ABSTRACT
Various researchers working from an interactionist perspective have made a convincing case regarding the importance of the self in teaching and the manner in which it is complex, differentiated and subject to change depending upon time and circumstance in the teacher’s life. However, as Merleau-Ponty (1962) pointed out since perception is always from a vantage point, namely the body, the ‘self’ cannot be a disembodied agent. Likewise, Stevens (1996) argued that to be a person involves embodiment, or being related to a particular body. If this is the case then it would appear the part that the body plays in relation to the sense of self in teaching has been largely neglected. Indeed, teachers’ bodies have been an absent presence in the literature (Sparkes, 1996a). That is, their bodies as part of the body-self complex are everywhere in terms of their gender, age, social class, ableness, sexual identity, race, ethnicity, career-decisions, tiredness, stress and emotional reactions to teaching episodes, critical events, and teacher burnout, yet their subjectively experienced bodies are nowhere in terms of being the direct focus for analysis. For Shilling (1993) this absence is symptomatic of a much wider underestimation of the importance of the corporeal in schooling and a more general neglect of the embodied nature of the educational enterprise.
