Who am I who teaches?

This paper investigates what role my identity and self-awareness play in my teaching. My questions are, who am I who teaches? And does this ‘I’ impact in positive ways for myself and others? In seeking to answer these questions, and to explain why, in my opinion, they are vital questions for any teacher to answer, I describe a historical degree of naïvety about the impact of my background and culture on how I teach. Such naïvety renders practice unsafe for all concerned. I explore how the work of specific theorists, encountered during Masters and Doctoral study, have enabled me to gain insights into the ‘I who teaches’. These include Freire, Foucault, McNiff, Whitehead and latterly Palmer. Furthermore, these writers, along with certain instances from my educational practice, have brought home to me the importance of ongoing self-exploration and clarity about my values and accountability. I present examples of how I now currently practice, how I strive to make my biases clear both to myself and my students and hold myself accountable for my values in a public way. I show how I now seek to ensure that, as far as possible, my practice demonstrates the flow of life-affirming energy for both my students and myself. Departing from tradition, perhaps, I incorporate reflections from the open reviewing process so that my reviewers’ voices are also explicit in the development of this paper.