Immoral Education

The Assault on Teachers' Identities, Autonomy and Efficacy

Simon Gibbs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351254823
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book brings together for the first time a synthesis of philosophical and psychological material to examine the basis for the professional identity that teachers might believe in, and the effects of misunderstanding and mistreating these beliefs. By critically synthesising findings from a range of sources, the book provides a rationale that argues an essential ingredient of good education is the quality of teachers who have a reaffirmed sense of creativity, autonomy and agency. The book presents a role for educational psychology in informing educational and inclusive processes, filling a longstanding need for a text that delineates the way psychological phenomena underpin education.

Beginning by considering notions of 'self' and 'identity', the book explores the relationship between our identity as defined by ourselves, but also as defined by others in the social and professional groups we may or may not be considered as being part of. It looks critically at how the erosion of the professional identity of teachers has affected education, and considers the morality of 'othering' 'others' and its damaging effect on teachers and young people. Gibbs reflects on the organisational structure and leadership of schools, the psychology of these institutions, and the barriers that need to be overcome in order to promote greater inclusivity within them.

Offering a careful and insightful look at the psychology behind education and teaching, this is an essential read for teacher educators, researchers and academics in the field of education and will appeal to policy makers, teachers and educational psychologists.

Chapter 1
Selves and identities

I first came to the ideas of Gabriel Garcia Márquez in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. There Márquez described the dangers of isolation for a family that cannot (or will not) escape their own self-inflicted misfortunes. In Love in the Time of Cholera, Márquez revisited the theme of the iterative nature of history, death and rebirth and pondered the power of relationships in sickness and health. The novel is about the intimacies of a relationship and the consequences of rejection and inequality, but also challenges us to question the facades and personal identities created and recreated by the characters in the novel. It is about the process of ‘continuing to become’.

Much of what follows in this book is also about relationships, how we see ourselves and how we are perceived by others. How we are identified by others and how we identify ourselves are not necessarily congruent but both are integral to the discourses we hold with ourselves and others; they are part of the vernacular and both are yoked to the culture of individuality that is so pervasive in many societies. In Westernised societies, we are encouraged in various ways to see ourselves as unique. We talk, for instance, of someone who is ‘uniquely qualified’ for a particular role. We laud the individual who outcompetes the others and wins the prize. This sense of uniqueness and the identities we adopt can, I suggest, blind us to our common humanity. It is this disregard for each other’s humanity that I want to question and investigate as part of my concerns about a key societal fulcrum: education and educational processes.

As indicated in the Introduction, my main aim in this book is to raise awareness of psychological factors that may be harmful to education. To do this, I need to pay attention to the context for education and the beliefs of those who, by virtue of their profession, identify themselves, or are identified by others, as ‘educators’ or ‘teachers’. This entails thinking about the nature of professional identity and how that is constructed. In this chapter, however, I examine general notions of ‘self’ and ‘identity’; what are some of the possible consequences of such conceptualisations; and how ‘identities’ may be formed. In doing so, I also examine some of the illusions (or myths) we have about, first, our notionally distinctive ‘selves’; and, second, the relationship between our identity (our sense of individual personhood) and others in social groups that we may (or may not) be perceived to be in; and, last, what we can morally and ethically do in light of such considerations. This leads me to consider both how identity is both socially constructed and socially formative and the scope of individual identity and autonomy. This latter involves considering what autonomy and responsibilities we believe we have – that we take for granted – or perhaps, realistically, recognise as being limited. Some of these considerations will be based on philosophical work; some will be conceptually or empirically psychological in nature. I will discuss the nature of teachers’ professional identities and some of the factors that shape these in a subsequent chapter. In this chapter, however, I also suggest that identities as our observable or conceptualised characteristics, epiphenomena, can also be misleading or prejudicial.

1.1 General notions of self and identity

For the purposes of what follows, I will try to discriminate consistently between ‘the self’ and ‘identity’ (following Gerson, 2014). The former almost tautologically entails consideration about what one believes about one’s ‘self’ for one’s self’s sake (and one’s beliefs about related concepts such as self-interests, self-efficacy and self-esteem). But when talking about one’s self caution is needed:

The point is not to know whether I speak of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather to know whether, when I speak of myself, I am the same as the self of whom I speak.

(Lacan & Fink, 2006, p. 430)

While ‘identity’ may be used synonymously with ‘self’ in much of the relevant literature, here I will mostly use identity to mean how one wishes to appear to others and how one is identified by others. However, as far as is known, neither self nor identity consists in any distinctive material, neural, component of the brain.¹ Both self and identity (as simple constructions of our embodied minds) are used variously as philosophical, psychological and sociological devices to help delineate and understand human behaviour and mentalisation as epiphenomena or emergent properties of brain activity. But, while I am convinced by arguments such as those presented by Derek Parfit that both our physical and psychological features depend partly on the states of our brains (see Parfit, 1984, p. 237), I do not subscribe to a crude reductionist views of human behaviour. Further, since we are typically never totally isolated from all external physical and social environments (including the environments of ourselves), it is, therefore, (thanks to Simon’s ant) ultimately only possible to study these epiphenomena and their purportedly correlated behaviours in the contexts of the environments in which they are situated, constructed and construed (Simon, 1996). Importantly for what follows, I must note that in a series of thought experiments Parfit showed that an individual’s identity cannot be fully determined, except arbitrarily. Parfit rejected the plausibility of the argument put forward by some who:

… believe that the identity of everything must always be determinate. These people accept a strict form of the doctrine no entity without identity. This is the claim that we cannot refer to a particular object, or name this object, unless our criterion of identity yields a definite answer in every conceivable case. On this view, we often mistakenly believe we are referring to some object, when, because there is no such criterion of identity, there is no object.

(Parfit, 1984, p. 240)

It seems to me that this argument, particularly when applied in the domain of human existence and inter-relationships, is another way of guarding against the essentialisation or objectification of persons that is a critical problem in the current state of education. I discuss some of this (and more of Parfit’s work) in the next sections but will return to it in greater detail in a later chapter.

1.1.1 Objections to objectification

Despite reasoned arguments such as Parfit’s (above), the construction of both ‘self’ and ‘identity’ continue to be objectified by authors and practitioners. Thus, for example, Michael Gerson, seeking to promote a role for neuroscience in complementing psychoanalytic approaches to ‘self’ and ‘identity’, appears to have suggested that objectification is at least partially possible:

Self as a source of knowledge and percept suggests a Jamesian subjective being, whereas self as a narrative and interpreter suggests an objectified reflection … The use of language to speak about one’s self, especially in comparison to others, forms an objectified frame of reference separate from the ‘being’ of self.

(Gerson, 2014, p. 215)

Some of this may be an artefact of the limitations of language (and space) in Journal papers but exemplifies how easy it can be to slip into the old habits of positivism.

Likewise, in the social and political, psychological environments of education, concepts such as ‘identity’ and ‘self’ are, I suggest, easily misused by being objectified. Neither concept is essentially a natural category (or kind) that has distinct, bounded and immutable qualities (in the way that we see ‘ant’ as distinct from ‘diamond’, for example). If, for example, I am identified as a ‘vegetarian’, how distinctly and immutably different am I as far as you are concerned? Nick Haslam and his colleagues have investigated the issue of social categorisation in depth and mapped out the stigmatising effects of essentialist beliefs about social categories. Haslam has also challenged the hegemony of medical classification of mental health. Given the incursions of medicalising children’s apparent difficulties (for instance, in terms of behaviour and concentration that is too readily diagnosed as ‘Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder’), it is worth noting here what he has said. Having provided a rigorous critique of notions of psychiatric, mental-health conditions, he concluded that:

the adverse consequences of essentialist thinking about mental disorders among laypeople are another neglected reason to be wary of these ways of conceptualizing psychiatric phenomena. Understandings of mental disorders as natural kinds with biogenetic essences that originate in professional discourse may spread into everyday language and thought, often in a vulgarized form, and there is now considerable evidence that the implications for lay conceptions of mental disorders are troubling.

(Haslam, 2014, p. 23)²

The objectification or essentialising of personhood is ethically objectional and practically risky. Insensate things (for instance, diamonds) may have objective ‘identities’ that are unchangeable, universally defined and forever recognised. Human beings are not like that. We are not as different from each other as, for instance, gold and ant, or even as tiger and lion are. We are diverse in our superficial characteristics, our traditions and languages, but we share a common genetic heritage and a common humanity and can communicate empathically.

One of the consequences that I think follows from taking an essentialist and reductionist view of identity (aside from categorisation and stereotyping) is that it suggests there lies an ultimate causal origin behind the identity. Some sort of homunculus, perhaps. It seems to me that such an approach is both theoretically and practically problematic. Jacques Derrida sought to challenge this by posing the conundrum: ‘Must not the structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be already structured, in order to be the genesis of something?’ (Roy, 2010, p. 176; emphasis in the original.) The solution, for Derrida (and others drawing from the well of phenomenology first tapped by Hegel (1977)³), was to construct identity in terms of differences. Just as we notice something most quickly when, for instance, a bird that has been camouflaged by the leaves in a hedge flies up, so we distinguish identities by comparison with what they differ from, what they are not. Ultimately, this is a relationship with ‘otherness’ (which I address in detail in Chapter 2). Edward Sampson used this deconstruction of essentialism as cornerstone of his relational view of identity. Sampson also drew on Derrida in saying:

The essential reality of a given object can appear only by virtue of the unstated other that is necessary for the object’s identity to appear as such. In short, otherness is the basis for all identity, thereby undoing the essentialist view of identity and requiring that each identity be understood in terms of differences.

(Sampson, 2008, p. 90)

As I will show in Chapter 2 with reference to the work of Lacan and Levinas, we are primarily defined by our difference from the Other but refract different differences from each other (including ourselves) that we encounter day by day.

1.1.2 Self-interest

From time to time, some of us are plagued by inter-related questions along the lines of ‘who (or what) am I’, ‘what’s my role (or job)’, ‘what should I do here’? Derek Parfit posed and examined the key issue more elegantly and precisely by presenting the issue thus: ‘Many of us want to know what we have most reason to do’ (Parfit, 1984, p. 3). For very many teachers working in the educational systems of Western jurisdictions, these questions deserve to become the focus of pertinent and worrying concerns about the role of education and educators’ professional identities.⁴

Also implicit in these questions is the notion that there is a personal and autonomous self – a phenomenal self that has to be discovered or revealed and play its part in our personal development. In the Western Judeo-Christian and Greek philosophical traditions of thought, it is commonplace to believe that the self is persistent and unchanging, and that we are, at least partially, but more likely, predominately self-interested, making as sure as possible that we, ourselves, are each ok. (That is to say I will look after myself; you look after yourself. I’ll be too busy looking after myself to look after you.) These beliefs are associated with trying to do what we can to make our personal situation as good as it may be (or at least to do what is necessary to personally survive). It is, accordingly, evident in many aspects of Western cultures that we each behave in ways that are motivated by seeking to feel as good as we can about ourselves as individuals.⁵ Thus, when things are going well we seek achievements that reinforce a sense of well-being that we have autonomously achieved through our own efforts and agency. (The tautologies here are deliberate to set the agenda for what follows.) Western cultures offer us innumerable material rewards, to give us a sense of physical comfort for apparently minimal effort (‘buy now, pay later’). Most of us will also find affirmation of who we are, who we are regarded as being, through membership of groups – at work as well as in social and family settings. As I will discuss later, we tend to choose to join the groups that we can best identify with and best resonate and reinforce our beliefs in our selves.

As I will also show, an answer to the question about ‘who we are’ is related to not only ‘where we are’ but more importantly ‘who we are with’, and perhaps most importantly, ‘how we are’. Who we are with, what society we are in, provides many of the constraints and affordances on who we can be, what we can responsibly do and what role we have in specific circumstances. We are continuously evolving, but it is not possible to prove that we are distinct identities. For, as Parfit suggested:

Because we ascribe thoughts to thinkers, we can truly claim that thinkers exist. But we cannot deduce, from the content of our experiences, that a thinker is a sep...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author biography
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: can education in a troubled world help us in becoming human?
• 1 Selves and identities
• 2 Others, othering and dialogue
• 3 Teachers’ professional identities and autonomy
• 4 Categories, labels and stereotypes
• 5 In- and out-groups: segregation and exclusion
• 6 Leadership, efficacy and inclusion
• 7 Conclusions
• Index