Academic identities in the contemporary university: seeking new ways of being a university teacher

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes academic identities and academic agency in the context of knowledge management and production that permeate the contemporary university. A practical argumentation on the meaning of teaching activity seeks to propose, in contrast to traditional approaches, that identity and meaning are constitutive dimensions of present activity. Furthermore, as analyzed, the present action of the teacher, students, and things produces meaning and identity. I argue that, even while immersed in the functional environment of the university, teacher identities are not entirely bound to determination. Instead, it is contended that teaching events often provoke moments of ‘professional desubjectivation’ resulting from the teacher’s response to present situations that demand a different attitude and disposition. The result of this argument presents, through teaching activities, the possibility of enacting educational gestures, such as those shown during study activities.

KEYWORDS:

• Teachers’ identity
• university
• being
• teaching scene
• study

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A practical argumentation essentially attempts to connect reflective theoretical discourses with practice. As proposed by Craig (1996), theorization of a practice is a movement of conceptual abstraction in which ‘the practice is typified or idealized such that particular instances are redescribed in less context-specific, more universalized terms’ (469).

2 Schatzki argues ‘that human activity should be understood as an indeterminate temporalspatial event: an inherently temporalspatial happening.’ Accordingly, time and space are not merely features of an activity (when or where something happened) but instead are constitutive dimensions of the ‘happening’ of action. Moreover, for him, the past, present, and future dimensions of the activity are simultaneous, occurring at a single stroke. Then, even though the performance of particular actions is determined by motivations and future pursuits, the reasons for acting are not fixed until the action is performed.