Afterword: Looking Back, Moving Forward

Abstract

There is a temporal dimension to an afterword that echoes its structural position in a book, providing a perch from which one can cast an eye backward. As a temporal device, it traditionally says something about what one has just read, not as conclusion or summary but as a description of the processes that have led to the creation of the book itself. However, my approach in this afterword takes a different tack in seeking to converse with some of the central ideas presented here in ways that also look forward. It offers me an opportunity to think alongside some of the key concerns developed across the chapters to see how they can open up new trajectories of inquiry, formations of thought, and ecologies of practice. Explorations of Self invites inquiry into the nature of self and its relationship to the figure of the teacher and teaching practice. It calls on us to be attentive to the ways in which who we are can act as a source for understanding what we are and what we do. When I was reading these chapters I was, as I’m assuming many readers were as well, reminded of both who and what I am and the distinctions I make between them. As many of the contributors here suggest, making such distinctions between who and what, however, can be fraught with assumptions that replicate dualist conceptions of the world (Bai et al., Sellman). Other authors suggest that self and identity are synonymous, thus insisting that teacher identities are always imbricated with the self (Lyle), while still others see the friction between them (Zhao). Some see self as a process which provides a rich ground for exploring how selves and practices are conditioned by larger trajectories of culture (Ritter) – trajectories which actually shape the very conception of self (Ergas and Ragoonaden). Other contributors foreground the centrality of narrative and the arts in formations of the self as central to overcoming a learned dividedness (Lyle, Kitchen), while others explore the conundrums faced within the self-study of practice (Pinnegar and Hamilton). Still others situate the self within a project of mindfulness as key to developing certain skills, such as CCK (Hulburt et al.) or to developing an ecological self (Albrecht). Others suggest that there is an ontological basis to teaching itself (Vlieghe and Zamojski), thus making who and what we are coterminous, while yet others eschew ontological framings of self altogether, viewing the self as “states of mind” (Ergas). Through demonstrating such variety of perspective, what these chapters do collectively is stake different claims about what or who the