narrative study (Keck, 2018), demonstrates that the teacher learning and transformation it catalyzes are substantive. The findings are consistent with other research into the value of radical reflexivity (see Keck, 2012) and can be summarized as follows:

• A greater disposition to take professional risks and disrupt routines.

• A heightened perceptivity regards what is and isn’t occurring in the classroom and school.

• Greater aptitude and identify and assume the due level of personal responsibility in any given situation, and with it a reduction of tendencies toward victimization and passivity.

• Greater sensibility to and acceptation of diversity within the student population and among colleagues.

• Greater commitment to the relational dimension of teaching and learning.

• Greater coherence of thought, feeling, and action within their professional-personal life.

• Greater capacity to discern what is important and necessary in the immediacy of the classroom.

• Greater belief in the transformative and vital potential of education and of the pedagogic relationship. (Keck, 2018, p. 42, my translation)

This collection of movements and ruptures reported by teachers represents a movement toward

a relational sensibility and a recognition of the transformative potential of their work as teachers, together with a new autonomy that has repercussions with regards to the exercise of personal leadership. These are the movements that return to them, or proportion, a greater satisfaction and sense of vocation, and another quality to their presence . . . The teachers take on greater presence in the classroom, they fill their role and function more, no longer using the formal gestures that the system and teacher culture imposes, but using the human gestures that arise from with their immediate relations. (p. 42)

What seems to be taking shape is one possible answer to the question put forward at the beginning of the article, namely, how would learning to be present actually come about, and how would such a learning occur? A therapeutic approach to reflexivity would seem especially valuable wherever highly relational concepts such as teacher presence are seen to be relevant to education and wherever the question child and the question teacher, with their complex subjectivities and multiplicities, appear on the horizon or under the radar.

Overcoming Resistance

Despite empirical evidence and theoretical arguments that could support a fuller embrace of therapeutic reflexivity, its praxis within teacher education remains marginal. The question teacher, just as the question child, has not yet come in from the cold. This is hardly surprising given Goodson’s (2007) identification of a systemic negation of the biographies of teachers. According to Goodson, what he calls “the personality of change” (i.e., that change attributable to the teacher’s mode of being) is all too often seen as the “stumbling block” of real reform, rather than as a crucial “building block” (p. 138). Goodson claims reform efforts suffer from their refusal to embrace teacher biography, just as Korthagen (2010) points to a well-documented ineffectiveness in teacher education (see also Beauchamp & Thomas, 2009) as partly resulting from a reluctance to address the emotionality of teaching.

And yet reaching out toward emotionality, or desire and the unconscious, would appear to threaten teacher education with the specter of excessive complexity. The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education (Ecclestone & Hayes, 2009) presents a strident case against an alleged colonization of education by therapeutic discourse. However, the figure of the rational, autonomous subject they hold up as a means to contest the therapeutic discourse is itself contested by the therapeutic discourse. From the psychoanalytic perspective, true reflexivity necessarily leads us toward the unconscious and the opacity of our own history and toward vulnerability, uncertainty, and the ignoble motivations alluded to in Foucault’s disrobing of rational knowledge.

Even while theoretical objections may be challenged, any move from theory to practice meets with a glass ceiling within the institutional culture. Intrator and Kunzman (2007) identify several points of resistance to those practices that center on teacher biography and interiority. First, the personal dimension of the teacher is considered to be a private domain, whereby “becoming a tactful, caring, or passionate teacher is treated largely as a matter of personal disposition, moral commitment, or private virtue” (Hargreaves in Intrator & Kunzman, 2007, p. 19). The result is that “qualities such as presence, connectedness, and purpose are considered to be inherent to the individual; either you have these qualities or you don’t” (Intrator & Kunzman, 2007, p. 19). To this first point they add the idea that the work of interiority is too inexact, complex, and costly within an educational paradigm dominated by economies of time and scale, and demanding the immediate transference of teacher learning to the classroom setting.

Furthermore, Whitcomb et al. (2008), in relation to the academic environment that surrounds teacher education, point to an epistemological resistance to the language of person-centered education:

Talk about the inner self stretches the content of many academics’ somewhat brittle metaphysical catalogue. Add to this talk of the inner self a search for truth and it seems we begin to herald an outmoded epistemological quest and certainly misguided educational journey. (p. 7)

Whitcomb et al. are not alone in drawing attention to an epistemological resistance within the educational “establishment.” Pignatelli (1993) alludes to the dominant discourse of “truth” in relation to teacher agency:

Truths arrived at through orderly method, scientific inquiry, and prescriptive theorizing predispose and deeply constrain the way one understands and practices teacher agency. Therefore, proposing an alternative way of thinking about teacher agency involves teachers finding alternative ways of knowing the truth about themselves. (p. 420)

If a therapeutic reflexivity based on an ontologically flawed subject is countercultural in education, then any of its advocates will have to work doubly hard to gain traction in a hostile terrain. They will need to be able to document, analyze, and communicate the value of the approach in terms that are understandable to a broad population of educators. There are some similarities here with the challenges that Whitcomb et al. identify in relation to a reflexivity grounded in the use of literature as a mirror for self. They quote Edmundson’s interrogation of any work that would aspire to call itself great literature:

What am I asking when I ask of a major work (for only a major work will sustain this question) whether it is true is quite simply this: Can you live it? Can you put it into action? Can you speak—or adapt—the language of this work, use it to talk to both yourself and others so as to live better? Is this work desirable as a source of belief? Or at the very least, can it influence your existing beliefs in consequential ways? (Edmundson in Whitcomb et al., 2008, p. 7)

I would argue that these are the same questions that any reflexivity would need to answer, and especially those most in need of arguing their credentials as a viable practice. As long as the burden of proof lies with the “pretender,” it will be necessary to accumulate a thorough understanding of its transformative potential across a whole series of identity-practice spectrums. This work has already begun, and, as already mentioned, a corresponding line of qualitative research has yielded a body of evidence and corresponding analytic framework which point to an important contribution to teacher education (Keck, 2012, 2018). In response to Edmundson’s criteria for attributing substance to a work, this research into therapeutic reflexivity provides evidence that: Yes, teachers can live it and put it into action; yes, teachers can speak its language in talking to themselves and others; yes, teachers can find its beliefs desirable, and find their own beliefs and practices to be influenced in consequential ways.

Some Concluding Thoughts

By attending to teachers’ existential and relational difficulties, psychotherapeutic praxis is potentially important to teacher education, offering a counterweight to an institutional insistence on the smooth surfaces of systems. In place of the performative and programmatic agenda of schooling, teachers come upon a pedagogy whose agenda is expressive and regressive. While education’s project looks forward and outward, psychotherapy’s pedagogy is skewed backward, or to the present, and is inward-looking. A psychotherapeutic pedagogy centers on an exploration of experience and on a subject’s giving voice to their own happenings.

Freud referred to psychoanalysis, for example, as “the talking cure,” patients being given free rein to talk in any direction. To a certain extent, retrieval and expression is the cure, and, in general, psychotherapy has provided the means whereby a person can “let it all hang out”—that is, where they can unpack their baggage. If schooling is normative and prescriptive, psychotherapy is permissive and its modus operandi is a search for authenticity, for the real underneath appearance, or for the lived tension between real and apparent. From the seemingly innocuous appearance of a Freudian slip, to a cathartic cry of hatred, psychotherapy attaches itself to that which would prefer to remain invisible. Something real about us is prized open and revealed, and it is my argument that teachers—and thus teacher education—could benefit from this work of becoming more openly human.

A psychotherapeutic reflexivity would lead teachers beyond the recognizably professional and toward “the animality of being human” (Foucault in Miller, 1994, p. 363). It is this animality that, in the words of Nietzsche (1996), makes us “all too human.” By coming upon this place of “all too teacher–all too human,” teachers’ presence is enlarged, as is the space they offer for the humanity of others. A teacher who is familiar with their own violence might well look differently upon an openly violent student, just as a teacher who recognizes their own will to ignorance might look differently on a student’s disinterest in learning.

Moreover, closing in on the deeper drives within our thinking, feeling, and doing is a means through which the reflexive subject can leverage some degree of dialogue and ownership over the forces that shape their life:

Once we come to see that we are not merely the hapless victims of these impulses but can take a dynamic role in deciphering them, we can begin to alter our lives. This is what it means, in Freudian terms, to move from passive repetition of the past to an active working through of this past. (Ruti, 2009, p. 8)

There is something here of the Phoenix rising from the ashes; one descends into the fiery depths to rise again. In keeping with this “promising descent,” I have argued for a radicalized practice of teacher education, one which involves an active engagement with our existential tensions; a submission to vulnerability, pain, uncertainty, and struggle; and a renunciation of linear progress and development, and all this so that teachers can more fully take up living their real lives, in real classrooms with real students. This seeing the thing as it really is, being prepared to work with what you have, is an act of acceptance at odds with the exacting idealizations of the system, and as such should be understood as a creative resistance with truly transformative potential. Were education to admit the question child and the question teacher, perhaps it could begin to address the question school. In pressing times, we might need to conceive of a school and an education which would help us to address our collective baggage, whose weight threatens to render our present education somewhat redundant. Schools, it appears, have not yet begun to find alternatives to the homo economicus who is the protagonist of a potentially catastrophic environmental meltdown, and perhaps any move toward the question school would have to begin with this overarching issue of our times.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Charles S. Keck

Author Biography

Charles S. Keck has been working in the field of teacher education in Chiapas, Mexico, for more than 20 years, principally through the provision of complementary training programs designed and operated from outside of the officially structured channels. Partly as an extension of his own psychotherapeutic or socioemotional journey, he has become increasingly more interested in the transformative potential of psychospiritual practices of self and in a Foucauldian approach to the ethics of the care of self. Since 2003, he has been systematically engaged in providing teachers with a “hands-on” experience of this ethics of the care of self through their participation psychotherapy’s “journey of emotional significance.” In 2012, he obtained his PhD from the Institute of Education in London, having completed his research thesis documenting and analyzing the learning and transformation of teachers participating in an intensive psychospiritual retreat program. Since then, his teaching, training, and academic interests have remained firmly embedded in this intimate dimension of teacher development and in the teacher as “person,” rather than the teacher as “professional.” He pursues these interests from within the institutional framework of El Colegio de la Frontera Sur where he forms part of the Department of Society and Culture.

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