‘More than an academic thing’: Becoming a teacher in Ltyentye Apurte and beyond

Abstract

Becoming a teacher involves much more than building an effective collection of professional knowledge and practice. Establishing a satisfying and meaningful teacher identity is the foundation of teacher development and has implications for teacher retention and for reclaiming the profession from its current domination by policy discourses. Much can be learned by teacher educators, education leaders and teachers themselves from narratives of identity development. Such stories offer an embodied picture of the complex inter-relationship between the different elements of a teacher’s identity and how a teacher’s experiences, relationships and socio-cultural context shape the meaning they make of their teacherself. This paper draws on arts-based, narrative and dialogic methods to share Author 2’s story of his professional identity formation before, during and after his participation in the Growing Our Own (GOO) program at Ltyentye Apurte (Santa Teresa). The story emerges from data collected over six years of the eight-year working relationship between Author 2 and Author 1, a lecturer on the program. It casts light on the people, places and experiences that shaped his professional identity, on the challenges he encountered, and the impact becoming a teacher had on his identity as an Indigenous man and a member of his community. This story contests the notion of professional identity development as a straightforward journey towards a known destination and offers a rich embodiment of the complex nature of teacher identity as ecological, transactional and relative to time and place. Background and context Teacher identity When Author 2 said, “It’s more than an academic thing: it’s about relationships and feeling good, feeling like you belong”, he wasn’t referring to his own learning. He was talking about his students’ experience of school at the remote Indigenous community of Ltyentye Apurte (Santa Teresa) in central Australia where he learned to become a teacher as part of the Growing Our Own (GOO) program. GOO is a joint initiative of Charles Darwin University and Catholic Education, designed to deliver Indigenous teacher education ‘on-country’ and so address the shortage of remote Indigenous teachers. Author 2’s insight into the relational and cultural aspects of his students’ learning applies equally well to his own experience of learning to become a teacher. Becoming a teacher is “more than an academic thing,” and this is supported by the literature, which foregrounds the ecological nature of teacher identity formation (Beauchamp & Thomas, 2009). Researchers and teacher educators are becoming increasingly aware that a teacher’s development involves far more than the “acquisition of assets” such as skills, knowledge or beliefs (Akkerman & Meijer, 2011, p. 308). Identity formation also involves the experience and negotiation of emotions, commitments and other elements that are not captured by a predefined set of professional standards. The post-structuralist recognition that identity is multiple and that it changes over time and in different contexts, offers a further layer of complexity to any inquiry into teacher identity formation or operation. 45 Learning Communities | Special Issue: Growing Our Own: Indigenous Education on Country | Number 25 – December 2019 These layers of complexity are one reason there is no agreed definition of teacher identity in the literature (Beijaard, Meijer, & Verloop, 2004). This paper’s aim is to present and explore Author 2’s story of becoming a teacher in order to: (1) demonstrate how recognising teacher identity as ecological, transactional and relative to time and place enables better understanding of the complexities of identity development; and (2) highlight the influences and challenges of beginning Indigenous teachers in remote contexts and the impact of becoming a teacher on their other identities and their community position. Ecological and post-structural conceptions of identity This paper frames teacher identity in terms of the ecological and post-structural conceptions of identity noted above, and expresses identity in terms of the model shown below (see Figure 1). This model draws on Mockler’s (2011) understanding of teacher identity formation as an interplay between teachers’ “motivations for entering the profession and their experiences as teachers” and involving personal experiences, professional contexts and political-cultural environments (p. 517). The model also embraces a dialogic understanding of identity as “both unitary and multiple, both continuous and discontinuous, and both individual and social” (Akkerman & Meijer, 2011, p. 308). The implication of this dialogic conception is that teachers negotiate their identity positions within these dyads in response to the contexts and relationships of the moment. Identity is “an ongoing process of interpretation and reinterpretation of experience”, an ever-changing answer to the recurrent question, “Who am I at this moment?” (Beijaard et al., 2004, p. 108). Figure 1: Author 1’s ecological and post-structural model of teacher identity Source: Al Strangeways 46 More than an academic thing: Becoming a teacher in Ltyentye Apurte and beyond Al Strangeways & Vivien Petit The teacher identity model created for this paper (Figure 1), identifies three inter-related elements of identity: • Underlying beliefs, values, dispositions and motivations. • Current knowledge, skills and practices. • Future aspirations, goals and vision. These elements are constructed through a series of ever-widening ecological spheres of influence (Bronfenbrenner, 1977), including: individual influences such as a teacher’s storying practices; mesosystemic influences such as relationships with family and colleagues; and macrosystemic influences such as culture and history. The elements and influential factors of identity are all dynamic; they interact with each other and change over time. The purpose of the model is to express the individual elements of identity (the three inner circles of the model) and the ecological influences that work to construct these elements of identity (the four concentric circles and the timeline). The model draws on the ecological perspective that Strangeways and Papatraianou (2019) developed when remapping the landscape of teacher resilience. The spheres of influence described in the model need to be viewed and understood as ecological, transactional and relative; occurring in a socio-culturally constructed context, through a process of negotiation amongst contextually situated meanings and values, and changing according to these contexts and negotiations. Arts-based narrative and dialogic methods Teacher narratives have a long and well supported history in educational research (Goodson, 1990; Clandinin & Connelly, 2004). They, along with other arts-based educational research (ABER) methods, are a key element of the “more nuanced and holistic approaches” to understanding professional identity that Mockler (2011) identified as essential to counter the increasing privileging of “technical-rational” understandings of teachers’ work and role in policy and public discourse (p. 517). This paper uses narrative methods because identity itself is constructed by narrative. As Mockler (2011) asserted, narratives work both to produce identity, and to lay claim to it. Further, the knowledge that stories offer is always “situated, transient, partial and provisional” (Cormack, 2004, p. 220). This is because stories are the product of a series of reconstructions, by the participant who tells the story, by the writer who interprets the story in a paper such as this, and by you, the reader of the story. As such, narrative form serves well to represent the equally situated, transient, partial and provisional nature of identity, and the ecological system within which it develops and operates. As Clandinin, Downey and Huber (2009) asserted: A narrative way of thinking about teacher identity speaks to the nexus of teachers’ personal practice knowledge, and the landscapes, past and present, on which teachers live and work...using a concept of ‘stories to live by’ is a way to speak of the stories that teachers live out in practice and tell of who they are and are becoming as teachers. Important to this way of thinking is an understanding of the multiplicity of each of our lives – lives composed around multiple plotlines. (Clandinin et al., 2009, pp. 141-2) Dialogic approach Building on the work of Akkerman and Meijer (2011), this paper takes a dialogic approach to research methods as well as to the conceptualisation of identity. Dialogic inquiry is “an act of dialogue with the respective teachers,” rather than research “about” them (Akkerman & Meijer, 2011, p. 316). This paper is co-written with the teacher whose story it tells. Author 2’s story is presented in the italicised texts, which were extracted from over 15 hours of transcribed interviews undertaken by him and his co-author, Author 1 who worked with Author 2 as his lecturer on the GOO program from 2010-2015. This period marked the end of his first year of full time teaching at the remote Indigenous community of Santa Teresa (Ltyentye Apurte) in central Australia. 47 Learning Communities | Special Issue: Growing Our Own: Indigenous Education on Country | Number 25 – December 2019 The analytic and interpretative text that forms the rest of this paper is the result of collaborative discussion between Author 2 and Author 1, as are the structure and themes that run through the narrative, analysis and artwork. Throughout this approach, the authors were careful that Author 2’s story was not “colonized” in its retelling, so it maintained its authenticity whilst also serving the purposes of this research paper (Garrick in Cormack, 2004, p. 234). For this reason, we chose not to indent Author 2’s text as “block quotation” to avoid relegating his voice to a supporting or illustrative position in