ABSTRACT

There is a recognised tendency in education to hide behind the professional role, within a profession that "fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, and the abstract". When practitioners bow to pressure, however, they can feel a sense of disconnectedness within their practice, a feeling that it is both "inauthentic and alienating". Young children have an incredible capacity to sense authenticity, integrity, or the lack of them in adults, leading Palmer to suggest that the "selfhood of the teacher is key" to success. Children, through their teacher's attitudes and society's mores and values, can find themselves marginalised because of their race, ethnicity, faith, gender orientation, behaviour, disability and so on. Self-knowledge is powerful and healing, leading to the possibility of self-determination. Autoethnography provides practitioners with a way of eliciting self-knowledge, looking inwards, backwards and then forwards, armed with insight.