ABSTRACT
The Indispensability and Impossibility of Identity Identity is indispensable for its role in self-denition; and yet at the same time, a full or pure identity is made impossible by its reliance on that which exceeds its scope. Identity, then, is replete with paradox and tension: a complex matter of the social and the individual, of discourse and practice, of similarity and dierence, of reication and participation, of the rational and the emotional, and of the symbolic and the ‘real’. Far from the mere donning of a pre-determined set of characteristics, identity is a never-completed ‘work-in-progress’, a project of personal formation through active participation in the living communities where practices and meanings are established, armed, or contested across time and space, reecting the interplay of the past, present and future and interconnections between the global and the local. But what does this paradoxical complexity imply in relation to teaching and the process of becoming a teacher? Is recognition of the complexities through which our identities are constructed as much as we can expect to achieve? Or is it possible, despite the paradoxes discussed above, to go beyond understanding and engage in work by the self on the self? And how might teacher educators and pre-service teachers do such ‘identity work’? What I want to argue here is that these very aspects of tension and paradox are sources of creative potential in our identities. is notion has anities to what Alsup describes as ‘borderland discourses’, or uncomfortable, disturbing, edgy zones where disparate discourses collide, and in the process open windows onto “an enhanced consciousness, a meta-awareness of thought and action that can incorporate the personal as well as the professional, and multifaceted, contextual, and sometimes contradictory ideologies and situated identities” (2006, p. 125).
