Consideraciones éticas

Teachers’ narratives are stories of their selves which, following Holland et al. (1998), I understand as something that is also worked on and practised, not something that is fixed or given:

We take identity to be a central means by which selves, and the sets of actions they organise, form and re-form over personal lifetimes and in the histories of social collectivities. (p270)

In her work on the identities of trainee teachers, Britzman (2003) warns that it is tempting but unhelpful to think of teacher identity as fixed because to do so glosses over the struggles and contradictions experienced by real teachers whose identities are responsive, complex and multiple, and sometimes inconsistent. As Holquist (2002) argues, identities are developed over time:

The present is not a static moment, but a mass of different combinations of past and present relations. To say I perceive them as a whole means that I see them surrounded by their whole lives, within the context of a complete narrative having a beginning that precedes our

encounter and an end that follows it. I see others as bathed in the light of their whole biography. (p37)

Understanding individual narratives entails recognising that identities cannot be reduced to – or understood through – a series of snapshots, that it is important to engage with a person’s ‘whole biography’.

Holland et al. (1998) work with personal biographies through the idea of ‘history-in- person’:

One’s history-in-person is the sediment from past experiences upon which one improvises, using the cultural resources available, in response to the subject positions afforded one in the present. (p18)

Our selves are shaped by our history-in-person, and this ‘sediment’ from experiences throughout our lives, influences how we see and how we interpret what we see: history- in-person is a lens through which we see and comprehend the world. But our history-in- person also influences how we act in the world because we bring this perspective to our current or new situations.

For teachers, this may include their own experience as learners or ‘do-ers’ of mathematics as well as their experience of teaching the subject to different classes of pupils or in different schools. The nature of such new situations – the particularity and situatedness of the moment – is important, as the conditions under which the self finds itself influence the identity work done.

3.3.1

Self and I

In order to theorise the becoming ‘self’, Holland et al. (1998) turn to the work of Bakhtin (1981; 1986; 1990):

The meaning that we make of ourselves is, in Bakhtin’s terms, “authoring the self,” and the site at which this authoring occurs is a space defined by the interrelationship of differentiated “vocal” perspectives on the social world. In Bakhtin’s vision, the self is to existence as the pronoun “I” is to language. Both the self and “I” designate pivotal positions in the stream of (language) activity that goes on always.In explaining what an “I” is, position, rather than content, is important. Suppose one tries to define “I” by summarising the characteristics of everybody one has heard use the term in the past week. One can imagine a prototypical tree, but can one imagine a prototypical I? In Bakhtin’s system the self is somewhat analogous to “I.” The self is a position from which meaning is made, a position that is

“addressed” by and “answers” others and the “world” (the physical and cultural environment). In answering (which is the stuff of existence), the self “authors” the world—including itself and others. (Holland et al., 1998:173)

For Bakhtin, the I – or the ‘I-for-myself’ – is synonymous with an individual subject. There are many Is in the world, many subjects who are each an I-for-myself as illustrated in Figure 3.

Figure 3: I-for-myself.

However, for Bakhtin, subjects are not isolated because in a social world, subjects encounter other subjects. In other words, ‘other concrete, bodily and temporally located, answerable persons living their own unique and once-occurrent event of being’ (Renfrew, 2015:32) and it is only through these interactions that an I can come to really know itself. But, the I alone – as Bakhtin would say, the I-for-myself – is not seen by the self, we need others in order to see our self and then our identity work is in relation to these others:

For in order to see ourselves, we must appropriate the vision of others. Restated in its crudest version, the Bakhtinian just-so story of subjectivity is the tale of how I get my self from the other: it is only the other’s categories that will let me be an object for my own perception. I see myself as I conceive others might see it. In order to forge a self, I must do so from the outside. In other words, I author myself. (Holquist, 2002:28)

Bakhtin’s theory of ‘dialogism’ is helpful for understanding this:

In dialogism, the very capacity to have consciousness is based on

otherness. This otherness is not merely a dialectical alienation on its way

to a sublation that will endow it with a unifying identity in higher consciousness. On the contrary: in dialogism consciousness is otherness. More accurately, it is the differential relation between a centre and all that is not that centre. (Holquist, 2002:18)

‘Centre’ is used here to describe the self and so consciousness is an awareness of other selves with different biographies and histories-in-person. This other subject sees the I

from another time and space and through their unique history-in-person lens; they see the I in a way that it could not see itself. It is only when the I attempts to see itself through the eyes of the other, that we understand ourselves:

Any subject requires another subject, located in a relation of

outsideness, in order to acquire what Bakhtin calls ‘wholeness’ or

‘unity’; the subject, person, individuality only becomes what he or she is – in a towering paradox – under the gaze of another. (Renfrew, 2015:33)

The language used by Bakhtin to describe seeing ourselves through the eyes of another is ‘the-other-for-me’ (sometimes translated as the ‘not-I-in-me’). Whilst the I cannot ever actually know what the other sees and interprets through their history-in-person lens, the I can imagine this. This is represented in Figure 4. In this sense, the other is for the I to enable it to see itself in that moment; to achieve ‘outsideness’.

Figure 4: The-other-for-me.

So while ‘Bakhtin’s other is always the-other-for-me’ (Renfrew, 2015:34), it is not a solitary or specially selected other. All others – all who are not the I – act as the-other-for- me and thus, in any moment, the I can have multiple others acting as the-other-for-me. It is the views and thoughts of these others which help the I to gain a more complex view of itself from the outside. This is represented in Figure 5.

Figure 5: I can have many others, each acting as the-other-for-me.

These others may be actual people who are either materially present or absent, or they might be symbolic figures who represent different organisations or ideas.

While in the moments represented in Figure 4 and Figure 5 the other (or others) is for me (in the form of the blue character), in another moment, those others will act as the-other- in-me for a different I; they are not exclusively my other. Figure 6 shows how for each member of an interaction (the I has here shifted from the blue to the orange character), the others act as the-other-in-me for them.

Figure 6: Being the-other-for-me for a different I.

The role of other is therefore significant in our presentations of self, our authoring. I expand on this next.