CHARITY BECKER

19. Always Becoming: Life as Self-Study

“To choose a teaching life, or to have a teaching life choose you, means entering into an intense
and intimate act of relations.”
(Ingersoll, 2014, p. 44)

I had a tenth grade student a couple of years ago ask me, if I didn’t have any children of

my own, how could I be such a good teacher. I told him that because I don’t have any children of

my own, my students are my children and that’s why I take such good care of them. My children.

Sadly, I did not always see my students in this way.

“Identity itself is a transient and fragile concept.”

There Was Once

There was once a high school English teacher who worked very hard to be good at her

job. She had a BA with Honours in English, an MA in English, and a BEd; she was an avid

reader, and she had expertise in literature and grammar. This teacher planned meticulous lessons

and maintained control of her class at all times. Her students all read the same texts at the same

times, did the same assessments at the same times, and were held to the same expectations. She

knew each of her students by name and their marks in the class and not much else. Her students

knew her by name and the subject she taught and not much else. And they all existed separately

in a common space in relative indifference to one another.

Shift.
 There was once a high school English teacher who became a student (again) and who

worked very hard to be better at her job. She expanded her expertise in literacy. This teacher

planned more thoughtful lessons and worked with her students to maintain a disciplined class.

Her students still read the same texts at the same times, did the same assessments at the same

times, and were held to the same expectations. She knew each of her students by name and their

marks in the class and knew some of the interests of some of her students. Her students knew her

by name and the subject she taught and some of her interests. And sometimes the teacher and

students existed together and sometimes they existed separately in comfortable respect for one

another.

Shift.

There was once a high school English teacher who became a writer and became part of a

community of writers and who worked very hard to become a better person. She gained expertise

as a writer but she also became more vulnerable through her writing and became more open-

minded and understanding of others through the sharing of writing. This teacher became more

flexible in adapting lessons to meet the individual needs of her students and worked with her

students to create a community of learners. Her students then sometimes read different texts at

different times and had some choice in their assessments and were still held to high expectations.

She knew each of her students by name and knew many of their stories and her students knew

her by name and knew many of her stories. And the teacher and students learned together as a

collaborative community.

Shift.
 There is a human being with a passion for reading and writing and teaching who engages

in learning with other human beings who are in the process of becoming adults. She continues to

grow and develop as a human through courses and workshops and reading and writing and

discussions and travel and mindfulness. She plans and re-plans and reflects on the teaching and

learning that happens in her classroom and serves her students with an open and loving heart.

She knows many of her students’ fears and dreams and challenges and hopes, and her students

know many of her passions and vulnerabilities. And they all work together at becoming better

versions of themselves and bettering the world for all.

Shift.

There will be…

“Teacher identity is critical to successful teaching; connectedness spills over life into the

classroom, into teaching and learning.”

(Sameshima, 2007, p. 16)

What does it mean to be a pedagogue? Max van Manen (1982) writes that “pedagogy is

the most profound relationship that an adult can have with a child” (p. 290) and that “the teacher

as pedagogue is oriented toward the child in a special way…[the pedagogue] immediately

[enters] a very personal relationship with the child” (van Manen, 1979, p. 14). The very notion of

pedagogy, according to van Manen (1991), “always assumes that there exists a personal learning

relationship between people, usually an adult and a child” (p. 30), and Sameshima (2007)

reiterates that “transformational learning is influenced by a strong, even loving, teacher/learner

relationship” (pp. 25-26). For years I taught without a personal relationship to my students. I

taught the way I had been taught. I stood at the front of the room spilling forth knowledge which
my students, sitting in rows of desks, were expected to drink in and pour back out on test days. I

did not know my students. I did not have a personal relationship with them. I taught, but I was

not a pedagogue. Wiebe and Yallop (2010) write: “In school, hearts need caring, hearts need our

attention, our investment, our time” (p. 179). My being with my students was predicated on a

sense of responsibility but not on a sense of care. I perpetuated the problems evident in many

educational systems that place subject knowledge and classroom management above care of

students.

But how was I to break free from these constraints, which my own educational

experience had so ingrained within me? Mandated professional development for teachers, often

disjointed and disconnected one-off sessions that sometimes were and sometimes were not

relevant to my individual needs and that sometimes provided and sometimes did not provide an

opportunity for professional growth, did not seem to instigate any significant change in who I

was as a teacher. I often left a PD session with a new idea for an assessment or activity or a new

way to teach a certain concept but rarely was there any significant transformation in my way of

being with my students. So how does authentic pedagogical transformation occur? How was I to

stop teaching, in the most basic definition of the word, and become a true pedagogue?

Mette Hauch, a teacher from Denmark, states: “I have to teach by being engaged and

being human and involving [my students]. They need to know that I am a person who has a life

[outside of teaching], and I need to come across as a human who they can identify with; and then

it becomes real to them” (Fullan & Langworthy, 2014, p. 14). When I began teaching, I was not

engaged in my students’ lives. In the classroom, I assumed the persona of a teacher, or what I

thought a teacher should be. I was concerned with maintaining control of what happened in the

classroom. I had an objective view of my students, rather than seeing them individually and
subjectively. van Manen (2015) writes: “As the teacher interacts with the students, he or she

must maintain an authentic presence and personal relationship with them” (p. 92). In my life

outside of the classroom, I was authentic in my relationships: I was caring, compassionate,

vulnerable, loving. But within the classroom, with my students, I was acting a part, playing a

character who differed significantly from who I was off the stage. When I began writing and

engaging in stories and reflecting on my life as an educator, however, I was able to see the

disjunction between my personal self and my professional self and I was able to begin the work

to bring these two selves together.

Sameshima (2007) writes, “the sharing of stories encourages reflexive inquiries in ethical

self-consciousness, enlarges paradigms of the ‘normative’, and develops pedagogical practices of

liberation and acceptance of diversity” (p. xi). I began to write my stories, in prose and poetry,

and to listen to others’ stories. I began to share my stories with a select group, tentatively and

reluctantly at first. Eventually I found my voice and my narratives began to find their way into

my classroom. I began to read my poems and stories to my students and, when the space was

opened up, they reciprocated by sharing their stories with me. As Wiebe and Margolin (2012)

write:

What poetry does is to work outside the paradigms that stifle change. Poetry enlivens and
invigorates my attention so that I’m attending to school in ways that are more likely to
matter to students in their present circumstances…Poetry offers a respectful rendering of
care…bringing sacredness to live beside and within heart-wrenching data. (p. 30)

Leggo (2005) also states that “teachers, both beginning and experienced, should learn to know

themselves as poets in order to foster living creatively in the pedagogic contexts of classrooms

and the larger pedagogic contexts outside classrooms” (p. 442). Through writing, I have come to

view the world differently. I am more attentive to details, to colours, to patterns. I see beauty in
brokenness and decay, in transitions and juxtapositions. And I see differently as a teacher as

well. I see the student who is always alone in the hallway. I see the dark circles under the eyes of

the student who has been crying over the lunch break. I notice when a usually talkative student is

quiet or when someone is suddenly no longer sitting with their usual group of friends. I

recognize loneliness and pain and fear in faces which, in another time, I would have passed over

without notice. And because I see, I must act. In seeing and acting in service to my students

rather than to my own teaching, I have become a pedagogue. I have learned to practice what van

Manen (1991) calls “pedagogical thoughtfulness and tact” which are practiced through

“exercising a certain perceptive sensitivity as well as by practicing an active and expressively

caring concern for the child” (p. 172). I have continued to become a better pedagogue not

through professional development but through the personal development that happens when I am

reflective on my way of being with my students. van Manen (2002) writes that when “I

experience this child’s life as more important than my own,” I must look more carefully and

reflectively at my own life, I must “question and reshape it” because I must live a life I would

want for my students; thus “the education of the child turns into self-education” (p. 14). In order

to change on the outside, I had to change on the inside. As Fidyk (2012) notes: “inner work may

be the most far-reaching ethical act in which one can engage” (p. 356). Through inner personal

development, through becoming a better human, I become a better teacher and authentic

pedagogical transformation occurs.

“These stories in our lives are the work of our human becoming.”
(MacDonald & Wiebe, 2011, p. 104)

Though I came to writing a decade into my career, becoming a writer has had the most

significant transformational impact on my living and my teaching. Like Laurel Richardson

myself…writing was and is how I come to know” (p. 33). In order to write my stories, I had to

dig deeper into myself. Nairne and Thren (2017) write, “stories are how a person knows who

they were, who they are, and, potentially, who they will be” (p. 115). Writing has required me to

look more closely at who I am and to recognize the disjunctions between my personal and

professional selves and between who I was, who I am, and who I want to be. And so began the

process of creating and recreating myself through words. Ted Aoki claims: “Whenever I write a

story, I not only produce a narrative but I’m reproducing myself. The very narrating acts upon

me, and I’m changing” (in Leggo, 2004, p. 99). For me, reflecting happens through writing. As I

write my experience, I reflect on my experience; in the rewriting, I am able to change who and

how I am and thus to change future experiences. van Manen ( 2003) also states, “the writer

dwells in an inner space inside the self. Indeed this is a popular way of spatially envisioning the

self: an inner and an outer self. But phenomenologically it is probably just as plausible to say that

the writer dwells in the space that the words open up” (p. 2). Words cracked through to the

places within that I had hidden even from myself and as I collected the fragments of my being I

realized new ways of putting the pieces back together, new ways of being.

“It is the word that makes us human.”

“The writing was the net in which I tried to catch the intimate splinters of my experience.”
(Barnes, 2014, p. 249)

“Words,” writes Carl Leggo (2012), “are wild with insight, with ways for seeing and

knowing the world” (p. 147). Words are powerful. Words can change lives. Words have changed

my life. Not just my own words, but also the words of others. van Manen (1990) writes, “we

gather other people’s experiences because they allow us to become more experienced ourselves”

( p. 62); and “this is where the listening to and witnessing of the life stories of others lies. You

listen because you do not know and you listen because you understand that each person is the

expert of his or her own life” (Norton, 2017, n.p.). My own experience expands when I am

attentive to the stories of others. I come to know things I could not have known on my own. I

have become a gatherer of stories, particularly the stories of my students. As MacKenzie (2012)

states, “I have become, as a result of my encounters with the students and their writing” (p. 213).

Because of my students’ stories, I have become more – more open, more vulnerable, more

understanding, more patient, more empathetic, more tactful, more kind. Because of my students’

stories, I have been transformed from merely teaching to being a pedagogue, from playing a role

to living as a complete, embodied human being. Together, my students and I continue our

process of becoming and of making the world a better place. As Sameshima writes, “when all

stories can be heard, then we can be truly democratic, overcome privileging, and develop in

ourselves and in our schools lives of peace, happiness, and joy” (2007, p. 288).
 “We end up loving the people we serve.”
(Durman, 2017)

Last spring I attended a workshop on archetypes with Newfoundland author, Donna

Morrissey. Prior to the workshop, participants completed a self-inventory to determine which

archetypes were their strongest. In the past, I had always struggled with self-inventories of this

type. I was never sure whether to answer as my personal self or as my professional self, two

sides which stood in contrast to one another. This time I did not have that struggle. My prevalent

archetypes – the lover, whose aim is to build community and oneness; the caregiver, whose aim

is to help and care for others; the creator, whose aim is to create a better world for others; and the

innocent, whose aim is to be safe and to maintain hope – apply to both my personal and my

professional selves. As my professional self has come into alignment with my personal self, I

have become more comfortable in my classroom. I am no longer playing a role. I am authentic,

and I am no longer afraid to let my students see who I am, to see my passions and my

vulnerabilities.

Wiebe and Snowber (2012) write, “living my vulnerabilities in the classroom must not be

excluded from a theory of practice. The continuous struggle with the complexities of living are

the complex vulnerabilities that I ought to bring with me into the classroom” (p. 454). My

students struggle every day with unimaginable challenges. I have taught students who live in

extreme poverty and miss classes because they have no food or no shoes; students who live with

chronic pain or who are battling depression or anxiety or addictions; students whose parents are

addicts and who sometimes have no electricity because the money has gone for drugs; students

who have been the victims of bullying, of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse; students who

are lonely and can’t understand why no one wants to be their friend; students who have never
known how it feels to be successful or to be praised for anything. There are so many things

about which I can do nothing. But I can, at the very least, let them know that they are not alone. I

can make sure that they leave school knowing that someone cared about them, that someone

appreciated them, that someone loved them. Shields and Reid-Patton (2009) write:

Kindness has the power to restore dignity and extend grace even when it seems
undeserved. Kindness can bring with it healing and restoration. It seems to call forth the
best in the other. Kindness is a response to the perceived value of the other, an
acknowledgement of the sanctity of life and the dignity of all humanity. In embracing
kindness as the cornerstone for teacher and learning, we see that we can create situations
that offer others the respect and consideration that is so essential for learning to occur. (p.
13)

I hope that all of my students experience this kindness in my classroom. I wish it had always

been that way.

“We are always becoming.”

I am…
(in the style of Carl Leggo)

zealous zestful
youthful yearning
xenodochial (e)xpressive
wondering worrying
vocal vulnerable
understanding uplifting
trusting tenacious
sensitive seeking
researching renewing
questing questioning
open organized
natural nonconforming
mindful motherly
loving learning
kind kaleidoscopic
joyous journeying
inspired introspective
hopeful happy
guiding growing
friendly fierce
enthusiastic encouraging
dedicated determined
creative caring
brave blossoming
attentive aspiring

always becoming

“In the doing, in the creating we are becoming. We are transforming ourselves.”
(Irwin in Sameshima, 2007, p. xx)

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