Edu-Crafting Teacher Identities: Diffractive Auto/ethnography through Cartomancy

Abstract

“Teacher identity” is a popular topic for discussion and reflection in teacher education programs. We ask pre-service teachers to consider pervasive cultural and personal images of teachers (as expert, caregiver, authoritarian, and so on) in order to accept or resist these images as they contribute to the construction of their own teacher identity. Discussed in theory and aspirational language, teacher identity appears to behave in a reasonably orderly fashion; however, once the novice teacher is introduced to the dynamic world of teaching, teacher identity can become an absolute mess to untangle. As an approach to research, posthumanism offers us a chance to see this mess as beautiful in its lively, evolving, and relational condition. This posthumanist project takes to heart that in order to understand concepts such as identity differently, we must also look differently. After Taylor (2018), who describes posthumanist research as “allowing oneself to be lured by curiosity, surprise, and wonder” (p. 377), I conduct a diffractive auto/ethnographic study to find out what happens if I take seriously the value of play in research, wondering what can be gained, in terms of understandings of teacher identities, through cartomancy (i.e., tarot readings) as a potential source of knowledge. This unconventional approach to research allows me to give generous attention to these teachers’ identities by acknowledging their connections to other selves, other humans, non-humans, and more-than-humans. Through this project, I find an expanded sense of self-perception and an increased recognition of a teacher’s multiple, connected, changing, and changeable identities.