ESRC TLRP Seminar Series
Changing Teacher Roles, Identities and
Professionalism
Kings College, London
‘Racialized Identities in Initial Teacher
Training’
Lorna Roberts
Education and Social Research Institute
Manchester Metropolitan University
March 15 2005
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‘Racialized Identities in Initial Teacher Training’
Lorna Roberts, Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester
Metropolitan University
Abstract
Initiatives to improve teaching in England and Wales have resulted in radical changes
in programmes of initial teacher training and teaching practices. The drive for greater
accountability within the teaching profession has led to greater ‘intensification and
prescription of training regulations’ (Brown et al 2001). Trainee teachers have to
understand and articulate their development in terms of the Standards. However, this
narrow focus on standards obscures the complexities involved in the process of
becoming a teacher and conceals trainees’ lived experiences of the transition to
qualified teacher status. Trainees enter ITT programmes with their own personal
aspirations about the kind of teacher they would like to be and what it means to teach.
Personal perceptions are continually squeezed as trainees negotiate the Standards.
The Standards discourse has constructed a version of ‘The Teacher’ which is
somewhat abstract in relation to the trainee, time, relationships and context. What
does it mean for a trainee to make the transition? In particular how do Black and
minority ethnic trainees gain a sense of themselves as teachers? How are particular
identities enacted and sustained? What expectations arise from the signifier ‘teacher’
and what does this reveal about who is or is not accepted as a teacher? To explore
how identities are racialized and thus limit possibilities of being, this paper draws
mainly on data from a research project investigating teacher development. The study
explored final year primary trainee and novice teachers’ struggle to achieve a teacher
identity. Data from other funded projects specifically focussed on the experiences of
minority ethnic trainees are also considered.
Introduction
To gain entry into the academy, to what degree must I engage a particular
performance of language and Mclarens’s notion of an “articulating whiteness”?
To what degree does that gain me entry as a testament of my ability to
perform academic, to perform teacher, to negotiate and display the scolarly
apparatus of institutional (cultural) membership, to be socially accepted – in
exclusion to other aspects of my performative Black self?
Alexander 2004:662
Shifting Identities: The Researcher’s and Trainee / Novice Teachers’ Evolving
Professional Identity (Roberts, 2004) 1 examined identities in transition. The study
was not primarily concerned with issues of ‘race’; rather the primary concern was to
1
The study following final year B.Ed primary trainees into their fist year of teaching. The rites of
passage metaphor was used to conceptualise the transition to qualified teacher status.
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develop understanding of how trainees perceived their developing professional
identities. Although not primarily concerned with the racialized nature of transition, I
was interested in how trainees’ personal identities might shape the contours of their
development. Consequently I was keen to involve male, female, mature and nonmature, Black and minority ethnic trainees.2 The data suggest that trainees are faced
with a struggle to reconcile the teacher they imagined themselves to be with the
teacher they were expected to be. The struggle is made all the more difficult since the
Standards the trainees are required to meet imply that ‘teaching’ can be quantified
when in fact it is a phenomenon that ‘cannot be completely pin[ned] down’ (Peter, a
former trainee). Teaching ‘cannot be made fully transparent simply because there is
no substitute for the kind of experiential and implicit knowledge crucial to
expertise…’ (Strathern, 2000:313). As performance indicators, the Standards do not
capture or reflect the ‘personal and interpersonal dynamics that characterise the whole
process of becoming a teacher’ (Mclean, 1999:59). Learning to teach ‘is not a mere
matter of applying decontextualized skills or mirroring predetermined images; it is a
time when one’s past, present, and future are set in dynamic tension’ (Britzman,
1991:10, cited in Mclean, 1999:59). Transition can be seen as a dual process: on the
one hand there is the overt assimulation of the Standards; on the other there is the
underground ‘in the flesh’ lived experience. I say underground as it is this aspect of
transition which is usually masked by formal accounts. The trainee’s hidden work
‘really involves negotiating past and present demands’ (Britzman, 1986:443). The
Standards create an ‘archetype’ teacher which may conflict with the trainees’ lived
reality. The uncertainties and ambiguities in the nature of teaching are absent in such
abstract formulae, as are the elements which constitute the person acquiring the
teacher persona. In addition The ITT National Curriculum presents transition as a
linear development process, when in fact it is more likely to be experienced like
‘incoming waves that break on the shore, sometimes moving forward relentlessly,
sometimes finishing so far back that … it appears that the tide has turned’ (Hayes,
1999:24).
Danielewicz (2001) reminds us that ‘individuals are composed of multiple, often
conflicting, identities’ (p.3); identities are also ‘culture specific’ (p.36). These
identities ‘figure into the way’ trainees and novices ‘develop as teachers’ (p.4). The
actual ‘gendered / ethnic / aged’ experience of becoming a teacher is not evident in
official / formal accounts of training to teach, neither is it always overtly voiced in
trainees’ own accounts of their experiences. Infact, Dillabough (1999) argues that
professional identity and the notion of teacher professionalism is ‘degendered’,
‘disembedded and decontextualised’ (p.387). If this is the case what assumptions
underpin current conceptions of ‘teacher’? What does it mean for the ‘gendered /
ethnic/ aged / classed’ individual to confront a ‘degendered’, ‘disembedded and
decontextualised’ professional identity? One particular case in the Shifting Identities
study seemed to offer the possibility of an alternative framework to critically reflect
on teachers’professional identity. This case proved rather perplexing; it begs
questions about racialized identities and assumptions about the culture of teaching.
Such questioning may have much broader implications in terms of: efforts to recruit
2
Such categories are an oversimplification. I am aware that an individual could cross all these
boundaries. The task in hand would be to understand how transition is shaped by these intersecting
identifications.
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minority ethnic teachers; understanding of what it means to have a ‘multicultural
society’ and how we know and produce knowledge around issues of ‘race’ and
ethnicity. This paper marks an effort to begin rethink notions of ‘race’ and teacher
identity, as such it is unpolished, tentative and exploratory. It revisits data from the
Shifting Identities study alongside data from other funded research into the
experiences of minority ethnic trainee teachers. I begin with an outline of how
evolving professional identity has been conceptualised in the Shifting Identities study.
The paper then presents one case study from the aforementioned research to explore
how transition may be inflected by ‘race’. This issue is further explored by moving
from this particular case to a consideration of data from other projects. Finally the
concept of ‘racialized’ identities is tentatively explored.
Shifting Identities: Trainee/Novice Teachers’ Evolving Professional Identity
How do trainee and novice teachers acquire a sense of themselves as primary school
teachers and what sense do they have of their personal identities? Trainees do not enter
ITT as tabula rasas, they come with a history and a ready made fantasy of the teacher
they are to become. ‘They already have lived full lives’ (McLean, 1999:59), particularly
in the case of mature students who ‘bring with them a lifetime of personal experiences,
including a substantial body of personal knowledge about the work of teachers’ (op.cit.).
Trainees already have a strong sense of who they are; they come with a strong sense of
their individual identities / personas. Many of the trainees who participated in the study
spoke about their motivation to teach in ways that suggested the career somehow fitted
with their perceptions of a ‘true’ self. Similarly, for some, the choice of main subject
specialism was related to what was perceived as a ‘natural’ ability. Many trainees spoke
about themselves in ways that suggested an inner core or substantive identity. One
trainee believed he would be a ‘good-humoured’ teacher who is liked and ‘gets on with
everybody’. However, he found he could not be like that. It was:
only in the second or third year I see teaching as a role, an act, something
that you step into, and when you said before about where your own sense
of identity is, that’s left on the sidelines. You are a teacher, you are
performing, if you like; you are putting on this role, stepping into this
particular area.
This notion of playing was to resurface frequently in the data, where trainees spoke about
‘playing’ at being the teacher or ‘playing a game’. In these managerial times with
increased regulation and the audit culture, learning to teach involves trainees in the
production of performative selves (Ball, 2003 McNamara et al, 2002; Roberts, 2004) as
they try to negotiate competing teaching discourses represented by their personal beliefs
and formal accounts – government, ITT institution and school. Stronach et al (2002)
characterises professionalism as a negotiation between ‘ecologies’ and ‘economies’ of
practice, where ecology relates to the practitioners personal philosophy of practice, and
economies relate to systems of audit. For the trainees, the need to present this
performative self to satisfy the Standards leads to a state which could be characterised as
virtual reality. Schools were characterised in some cases as ‘the real world’ which
paradoxically contained unreal elements, whilst the Initial Training Institution was seen
as ‘not real’. The interplay between the real and unreal world meant that the trainees
were never settled in their teacher identities but continually shifted between being a
student / teacher. Initial Teacher Training (ITT) can then be seen as a deeply complex
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liminal stage of passage in which student teachers in their narrative autobiographies story
the complex dynamic student / university / school / government in a way that inscribes
them as neither one thing nor another, and yet both at the same time, that is both student
and teacher. (McNamara et al, 2002; Roberts, 2004).
I begun this section with a question - How do trainee and novice teachers acquire a sense
of themselves as primary school teachers…? Perhaps the answer to this question lurks in
the differences between acting as a teacher and being a teacher. This is a distinction that
one of the trainees made when discussing moments when he felt like a teacher. Perhaps
the rituals of training and the audit culture (Power, 1997) do not engage trainees
sufficiently in those tacit processes which enable them to adopt a teacher identity.
Perhaps the answer lies in the idea that ‘identities require the commitment of self to the
enterprise in a way that acting out a role does not’ (Danielewicz, 2001:10). Danielewicz
(2001) explores the process of ‘becoming a teacher’ and argues that ‘it requires
engagement with identity, the way individuals conceive of themselves so that teaching is
a state of being, not merely ways of acting or behaving’ (p.3). It seems that whilst
transitions are being made the trainees are engaged in a process of learning how to do the
trainee / novice teacher learning how to do the teacher hence perceptions of the ‘real’,
‘not real’.
Conceptualising Teacher / Professional Identity
Stronach et al (2002) argue that there is not such thing as a ‘teacher’. Our understanding
of ‘teacher’ is discursively constructed. Perhaps transition could be conceptualised as a
process of ‘incorporation’ where trainees assimilate discursive practices of what it is to
be a trainee / teacher. The individual body of the trainee is gradually introduced into the
collective body of the teaching profession, eventually arriving at a point where the
trainee is recognised and recognises self as a member of that profession, in other words
there is a shift from ‘my body’ to ‘our body’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968 cited by Ahmed,
2000:47). This would imply a smooth transition, a progressive movement forward, not
only that, but a sense of sameness as well. However, the trainees’ gradual ‘incorporation’
into the teaching body, in some cases, appears to signal / highlight difference producing a
sense of ‘my body’ and ‘the other’s body’ (Ahmed, 2000:49). Trainees have to mediate
between their prior knowledge: their sense of who they are and their sense of their
teacher persona to be - and ITT / school discourses on teaching. It is within the in
between spaces marked by past / future; formal discourses of transition / informal lived
experience of transition that identity evolves.
Transition for many of the students was charged with emotion. A number spoke about
being torn between the competing discourses whilst still trying to maintain something of
themselves. Focussing on the discursive does not adequately capture the trainees’
embodied experience; as Calhoun states:
… simply showing a process of construction fails to grapple with the real,
present-day political and other reasons why essentialist identities continue to
be invoked and often deeply felt (Calhoun, 1994:14).
Burkitt (1998:500) argues that:
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Identities are not simply the constructs of disciplinary mechanisms and
regulatory practices, but circulate between the everyday practices of people
within the spaces of their life-world and the official categorizations and
institutional activities that both draw upon them and feed back into them.
Moya (1997:135) citing Moraga (1983) states the ‘“physical realities of our lives” will
profoundly inform the contours and the context of both our theories and our knowledge’
(Moya’s emphasis). The personal experiences of the trainees / novice teachers
participating in the project ‘rest[s] on an initial foundation of acquired and established
existence’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1987:432); that is to say ‘social, political, and ethical
normative webs of meaning’ (Yancy, 2003:xiii) have already been established prior to
our arrival. The trainees are ‘thrown (embodily) within a stream of narratives that are
historically sedimented’ (Yancy, 2003:xiv). We are ‘always already shaped by signs
and symbols’ (op cit). It is not a simple case of stepping into the stream, rather we
evolve within it (Yancy, 2003:xiii) and shape action. ‘The self is shaped within a
dynamic, transactional space of alterity’ (op. cit.), as such trainees’ and novices’
evolving professional identities must be considered in relational terms.
Engaging in teacher training involves trainees in an identification process where
individual ‘gendered’, ‘raced’ and ‘classed’ identities are reconciled with the collective
/ corporate identity of the teaching community. If evolving identities depend on a
process of discrimination between similarity and difference, if discourses are
hierarchical and if they shape emergent identities then it is possible that in certain
places and moments there will be conflict between our multiple identities; some
discourses may ‘erode’ or ‘dissolve’ identities thereby making it difficult to ‘reform’,
‘add to’ or ‘integrate’ new alternative identities (Danielwicz, 2001:3-4). If the particular
identity at risk of erosion, dissolution is perceived as one’s ‘centre of gravity’, then the
consequences may be such that one experiences moments of ‘silence’ and
‘inarticulateness’. This brings me to Marcia, a woman of African Caribbean descent
who entered ITT via the Access route. For as long as she could remember she had
always wanted to teach: ‘I remember role-playing as a child, and as I got older, I don’t
know it was just a thing I didn’t think of anything else. This was the only thing.’ She has
now realised her ambition and is now teaching in a large primary school. However her
journey proved particularly traumatic.
Marcia’s Case study
I am presenting this data as an exploratory exercise in an effort to begin to rethink
conceptions of ‘race’ and efforts to widen participation in Higher Education, increase
the recruitment of minority ethnic trainees and address attainment issues of black and
minority ethnic pupils in schools. I am endeavouring to take a critical stance towards the
data as I recognize the dangers of accepting participants’ narratives at face value. I’m
also aware that I am reading the account as an African Caribbean woman. The desire to
develop an alternative framework is borne out of curiosity as to why, even after Swann,
(DES, 1985) and more recently MacPherson (1999) and a range of other research and
widening participation initiatives, it appears the same questions are being asked with the
same stories being reiterated. Why the apparent inertia? Are we attempting to build on
faulty foundations?
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In talking to trainees about their experiences of training across a number of projects, I
have been struck by the weight of the emotional impact on the individual, although
some have more intense experiences than others. Hargreaves (2001, 1998) points to the
growing body of literature discussing the role of emotion in teaching. He posits the view
that ‘standards-based and largely cognitive-driven reforms do not capture all of what
matters most in developing really good teaching’ (2001:1056). Teaching is ‘an
emotional practice’ and ‘cannot be reduced to technical competence or clinical
standards’ (Hargreaves, 1998:850).
I found Marcia’s presentation of self during our discussions compelling. I was
immediately struck by her accounts of her experience of initial teacher training. The
trainees’ accounts suggested the existence of a gap between the formal requirements as
specified in the language of the course documents and national standards for qualified
teacher status and the trainees own beliefs and lived experience of training. The
Standards for the award of Qualified Teacher Status, the Career Entry Profile and the
Subject Knowledge Audits do not capture ‘the person’ engaging in the process. This
appeared to be more marked in Marcia’s case. Marcia presented her action in the
classroom as intuitive, spur of the moment engagement with her pupils. It was action
that ‘felt right’ at the time but which she found difficult to rationalise after the event.
This brought her into conflict with the requirements of the ITT course which required
her to ‘evaluate [her] own teaching critically’ (TTA, 1998); give justifications for
particular actions. Like many of the other trainees, Marcia’s desire to enter the teaching
profession led her to ‘play’ the system in order to satisfy formal requirements. Pleasing
the other meant Marcia engaged in emotional labour (Hargreaves, 2000; Hochschild,
1983) and a certain amount of self surveillance. This masking / masquerading of the self
(Gallop, 1995) to ‘suit the purposes of others’ (Hargreaves, 2000:814) impacted
negatively on Marcia’s perception of self, bringing her motivations and belief systems
about teaching into conflict.
Marcia’s account of transition from trainee to qualified teacher revealed an intense
struggle to reconcile her own personal convictions with the discourses encountered at
university and in school. She portrayed her transformation from student to teacher as a
deeply traumatic experience which struck at the very core of her sense of self; indeed
her initiation into teaching was narrated as an assault on the self. Her narrative
contained powerful metaphors (examples of these are presented further on) symbolising
the violence done to her sense of self by the competing discourses of what it is to be a
teacher. I interpreted her account as a ‘curtailment of self’ through a ‘mortification
process’ (Goffman, 1961). Mortification of the self occurs from the moment of
admission into the institution. The recruit who enters the institution voluntarily ‘has
already partially withdrawn from his home world; what is cleanly severed by the
institution is something that had already started to decay’ (Goffman, 1961:25). The
inmate is subjected to admission procedures and obedience tests which act as a form of
‘welcome’ initiation. Here the recruit is made aware of exactly where s/he fits in the
scheme of things, what is and is not permitted. Just as trainees saw the QTS Numeracy
Skills test as a ‘wielding of power with respect to themselves’ (Mcnamara et al.
2002:868). Marcia positioned her trainers, the course requirements etc as powerful
agents to which she had to submit.
Marcia’s case was also intriguing for what it revealed about the researcher / researched
relationship – an issue which cannot be further explored here. We met for the first time
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one lunchtime in November 1999 in one of the offices in the research centre. I recorded
my thoughts about the interview in my journal:
I interviewed the student today who was initially reluctant to get involved in
the sample. There a few places in the interview where I thought the student
was going to break down. I found myself wondering about how far to push
some of the questions for further clarification. I got the impression that this
particular student has experienced the course as a soul destroying
phenomena and I did not want the interview to be another nail in the coffin.
During the first interview, Marcia sighed a lot and her voice would tail off to an almost
inaudible pitch. At certain moments she became quite animated. When I met her again
for the second interview, I was confronted with a different Marcia. And even
commented on the fact during the interview: “you’ve got a smile on your face ...” at
which Marcia laughed. “I remember the first interview, I remember thinking – oh God
any minute now you’re going to burst into tears, and I felt quite awful…” I believe
Marcia was looking forward to being a teacher and she spoke enthusiastically about
what she thought it would be like. The subdued Marcia was again evident when we met
for the third interview where it was clear that life as a newly qualified teacher did not
match expectations. The sighs, pauses, and quiet voice re-entered the dialogue
particularly at those moments where Marcia seemed to be experiencing anguish. By our
final interview Marcia seemed more settled within herself; indeed in a chance meeting
some time after the research had ended Marcia announced that she had “found herself”.
Initial Teacher Training as a self-mortification process
‘It’s true … from the moment [Marcia] stepped into [her ITT HE institution],
[she] knew [she] could teach and [she] knew [she] wanted to be a teacher.’
However, all certainty was to be removed once she embarked upon training. The
University and partner schools where Marcia undertook her practicum were
experienced as total institutions (Goffman, 1961); closed worlds which
‘stripped’ Marcia ‘of the support’ offered by ‘certain stable arrangements in
[her] homeworld’. Entering the teacher training institution introduced Marcia to
a new discourse about the world of teaching. Despite her own conviction that she
could teach, Marcia was now expected to meet certain criteria as specified by the
QCA, and the TTA, in addition to the criteria determined by the University.
Marcia’s induction into this new way of conceptualising teaching was
experienced as ‘a series of abasements, degradations, humiliations and
profanations of self…’ (Goffman, 1961:24). Rather than a satisfying journey
towards the fulfilment of a dream, ITT proved to be a traumatic experience for
Marcia, where her:
self [was] systematically, if often unintentionally, mortified. [She] beg[un]
some radical shifts in h[er] moral career, a career composed of the
progressive changes that occur in the beliefs that [s]he ha[d] concerning
h[er]self and significant others (Goffman, 1961:24).
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By the final year of training Marcia’s strong sense of self had become
destabilized, she began to have serious doubts about whether she would enter the
teaching profession. This section charts Marcia’s reading of her journey to
teacherhood as a ‘losing’ of self and the strategies she adopted to survive the
ordeal.
When Marcia began training in 1996, she was ‘full of beans’, a ‘whole person’
and ‘confident’. She had dreams of being the kind of teacher that would be open
minded, prepared to make changes and go with the flow. She did not:
want to be one of those teachers who g[o]t stuck in their ways doing the
same thing. [She] want[ed] to be the kind of teacher who [would be] open
to new ideas, who [would be] prepared to try different things and not
always go with the norm. On some occasions if it seem[ed] appropriate to
go away from the norm and do something different to be able to do that.
However, she was not able to be the ‘self’ she imagined / perceived herself to be.
Instead various events during the training and school placements led Marcia to
interpret her developing professionalism as ‘being submissive’ perhaps until she
completed her training. One event that that greatly impacted on her occurred in
her first year of training:
‘Well I’ve actually had it drummed into me from first year because I think
in the first placement I was told I was not professional. I was told that I
had an attitude. I think what it was if the teacher did something and I
didn’t agree with it I don’t know if it was my facial expressions or my tone
of voice or my body language – this was perceived as not being
professional. I actually had to go away and write a 2000 word essay on
what it means to be professional and what is professionalism. So I had to
go away and write 2000 words and this was like at the time I thought it
was like a form of punishment. … My way of being professional was to be
submissive. Not to argue, sometimes, it even came to the point where I
didn’t feel like I was able to make decisions even though I could justify
them because I was the student and she was the classroom teacher so she’s
got the upper hand so whether or not I could justify what I wanted to do I
was not in the position to do so.’ (Marcia 30.11.99)
The accumulated impact of these experiences led Marcia to engage in a form of
self surveillance, (Foucault, 1977); ‘the only way that [she] found it possible to
get to’ the final year was by ‘being submissive, biting [her] tongue, not saying
really what [she felt], if [she] disagree[d] with something, not being able to say
why [she] disagree[d], not really having an opinion, just basically shutting up
and biting [her] lip and smiling and saying ok yes sir three bags full sir.’
Here is an example of what Goffman terms the ‘forced deference pattern of total
institutions’ (1961:31) Anything that can be read as insolence – facial
expressions, a ‘sassy’ attitude is quickly stamped on. The inmate learns to
conform. So for Marcia this resulted in her ‘biting her tongue’, ‘biting her lip’,
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‘wearing this blank face’, ‘shutting up’, ‘being ‘submissive’; ‘smiling’, ‘ok, yes
sir, 3 bags full sir’. In the outside world Goffman says one can conform without
necessarily agreeing and this resistance can usually be expressed – e.g. sullen
face - without fear of reprisals. This is not possible in total institutions.
The physical brutality inmates suffer in total institutions is captured in the
metaphors that Marcia used to portray her experience. She spoke about ‘keeping
[her] head down’; ‘tak[ing] a lot of knocks’; some experiences were like a ‘kick
in the teeth’ and such experiences could ‘break you’.
The sense of power is captured in the following metaphors used to portray those
with the power to pass or fail her: ‘I am your superior’, ‘dictating’; ‘upper hand’;
‘undermining’.
Marcia felt torn between university and school expectations: ‘I was kind of in the
middle;’ she explained that she:
…hated it, hated it. …just really hated it. It was an awkward position to be
in. You didn’t know whether you were coming or going. You don’t know
whether you are with [HEI ITT institution], you don’t know if you are with
the school. At the end of the day you just feel on your own.
Marcia had to ‘engage in activity whose symbolic implications [were]
incompatible with h[er] conception of self’ (Goffman, 1961:31). Marcia found
herself acting ‘in a lot of ways that conflict[ed] with [her] own beliefs and
philosophy on how [she would] perhaps react or deal with things.’ For instance
on school placement she ‘felt [she] had to…adopt [the class teacher’s] style to
fit in and to make sure that she complete[d] the placement successfully,’ even if
she disagreed.
I have lost, I am losing who I am I feel that I am losing who I am …I feel
that I have been pulled in so many directions during this course it’s come
to the point where I am not sure if I want to do teaching anymore because
of the experience that I have had… I don’t know. … You are being told on
one hand…, you go into the classroom you are a fourth year student now,
you go in there you’ve got all responsibility, … you’re in charge of the
class, do what you want and then when you actually go into school it’s a
different thing all together. You have still got the classroom teacher
dictating what she wants her children to do … I felt stifled, I felt stifled
throughout to tell the truth. And especially I felt stifled in this classroom
because how am I supposed to make something mine if I am not able to
make my own decisions and justify them … or move furniture. The way she
would do it is different to the way I would do it but yet I was expected go in
there and basically jump into someone’s shoes and work in the same kind
of environment that they have been doing and do things the way that they
have been doing.
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This process placed Marcia in a virtual world where things did not seem ‘real’ or
‘connect’ and where she felt ‘it [was] all a game.’ In this game ‘you have got to
please, you have got to be able to know what the other person is thinking, you
have got to be able to give that person what they want.’
In many ways Marcia’s account of being pulled in two directions and having to please
others accords with the accounts of some of the other research participants. There
appears to be nothing here to suggest her particular experience is connected with her
particular background. However, I would like to juxtapose accounts Marcia gives of her
perception of self as teacher and her relationship with pupils and parents in two different
schools to suggest that Marcia’s racialized identity may indeed have inflected her
experience of training. The first two extracts relate to Marcia’s third school placement.
The school was located in an inner city area which has attracted SRB funding and
undergone urban renewal.
Extract one
…you are two different people, my style is individual. I have not come across a
teacher yet who I can … share and really say well ‘wow’ this is something else.
And I feel that that’s what I have got … I don’t think people do see me as what
you would call a normal teacher; when I go in there those children are
learning. The objectives are achieved, I am doing everything that I need to be
doing as a teacher, but there is something about what I do in that classroom
that is different … my presence, the way I am, the way I come across, it’s
totally different and having to work in what may be a normal classroom
teacher’s way of doing things is really stifling. Oh my soul I don’t know it’s
taking me away. It’s taking all my values and who I am and what I want to be
and what I want to bring in the classroom … it’s keeping that down.
On the surface the struggle to fit into another teacher’s shoes is not untypical, but this
account does not appear to be simply about taking over someone else’s class. Marcia
seems to be positioning herself outside the teaching community to which she is seeking
entry. The separation is marked by the ‘wow’ factor she believes she possesses. Her
practices are in tune with what should be done, but it is her ‘presence’ ‘ the way [she] is’
and comes across’ that mark her out as different. I wonder what meaning to attach to
Marcia’s notion of presence? What marks her presence as different to that of the
classroom teacher’s? She is also different because she believes that she would not be
perceived as a ‘normal’ teacher. Marcia makes a distinction in her definition of what she
understands normal to be. The meaning depends on whether one is positioned as pupil
or professional colleague. So from the pupils’ point of view, Marcia believes you have
to be professional.’ But,
At the end of the day I am human and I want my children to know I am human.
You know, they will know that my role in that classroom is to teach them,
that’s what I am there for I’m the teacher but in the same breadth … I also
want them to know that I am human, I am a normal person, ok I am here to
teach you but I am a normal person. Because teachers are often seem not to be
normal.
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So teachers are not ‘normal’ people from the pupils’ point of view. According to
Marcia children do not perceive teachers as normal because they ‘see the teachers as ...
not having a clue about where they’re coming from ... or not really understanding’.
There is a hierarchical relationship - ‘it’s like they’re the teacher and we’re the
pupils...’ and ‘they don’t see this, they don’t see a relationship there or a real link
between that.’ I’m not clear now who ‘they’ refers to - the pupils or teachers - but given
the context I suggest ‘teachers’ is the referent.
Considering ‘normal’ from the teaching community’s point of view Marcia did not
think she was the ‘ideal view of what a teacher should be actually in the eyes of some
people.’ When pressed to explain what ‘the ideal view’ entailed she stated: ‘Prim and
proper, I don’t know, middle class, and I don’t know, I don’t think I am their idea of a
teacher, but I know I am a good one anyway.’ She felt there was:
‘a particular way that you’ve got to look and you’ve got to act and if you
don’t sort of fit into that ... it’s very hard to define it, but if you don’t fit into
that category there, you are seen as strange because even now - Oh! You’re
training to be a teacher? ... It’s like ... and I can’t explain it, but the
feeling’s there why I said that.
Despite her perceptions of not really belonging to the teaching community, Marcia felt
at home in her classroom: ‘when I’m with the children … well me and the children it’s
separate, but in a wider sense’ she did not fit in. Marcia also seemed able to connect
with parents as demonstrated in the second extract:
Extract Two
… me and the parents just seem to bond. I seem to spark up
relationships with parents. Before I know, parents are crying on my
shoulder you know, we are able to talk to each other like we are humans at
the end of the day they are not afraid to approach me. And the way I am
with them, my attitude toward them, I’m really relaxed …I’m not acting in
any way to make them feel threatened or that I am better than them, do you
understand me.
Marcia again invokes the notion of ‘human’ which seems to be in opposition to
‘teacher’. Contrast this to her perceptions of the final placement which was located in a
predominantly white suburban area.
Extract Three
I feel they’re very wary of me ... I’m the only black teacher here and to them
maybe ... I look about 22 ... so it’s ... not sussed me out and... a colleague of
mine commented … that sometimes I come across as being very businesslike because I’ll come in, in the morning ... this is my job, I come in, in the
morning and I’ll bring my bag down and what-not and ... maybe I won’t
write a message of the day I’ll just be ... I’ll just get on, I’ll be marking and
what-not, so maybe they’ve found me ... not like other teachers that they
know.
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It appears here that Marcia has become less ‘human’. It is the first time that she
identifies herself as ‘a black teacher’. The significance of this begins to unfold further in
the final extract. Marcia was offered employment in the school where she completed the
final placement. Her father encouraged her to accept the job.
Extract Four
He said - It doesn’t matter, you go there and you show them, you know,
there are your type of people out there ... but it’s different ... I’ve got
different expectations and values and what-not, and morals going up here,
whereas down there I felt ... there was ... I felt there was a moral running
through between us all ... I don’t know, it’s weird ... You know where I’m
coming from and I know where you’re coming from and so we bond straight
away … whereas when you don’t know where somebody’s coming from you
can’t bond ... I don’t think you can bond, and if you do bond I think it’s only
on a superficial level ...
…well up here, even more so that word professionalism is over me, because
I come to work and I do my job. I’m here to teach and it’s like I’m doing the
best job I can whereas may ... maybe down there I g[o]t more involved, I’d
get more emotionally ... emotionally attached.
The extracts point to a complex picture of identity. Marcia’s identity is intersected by
‘race’, class and gender; her account of transition perhaps signals the way professional
identity is shaped by this matrix. It is striking the way in which the school locales are
positioned by Marcia and her father: ‘there’,‘out there’, ‘down there’, ‘up here’ could
signify geographical location, but it also points to the hierarchical class / ‘race’
relationships. Implicit in this is the suggestion of boundaries, knowing ones place: who
is able to go where (Sibley, 1995). ‘Out there’ places Marcia and her previous
placement school on the periphery, outside; positioning them as ‘them’ as opposed to
‘us’ on the inside. In advising Marcia to ‘go there’, her father is encouraging her to
transgress the boundary, to counter dominant perceptions of who can teach. However, it
is not just about the technical delivery; there are ‘expectations’, ‘values’ and ‘morals’.
Marcia defined ‘morals’ as ‘an understanding’. Are current conceptions of teacher
identity and professionalism degendered’, ‘deraced’, ‘disembedded and
decontextualised’? Does such understanding allow for difference and diversity? How
is it that Marcia and her father come to locate themselves as ‘out there’ or ‘down there’.
I turned to a wider data source from other projects.
‘Them and Us’
Trainees’ accounts show ways in which Black and minority ethnic trainees are made
visible and invisible. For instance Fatima describes a situation in her placement school
where she was partnered with a white trainee:
I think the teachers may not realise that they’re doing this, it’s that implicit
that … when they are addressing us as students they sort of …. They’ll look
at my friend … even though they’re addressing the both of us, they’ll make
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eye contact with her rather than me and maybe talk to her rather than
addressing the both of us…
Similarly, Shakeela found that ‘most of the time … maybe it was natural for them to go
and start speaking to my partner.’
The headscarf is a strong marker of difference which makes trainees highly visible.
Shakeela chose not to wear her headscarf in new situations believing this would make
her more approachable, but ‘the moment [she] go[es] home, [she] change[s] into [her]
own clothes, because that’s how [she] feels more comfortable.’ Fatima on the other
hand does wear her headscarf:
… when I go into school I don’t have to just fight the usual thing that any
other student going into the placement would be fighting … I have to break
through a lot of those stereotypes and sort of prejudices (Fatima)
Fatima and her friends were frequently singled out for ‘always being together’. She
commented that other students sit together with their friends, ‘but it’s not apparent
because there are so many more of them and there’s less of us they can basically notice
that we’re together.’
Just as the headscarf marks difference, there is evidence to suggest that physical features
– phenotype- become the trainee’s sole defining factor. Maureen explains, ‘I think
they’ll look at me and think I’m black before they even notice my ability. Describing her
entrance to her placement, Tracy commented, ‘When I walked in you could just cut the
atmosphere with a knife’. Evadney had grown up in a predominantly white area where
she was the only black pupil in her primary school and had encountered name calling.
She would describe herself as a teacher;
… but in describing myself I would definitely say that I was black I would
have to mention it some way and I don’t know if that would be because I’d
want to, but it’s just because I’m so conscious of being different that I would
have to say it anyway… (Evadney)
Racialized Identities
Having engaged in a number projects now exploring minority ethnic trainees’
experiences of ITT, I have become increasingly dissatisfied with the outcomes of the
research. Identifying overt and covert episodes of discrimination, as has been done in
numerous other studies does not appear to have any impact. In many ways our
conceptions of Black and minority ethnic groups somehow work to fix and essentialise
identities. Efforts to understand the phenomenon also work to further fix and
essentialize identities. Gunaratnam (2003) discusses the problems inherent in
researching race and ethnicity.
The concepts of ‘race’ and ‘racialization’ are problematic. Small (1994: 33) cited in
Murji and Solomos (2005: 2) comments that racialization has been regarded as ‘a
problematic, a process, a concept, a theory, a framework and a paradigm.’ ‘Race’ as a
concept to signify biological difference has been discredited, rather ‘it is formed and
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fashioned’ (Essed and Goldberg, 2002: 3). Ahmed (2002: 47) sees ‘race’ as an ‘effect of
racialization’ rather than its cause. ‘The racial body’ is therefore ‘a product of the
process of racialization’ a process which is sociohistorical. Through this process ‘racial
categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed.’ (Omi and Winant,
1994:55). See Barot and Bird (2001) and Murji and Solomos (2005) for a fuller
discussion.
For the purposes of this paper I am considering racialization as a process of othering. I
would argue that difference is not a constituent part of the body but takes form in the
spaces between bodies in particular sites and times. Consider Marcia’s identification as
a black teacher: it took a particular context and relationship with particular bodies for
her to see ‘blackness’ as significant…..
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Meg Maguire for recommending me to Sharon Gewirtz and Pat Mahoney to
participate in the TLRP seminar series. A studentship and ESRC funding enabled the
Shifting Identities work. I would like to thank Dr Olwen Mcnamara, Professor Tony
Brown and Professor Ian Stronach who supervised the study. The pilot project exploring
the Recruitment and Retention of Minority Ethnic Trainees was funded by the TTA.
Work on this project was done in collaboration with former colleagues, Dr Olwen
McNamara, Dr Tehmina Basit , Gill Hatch, and Pat Hoodless, Sandra Palmer. The
views expressed in the paper are those of the author.
Address for correspondence
Lorna Roberts, Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan
University, Institute of Education, 799 Wilmslow Road, Didsbury, Manchester, M20
2RR. Email: L.J.Roberts@mmu.ac.uk
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