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Abstract
Authenticity is often touted as an important virtue for teachers. But what do we mean when we say that a teacher ought to be ‘authentic’? Research shows that discussions of teacher authenticity frequently refer to other character traits or simply to teacher effectiveness, but authenticity is a unique concept with a long philosophical history. Once we understand authenticity as an ethical and metaphysical question, the presumed connection between authenticity and teaching appears less solid. While being true to oneself may render it more likely that a teacher does her job well, there is also reason to believe that excellent teachers can be inauthentic and that inept or even very dangerous teachers can be authentic. This paper breaks down the concept of teacher authenticity and examines three cases to show that the relationship between authenticity and good teaching is less direct that it may initially seem.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Doron Yosef-Hassidim for his assistance with this research. For feedback on the ideas presented here, I am grateful to Derek Gottlieb, reviewers for this journal, and audiences at the American Educational Research Association, the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Kreber, McCune, and Klampfleitner (Citation2010) and Kreber and Klampfleitner (Citation2013) observe this as well, although they decline to defend any particular philosophical conception of authenticity in teaching.
2. Because I am focusing on teacher authenticity, the application of authenticity language to aspects of education other than personal identity will be less important for my purposes. Moreover, as I will argue, grappling with the notion of teacher authenticity is more philosophically urgent and challenging than examining, say, authentic pedagogy or authentic assessment, which do not tend to make problematic claims about the identities of people in the classroom. Indeed, teacher authenticity is vaguely credited with generating all sorts of other forms of authenticity, including student authenticity. I therefore take the normal identity-related concept of authenticity as my starting point and examine how it may or may not correlate to claims about a teacher’s overall efficacy or virtue.
3. I have given a more thorough account of this claim and the structure of authenticity, in general, in (Bialystok Citation2014).
4. Post-structuralists, who tend to reject authenticity talk altogether, may go a step further than the existentialists, claiming that identity is a performance, a negotiation, an interpretation, or a form of experimentation. These types of accounts (e.g. Foucault Citation1988; Butler Citation2006) have been popular among some educational theorists. They still require, however, some material and/or psychic starting point that can be a subject of such processes.
5. Indeed, by what standards are the actions to which I devote my authentic self even judged to be virtuous? What if a person ‘authentically’ devotes herself to an ideological cause that matters to some at the expense of others, such as a fanatical religious sect?
6. Several defenders of the virtue conception of teacher authenticity make a passing acknowledgment of this counterexample, and then go on to reiterate the virtue account without further argument. See Chickering, Dalton, and Stamm (Citation2006, 8); Kreber (Citation2013, 18); and Cranton (Citation2006, 83). I return to this problem in the final section.
7. Elsewhere, I have made a more thorough case for regarding gender identity as an aspect of the self that can also be dealt with authentically or inauthentically (Bialystok Citation2013).
8. Teacher authenticity is sometimes reduced to a function of teachers’ relations with students (e.g. Brookfield Citation2006; Frego Citation2006). While the self can never be fulsomely described in solipsistic terms, reducing authenticity to relationality seems to trivialize what is compelling about personal identity. Relationality already presumes that there are individuals with an irreducible experience of interiority, who stand to affect and be affected by interactions with others.
9. I am not suggesting that Kreber was not authentic by coming out in her work place, but that sincerity and authenticity may have accidently converged in this case: telling others who she was proved necessary for Kreber’s sense of having an authentic relation to herself.
10. For an excellent critique of some of the uses of authenticity in education, see Petraglia (Citation1998).
11. It is far from clear that these types of educational trends track something we would recognize as authenticity in a philosophical sense (again, see Petraglia Citation1998), but I leave that aside for the purposes of this paper.
12. Teacher authenticity has also been connected to practices outside the classroom, such as ‘critical reflection’ (Brookfield Citation1995; Dirkx Citation2006) and ‘soul work’ (Palmer Citation1998; Dirkx Citation2006) or ‘spirituality’ (Chickering, Dalton, and Stamm Citation2006). While introspective practices hold out the promise of revealing something about a teacher’s identity, possibly providing her with insights into herself that may inform her teaching, the recourse to unsubstantiated depth language (the ‘teacher within,’ the ‘inner voice’), and its concomitant recreation of an ‘aura’ of authenticity, invites the same scathing critique of authenticity that Adorno Citation([1964] 1973) leveled against his contemporaries decades ago.
13. Kreber concurs: ‘I want teaching to be an important aspect of what I do because it is part of who I am. It is part of my identity’ (Kreber Citation2013, 23).
14. Appealing to Heidegger, Kreber et al. (Citation2007) link authenticity in teaching to the process by which an individual becomes a teacher. If it was an authentic choice, the teacher may be said to be an authentic teacher. Brook (Citation2009) makes a similar, though more opaque, argument.
15. Haji and Cuypers (Citation2008) explain the potential paradox of teaching for authenticity since education itself is always already a form of manipulation.
16. For example, they give equal weight to the Heideggerian version of authenticity (Heidegger Citation1996) and Adorno’s famous critique of (Citation[1964] 1973), without attempting to adjudicate between these incompatible perspectives (Kreber and Klampfleitner Citation2013, 466).
17. Mary Warnock, a philosopher of education, also argues that ‘the first rule of teaching is sincerity, even if one’s sincerity is dotty or eccentric’ (Warnock Citation1996, 185). She does not, however, insinuate that teacher sincerity guarantees (or reflects) either personal authenticity or high-quality teaching.
18. Subjects in Vannini’s empirical work also agreed that ‘the most authentic component of teaching is the possibility to be useful to students’ (Citation2006, 250).
19. This work is especially important to critique because it is widely cited by other educational theorists. For example, Cranton’s edited volume Authenticity in Teaching (Citation2006) contains essays by seven other authors, most of whom reproduce her and Carusetta’s version of authenticity uncritically.
20. E.g. Brookfield (Citation2006, 5). As I have indicated throughout this paper, the critiques of Kreber and Cranton and Carusetta are generalizable to a large number of educational writers.
21. Sincerity and authenticity must be carefully disentangled in this case. Certainly, the primary crime Keegstra committed was imposing his views on his students, which does not automatically attest to the authenticity of his views (although it is hard to imagine why else he would disseminate them). Yet, it would not suffice to suggest that Keegstra ought to have been merely insincere, denying his hateful views on the job while harboring them privately. This is a person whom we might wish to simply remain inauthentic.