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

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.

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.