Teacher Identity and Ethical Responsibility: An Exploration Through Literary Representations

This dissertation investigates the meaning of ethical responsibility as a fundamental feature of teacher identity. While there is a tendency to construct both responsibility and teacher identity in terms of instructional practice, agency, and competency, this research foregrounds understudied complexes of dependency, uncertainty, and failure. Drawing on continental philosophy and psychoanalysis, I frame teacher identity from the vantage of concepts of natality, hospitality, and relationality to illuminate a central conflict of responsibility that places the teacher in a tension between an idealized conception of egoless passivity and the emotional situation of an ego-based affect of self-preservation and ego interests. Conflict and anxieties result, constituting the teacher’s emotional world. Through my investigation of this tension, I offer critique of the all-loving teacher figure by exposing how this idealization conceals the implication of education in discourses of aggression, exclusion, and social control. Literary portrayals of child/adult and student/teacher relationships in novels provide novel data to examine these tensions.