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

Introduction

Currently, the conditions and expectations of the academic teaching profession are defined by applying non-educational values, such as those associated with managerialism (Shepherd 2018). Teaching activities are increasingly described and evaluated according to efficiency, effectiveness, and excellence criteria using techniques and performance standards derived from business-oriented sectors (Teelken 2012).

Notably, in the functional environment of the contemporary university, while teaching is undoubtedly important, scholarly objectives appear to be moving away from academic teacher identity (Laiho et al. 2022). In this context, the teacher is often seen as an implementer of policies and initiatives (Hordern 2015) or as a facilitator of learning, especially in the current shift in higher education from a teaching-centered to a learning-centered approach (Trautwein 2018). This situation includes, among other things, teachers’ identities and professional development being shaped by instrumentalist notions of what it means to be a teacher and an increased emphasis on accountability (Buchanan 2015). In this context, there is a precarious sense of identity for those engaged in teaching, especially when the role of the teacher and even the need for a teacher in some innovative learning environments is increasingly questioned.

Beyond a critique of the teaching context, this paper proposes a practical argumentation¹ on the meaning of teaching activity. Methodologically, this paper combines empirical illustrations provided by insights from previous studies that have explored the development of academics’ identities in the contemporary university and theoretical argumentation based on philosophical, educational, and social theorists who articulate and give substance to the arguments presented here.

Initially, this practical reflection aims to describe the current situation of academic activities in the contemporary university and its effects on teachers’ identities. The constellation of performative and competitive practices that prioritize research productivity, external recognition, and goal-oriented agendas of funding agencies impact the relationships between research and teaching. Rewards are more often obtained in research – academic production and academic prestige are congruent with the highly competitive expectations in contemporary academia – while the role of the teacher seems to wither in this context. As proposed by Biesta (2004), under the dominance of the language of learning, teaching has been redefined as a supporting or facilitating activity that aims to provide learning opportunities. In this sense, the relationship between teacher and learner becomes an economic transaction formulated under technical terms of effectiveness and efficiency. Furthermore, teaching-focused identities are perceived as something other than promising or prestigious in this context. The second objective is to argue that the stage offered by managerial universities does not define teaching activity and its possibilities. Even if practice organization circumscribes activity, it is possible to analyze teaching activity as an event (see Schatzki 2010). Accordingly, no action is fixed before the performance; teaching happens instead. The main implication is that teachers’ identities can be explored as performance events; in other words, identity befalls the teacher while performing teaching activities.

Renewing the interest in exploring teacher identities becomes relevant given her precarious situation in the context of the contemporary university. Beyond the commonly assigned actions, such as transmitting knowledge and facilitating learning, it is also important to see the teacher as the one who contributes to the emergence of educational gestures of study. Furthermore, instead of focusing on the essence of teaching, the focus is on what happens during teaching moments and its impact on proposing different understandings of academic identities in the contemporary university.

The paper begins with a brief exploration of essential aspects of what constitutes the teaching scene in the contemporary university and how teachers, students, and educational things are part of it. Lingering behind the discussion about academic identities lies a tension between the increasing importance of research activities and the corresponding decline in the value of teaching. This tension, as will be elaborated below, has important effects on the pursuit of specific identities in academic contexts. A second section sets out the scene to analyze teacher identities. It first outlines how today’s university orientations, as discussed in the first section, prefigure desirable academic identities based primarily on status, peer acknowledgment, and research production. The constant threat of the erosion of teaching activities in this context points toward teachers’ identities as precarious, unstable, and transitory configurations too often confronted with particular trajectories determined by the pursuit of the standards of academic work. Broadly, the intuition behind some contemporary approaches is that teacher identity is an ongoing negotiated experience tied down by the demands of the current, ever-changing context of professional development. In contrast, the upcoming discussion argues that identity is not a process of becoming but something that happens during the present activity. Instead of focusing on predefined expectations and forms of professionalism, it is emphasized that teachers’ identities emerge in teaching events. Particular actions of the teacher, such as attitudes, decisions, and gestures that too often are veiled by the curriculum’s instruction necessities and professional development trajectories, are essential to understanding the teacher’s role and importance in education. Indeed, as it will be argued, those teaching events provoke moments of ‘professional desubjectivation’ where the teacher’s expertise is paused to open new ways to relate with their students and the subject matter studied. Here, the idea of love is essential to reveal those relations. The third section is more concerned with connecting the teacher’s agency with the contemporary university’s proposition as a time and space of collective study. From a practice perspective, the teacher’s actions coexist with the nexus of academic practices and material arrangements that constitute the university. Accordingly, study activities are presented as one of many possibilities to concretely act beyond the boundaries of the language of learning (see Biesta 2004) while giving value to the teacher as someone who inspires the emergence of university study events (see Jiménez 2020b).

The teaching scene in the contemporary university

Although there is an ongoing debate in educational literature about the role and direction of the contemporary university (see Barnett 2012; Izak et al. 2017; Masschelein and Simons 2018), there is a tacit agreement that it is an institution immersed in broader global processes. This tendency involves orientation, among others, towards international norms rather than national frameworks (Scott 2011); entrepreneurialism (Peris-Ortiz et al. 2017); transnational policy-oriented approaches, academic practices, and networks (Kauppinen 2015); and forms of knowledge management and production (Lorenz 2012; Peters 2011). In this context, the rationale for developing more efficient and effective learning and research processes seems to be shared under common global goals that have increasingly put the university under conditions of knowledge capitalism (see Peters et al. 2012). Across the world, most principles and orientations of universities are being articulated in relation to other institutions. According to Simons and Masschelein (2009b), activities and functions of the ‘knowledge triangle’ (education, research, and innovation) are continually ranked in relation to similar institutions. Thus, the distinction of specific indicators about what makes a university good – or better than others – has turned today’s university orientations into a discussion concerning matters of fact (output, indicators, and rankings) or need (assessments, satisfaction rates, and responsiveness). For Biesta (2011), the problem with this modus operandi of universities is that its orientation ‘is not toward public concerns but first and foremost toward private issues’ (45). According to Biesta, while universities are expected to be useful and competitive, they risk having nothing to say or offer outside ‘what its clientele already knows it wants and needs’ (Biesta 2011, 45, italics in original). Within these frameworks, usefulness, quality, and efficiency increasingly become means to conceive universities’ orientations and practices.

Closely related to recent university practices is the notion of entrepreneurship. Given the emphasis on innovation and the competitive environment in higher education, practices and resources are usually mobilized towards production and attracting more resources. According to Simons and Masschelein (2009b), the entrepreneurial university is concerned with ‘matters of performance and satis-fact-ion – that is, being responsive towards needs in their environment and seeking optimal ways to meet needs in research, teaching and service’ (209). However, I want to argue here that despite the managerial practices and radical strategies used to develop employment-based competencies and strengthen the ‘capacity to learn to learn’ (Jimenez 2018), this is not the only function of the university.

Under casino capitalism, higher education matters only to the extent that it promotes national prosperity and drives economic growth, innovation, and transformation. But there is more at stake here in turning the university into an adjunct of the corporation, there is also an attempt to remove it as one of the few remaining institutions left in which dissent, critical dialogue, and social problems can be critically engaged (Giroux 2011).

The university is also a vital social institution, a source of critique, and a place that embraces ‘‘strategies of exposure’ or com-munisation’ (Simons and Masschelein 2009b, 213). In both research and teaching practices, academics have an essential role in offering new possibilities for making the university a community of scholars and students. Moreover, as noted, the functional environment of the university, while problematic for understanding the role of the teacher in education, does not neglect other possibilities of existence in the university. In the case of the academic, while immersed in the university’s obsession with metrics and rankings (Barnes 2014; Gruber 2014), as well as managerial practices and techniques derived from the private sector (Laiho et al. 2022), their teaching practice offers the possibility of de-identifying such profile orientations (Masschelein and Simons 2018).

In a recent article, Fulford (2022) analyzes some signs of the crisis in the contemporary university. However, her perspective is that instead of assuming that the university has problems, we need to recognize it as a place that provokes problems that stir the mind. In other words, the university could be seen as a troublemaker. Other authors also share the concern about understanding the university in terms other than a ‘knowledge factory’ (Masschelein and Simons 2018; Biesta 2011; Wright 2017; Masschelein and Simons 2018; Zamojski 2020; Hil et al. 2021; Houtum and van Uden 2022). Among such theoretical developments, some recognize the university as a time and space of collective study. For instance, Masschelein and Simons (2018) suggest recalling the university as universitas studii (an association for study). An essential component of this originary idea of the university is the emphasis on research as ‘practices of making public and gathering a public around, with, for, and through that research as study’ (52). More specifically, in this form of university, research requires public exposition, not only implementing the means for producing something worth being published but also opening spaces to participate in ‘pedagogical forms’ of study that enact collective movements of thought. According to the authors, this is what happens in lectures and seminars. In this sense, there is no clear distinction between research and teaching practice; the academic is not an expert but a student, ‘the one who is moved by ignorance and ready to think in public and let her knowledge and existing ways of inhabiting the world be put to the test’ (54).

To understand such possibilities, we need to move beyond the pedagogical framework between the theories of learning based on student-centered or curriculum-centered approaches that focus on needs and performance. Unsettlingly, there seems to be a ‘common sense’ in education, where a positive shift has promoted the ‘learning paradigm’ while leaving the ‘instruction paradigm’ behind. The problem, beyond the changes in pedagogical practices, is that the way teachers are perceived and their functions in the classroom have changed. Notably, in the case of constructivist theories, it seems ‘to have given up on the idea that teachers have something to teach and that students have something to learn from their teachers’ (Biesta 2016, 46). What seems to be forgotten is that education is also a matter of existence in the world, and teachers have an essential role in drawing attention to things in the world.

Teacher identities in the contemporary university

What does it mean to be a teacher in a contemporary university? Any consideration of teaching activities in today’s university must engage with a background that governs how educational practices are understood in a global knowledge economy framework. These include how the university’s mission is defined and the multiplicity of perspectives contributing to the teaching and learning processes.

In that context, teacher identities lie at the intersections among the ‘knowledge triangle,’ strongly influenced by extrinsic quantitative metrics and competitive measures enacted by the universities to prioritize research and innovation over teaching. In those terms, the identity of the ‘rock star academic researcher’ emerges as the one:

(…) who are seemingly doing all the right things in terms of bringing in research grants, are prolific in terms of research publications, are adroit at securing partnerships with industry, who attract large numbers of bright young research students, and in the process, bring considerable prestige to the university and elevate its status in international league tables (Smyth 2017, 99).

Now, at first glance, it seems rather odd that teaching is missing as a quality for being an academic ‘rock star,’ but as McCune (2021) points out, in research-intensive universities, teacher identities do not contribute positively to building an ‘academic’ status and may even be perceived negatively by some academics. Indeed, the foremost hurdle academics face is the significant change in their role as workers in the ‘industrial capitalist architecture imposed on universities’ (Boden and Epstein 2006). The crucial questions to be asked here are whether there is still an interest in being a teacher in the contemporary university and how teacher identities are enacted. Before proceeding with possible answers to these questions, let me take a moment to elaborate on the idea of teacher identity.

Contemporary perspectives on teacher identity attempt to shed light on the complex process of constructing teacher identity; most approaches agree that predefined professional standards are insufficient to make sense of the interdependent teaching practice. Recent approaches to teacher identity propose three main characterizations: discontinuity, multiplicity, and sociality (Akkerman and Meijer 2011; Arvaja 2016; Vähäsantanen 2015). In these views, identity is seen as an ongoing process, as it is built on past experiences and is also shaped by the current circumstances of daily practices (discontinuity). Identity is also described as consisting of multiple sub-identities related to contexts and relationships (multiplicity). In addition, identity takes shape in social contexts and relationships, especially in collaborative exchanges in the workplace (sociality). In these terms, in the case of academics in research-intensive universities, Trautwein (2018) points out that teaching is only a sub-identity of their professional identity. Still, most academics identify as researchers and experts in a disciplinary field.

Leaving aside the many complexities that arise from these approaches, which are beyond the scope of this paper, I would like to highlight two main points for my argument: First, most conceptualizations treat identity as a process of becoming, in which identity is an ongoing, negotiated experience that is related to notions of lifelong learning and the current, ever-changing context of professional development (Scanlon 2011). Second, the analysis of identity is formulated by reference to difference. Different professional situations require taking a position in response to diverse educational settings and encounters (Arvaja 2016). However, what is done in a particular moment does not necessarily imply a change of identity or a discontinuity; for example, an academic using the ‘hat’ of a researcher on some occasions while switching to the ‘hat’ of a teacher when necessary. In my view, the relation of meaning between a teacher and a researcher does not derive from difference but from activity. The upshot of these distinctions is that teacher identities emerge significantly in teaching events; in this sense, teaching is not a process of becoming but something that happens in the present.

Moreover, what is being proposed here is that teaching does not necessarily require forms of professionalism, for instance, specific knowledge, developed level of skills, and certifications (see Macheridis and Paulsson 2019), but most importantly, often, it requires moments of ‘professional desubjectivation.’ Briefly stated, desubjectivation can be described as an experience of freedom. Given that some phenomenological approaches describe the experience invoking a string of meaningful everyday experiences, I must emphasize that the experience of desubjectivation reveals a present event that ‘has the function of wrenching the subject from itself’ (Foucault 2000, 241). In other words, it is about calling the subject into question. Furthermore, what I mean by ‘professional desubjectivation’ is not the adoption or the formation of a new identity as the result of new experiences. On the contrary, it is about how the teacher’s identity responds to what is present in the teaching event, sometimes demanding a transformation in the relationship we have with ourselves, with others, and with our knowledge. In Masschelein’s interpretation, ‘Foucault understands experience mainly as a limit-experience that transgresses the limits of a coherent subjectivity as it functions within an actual governmental regime’ (Masschelein 2006, 573). This interpretation denotes the freedom these kinds of experiences offer to the teacher, a freedom not just from the specific forms of professionalism or the expectancies of the profession but also a freedom from the teacher’s subjectivity.

This claim points in two directions. First, it points toward a different relationship between the teacher and students and knowledge. The last section will address this relationship following the ideas of studying with friends (Lewis 2013) and the experience of being-in-common (Nancy 1991). Second, it points towards opening up possibilities that allow the teacher to pause her expertise to opt for an exploratory attitude toward knowledge about the world. In this context, the educational purpose of teaching is more than facilitating learning or improving student outcomes. Following Biesta (2016), ‘[We] should understand the teacher as someone who, in the most general sense, brings something new to the educational situation, something that was not already there’ (44). However, what the teacher brings is not necessarily knowledge or skills to be transmitted but something that, according to the teacher, is worth sharing for a common experience of study. This gesture does not convey a lesson to be learned but makes possible an experience.

In this sense, teacher identities are not based on pre-established forms (expectations, pre-existing identities, or management culture) but instead take shape in the present (attitudes and dispositions). As will be discussed, the teacher is not only a professional (someone who is competent, knowledgeable, and skilled) but also someone who is interested in and attentive to the people and things that are part of the teaching scene.

According to Vlieghe and Zamojski (2019a), education always happens in relation to the study of a concrete thing, for instance, a subject matter. In that sense, ‘[t]he fundamental task of the teacher is then to show that the thing of study actually ‘matters’’ (23). The essence of their argument is their definition of ‘the uniqueness of the being of the teacher in terms of love for a subject matter’ (520–521). In other words, for them, it is the act of falling in love, not with someone but with a thing, that defines ‘being-a-teacher’ (2019b). Although the discussion of educational love is complex, especially when seen as a ‘triangular relationship’ between the teacher, the student, and the subject matter (Aldridge 2019), the gesture of teaching, of presenting something that matters, is an act of love in a double sense, as care for that part of the world that is shared and, of course, as interest and love for our students. However, these gestures are usually beyond our control. According to Biesta, teaching operates as an ‘encounter with something that is other and strange’ for the student and, as something that comes from the exterior, it presents resistance (2012, 42). While this resistance can be answered with the imposition of the student’s will or with the student’s withdrawal to avoid confrontation, for Biesta, the educational space is located between these points of resistance. To teach, then, means to make possible encounters between the students and the world, to call for the students’ attention and to provoke them to be actively exposed to the experience of not knowing. Teaching, thus understood, is not predetermined or dictated by pre-existing intentions; instead, it might be described as an experience that seeks to affect us (teacher and student) and all our senses and comes with uncertainty and risk (Biesta 2022). Likewise, the teacher’s identity, according to Biesta, ‘has to be understood as a sporadic identity, an identity that only emerges at those moments when the gift of teaching is received’ (2016, 54). In this way, we can discuss the role of the teacher in the university in different terms. As it has been elaborated, although learning is important in the university, there is more to teaching than learning. Moreover, being a teacher refers to an activity rather than a title or the development of a profession. Something is done to someone during a teaching event that affects and changes them. Yet, these encounters are not only related to learning something (e.g. a skill or a concept), but more importantly, I insist, these encounters are related to ways of existing in the world, of how we as human beings live with other persons and things in the world.

In other words, the teacher is not only someone who transmits what they know but also someone interested in studying what they do not know. In these moments, the teacher ceases to be an expert and becomes an amateur, someone who is interested and does it for love (see Masschelein and Simons 2013). Thus, teaching somehow involves the study of the uncertain, where the strange and unknown can be revealed. When this happens, the form of the teacher emerges as part of the shared exercise of studying something that becomes of interest to all those gathered in the teaching scene.

Furthermore, although the normative character of the university and past experiences, future pursuits, and motivations are determinants of the teaching activity, it is an event. Accordingly, what determines an action does not precede or follow the activity; instead, past, present, and future dimensions of the activity co-occur² (Schatzki 2010). My point is that teacher identity is not a process of becoming (of perpetual incompleteness) in which individuals constantly choose, alter, and modify their identities (see Scanlon 2011) but rather a state of being in the present. As described by Masschelein (2010), this state has to do with being attentive. Attention entails the suspension of judgment and reveals the possibility of opening oneself to the world; in other words, ‘attention makes experience possible’ (48). In the teaching scene, moreover, teachers, students, and things receive meaning because of the activities that take place in the time and space of that event. My argument mainly implies that education, research, and innovation identities are intertwined during academic activities. Then, teaching activities and teachers’ identities in the university context transcend predefined meanings and positions, as well as transitive connections between actions and outcomes. Again, it is the present action among teachers, students, and things that produces meaning and identity.

One remarkable implication of analyzing teacher identity from a practice perspective (an identity that happens during the activity) is that teaching activities also affect academic practices in the university. Following Schatzki (2002), practices are social phenomena; moreover, ‘a participant in a practice coexists not just with those with whom she interacts, but also eo ipso with various sets of other participants, including the collection of all participants’ (87). In other words, academic practices in the university coexist; practices are continually evolving and mutually shape each other, and they interweave with the material arrangements of the university. A university, then, more than an idea, is a practice.

Educational gestures in the contemporary university

Before proceeding, to provide a sense of context, I emphasize that the university is a practice shaped by academic activities and material arrangements. Furthermore, the idea I am pursuing in this section is that the evolution of universities into managerial institutions does not preclude the possibility of enacting educational gestures. While identity is provided by the position of an entity in a given practice (e.g. an academic acting in particular ways according to her functions and being identified as an academic because of what she does), following Schatzki (2002), identity also arises from actual relations among people and things. That is to say, even if the current context of the university ontologically determines academic activities in it, academic actions are not restricted by this determination. Regardless of what has been called the ‘crisis of the university’ based on the colonization of education by the capitalization of knowledge and the commercialization of research (see Zamojski 2020), I defend that academics must respond (have a responsibility to respond) in educational terms. This assertion highlights the significance of teachers’ and researchers’ actions and emphasizes the possibility of interrupting the economic logic with educational gestures (gestures of care that provoke thinking and discussion in the university).

As elaborated above, being a teacher is not defined as a normative status. Instead, being a teacher is a practical matter connected with the activities performed. Hence, I propose that teaching activities are determined not by barriers that delimit specific forms of professionalism but by present actions that make sense and constitute potential forms to relate and be attentive to students and knowledge. More specifically, teaching offers the possibility to enact a time and space of collective study in universities. Studying, furthermore, can emerge from the mutual shaping between actions and things that enter into play during certain types of events that gather students around a matter of interest. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that study activities can occur outside of educational spaces and also without the figure of the teacher. But, as I have been portraying matters, the teacher has a key role in disturbing the prefiguration of activities and moving the participants to gather around a matter to be studied. The best way to clarify these manifestations is to enumerate important ways in which teaching activities provoke study events in the university.

Perhaps the most prominent manifestation is the particular action of the teacher to disturb the direct linearity between educational activities and learning results. Contrary to the logic of learning progression, study events have a completely different temporality. Those events pause the line of progression to ‘wander around some matter,’ which calls for the attention of students. Consider, for instance, when a teacher shares her past struggles with learning history during her time in school and how her encounter with ancient Greek epics made her fall in love with a subject that gave shape to her professional life as an academic historian. Doing so, that teacher disturbs momentarily the rhythms and necessities of learning history to share an anecdote of care and love that invites not to learn but to study (to consider that matter with care and interest). As a result, a second major manifestation is the sharing of love for a matter that is important for the teacher. As elaborated in the last section, the love for something can be presented by the teacher, but it can be answered in diverse ways. What is offered by the teacher, then, is the possibility to relate with something; she exposes her interest and care for Greek epics (exposing herself in front of her students at the same time) and asks for a response (provoking thinking and discussion). Third, her exposition manifests a ‘professional desubjectivation’ that leaves open the possibility to relate with her students, not from the position of the expert but as an amateur, as someone who is interested and studies history for love. To elaborate on those possibilities to provoke moments of study in the university, I will begin with Tyson Lewis’s idea of studying with friends.

From a philosophical approach, Lewis offers an interesting critique of the imposition of learning in education. Learning, for him, becomes a ‘generic potentiality’ that must be actualized according to ‘purposes predetermined in advance by experts in the field of educational research and economic development’ (7). Accordingly, for Lewis (2013, 2014), the main distinctive qualities of this learning perspective are: first, that its specific subject is the self-actualizing learner. He argues that in the logic of learning, the individual has been given the ‘freedom’ to self-regulate and self-monitor their process of reskilling through lifelong learning processes; second, its specific purpose is the optimization of educational outputs for human capital development. As he notes, within the skills framework, learning has become the educational logic of biocapitalism (2013, 3); and third, its ontological commitment is actualizing potentialities. Indeed, it is precisely the issue of potentiality that Lewis identifies as a central issue to be considered in the learning logic. In his analysis, ‘[p]otentiality is what must be actualized over and over again through the learning of skills’ (5).

In contrast, he proposes the ‘temporality of study’ as ‘an activity and a time beyond the temporality of development, the fulfillment of success conditions, and thus the quantification of one’s progress toward specific aims’ (2017, 241). Inspired by the work of Simons and Masschelein (2009a), Lewis declares that ‘the student should be rethought of as the one who studies without determinate ends, without identifiable interests, and thus one who is open, exposed, and attentive to the world’ (2013, 13). The educational study perspective presents not only a different approach to the actions, content, and purpose of activities at the university but also a different way of relating with others.

For Lewis, we study with friends. The idea of friendship proposed here, however, is different from the common sense of a friend. Following Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, for him, a friend is ‘someone with whom we share sharing’ (2013, 137). While studying, we are in a relationship – of sharing – with others around a public matter of concern. Moreover, studying implies, on the one hand, a submission to the present – the gathering of sharing – and, on the other hand, studying is also the offering of our singularity with the risk of being changed by the experience (Jiménez 2020a). Based on Jean-Luc Nancy’s ideas of sharing and community (Nancy 1991), friends who study together, according to Lewis, are a kind of ‘inoperative community,’ a community whose existence resides in the experience of being-in-common, ‘that it is not defined in terms of an essence that enables division’ among its members (Lewis 2013, 138). Rather, friends in this kind of community undergo a sort of desubjectivation: there are no defined positions or definitive identities; it is a community of equals.

The community of friends, moreover, can defy the hierarchies of the knowledge-oriented university; in friendship, ‘[a]ll predetermined positions, all individual habits of mind are oddly suspended, and the two friends meet as singularities whose being-in-common is nothing more than the im-potential experience of studying’ (Lewis 2013, 148). The argument for this starts from the idea of looking at the teaching scene as a time and a space that does not only function as a delineated course – like a directed procedure – based on the qualification predetermined for the teacher or the curriculum. Instead, it is interesting to reflect on it, also, as an event in which a community of friends gathers to study a public matter of concern. Three things are worth mentioning about this: first, there is a qualitative change in the task of the teacher; instead of focusing only on the intentions of the course (e.g. learning objectives and the development of competencies), teaching also becomes a matter of presenting something important of the world and calling for attention to it. In this context, according to Masschelein, attention is:

to be present in the present (…) in such a way that the present can present itself to me (that it becomes visible, that it can come to me and I can come to see) and that I am exposed to it in such a way that I can be changed or ‘cut’ or contaminated, that my gaze can be liberated (through the ‘command’ of what is present). As such, attention makes experience possible (2010, 48).

In this sense, we could say that the pedagogical approach changes to a gesture of showing something that matters and grabbing the students’ attention. Second, in friendship, teachers and students share, at least momentarily, a common de-identification of their profile orientations. Not because the responsibilities of teachers and students are relinquished but because studying demands a different attitude for both. Studying requires actively exposing ourselves to be affected by what is in front of us, and instead of producing results and solutions, it usually provokes new problems and stirs the students’ minds. Furthermore, we could say that the traditional academic function of solving problems (in research) and alleviating worries (in teaching) is transformed in studying into the action of a friend who provokes pedagogical disorientation with new questions about our existence in and with the world. Third, drawing on Masschelein and Simons (2013), the teaching scene rests, notably, in the amateurism of the teacher. The educational gestures mentioned above are not based on the professionalization of the teacher, for instance, on the level of mastery of competencies to direct their work (competence) or on following the correct scientifically proven theories for teaching (evidence) (see Biesta 2012); these gestures, in contrast, emanate from acts of love. The amateur teacher (one who does it out of love) ‘is someone who loves her subject or subject matter, who cares about it and pays attention to it’ (Masschelein and Simons 2013, 67). Teaching, moreover, implies sharing the love of a subject matter with our students (friends).

Sometimes, in the university, we forget that education is at the heart of our practices and is not only related to learning and developing competencies. Although an essential part of the university’s contemporary practices is responding to short-term social demands, usually following safe, predictable, and risk-free procedures, it is important to stress that education always involves a risk because academics and students are subjects of action and responsibility (Biesta 2016)

Being a university academic has to do with care for the world, a real world that we want to understand, protect, and live with (in research) and that we want to represent, share, and love (in teaching). In these particular actions reside the possibilities for making a university connected with the existential questions of living freely and responsibly with the social and natural world.

Conclusion

This article has presented a relevant issue for higher education, contributing to the current discussion on academic teacher identity in universities and proposing the educational importance of teaching activity in these institutions. Despite the attention placed on teachers’ professional development and the managerial pressures on their activities, teaching is the key to enacting new ways of transforming academic practices in universities.

This brief analysis of the conditions of the contemporary university has identified two overarching issues. First, universities are oriented toward various specific global processes, including a rationale of knowledge capitalism and competitivity, practical organization of academic activities, and prefiguration of agency due to normativity and expectations (for instance, making some courses of action obligatory or desired). However, prefiguration does not constrain what activities take place. Consequently, in most cases, activity can oppose prefiguration depending on the given conditions and, more profoundly, the educational gestures that the practice members provoke. Second, the current form of the contemporary university is not settled. Underlying the analysis of the contemporary university is the fact that the intentions, techniques, and practical organization of these institutions are temporally determined. The end implicit in the managerial university is inherently entwined with academics’ actions and identities. In short, the university’s practice is constitutionally bound to academic activities, especially teaching activities. This specification builds too much on the notion of teacher identity.

Identity establishes a relationship between the academic and the university. In the current academic context, as noted, certain conditions are ascribed in the definition of professional development as well as in the teleological organization of academic activities. Teacher identity, however, is not directly associated with the prestige and status connected to the conditions and aims that circumscribe the priorities of research-intensive universities. Additionally, this situation is problematic when the identification process is narrowly focused on becoming an ‘ideal type’ of academic – the desired conditions of an identity that can only be achieved in the future. This brings us to the core issue of this paper: identities emerge from activity. Although prerogatives, expectations, and normativity are associated with essential aspects of identity (for instance, a teacher’s identity is associated with knowledge, authority, pedagogical skills, and responsibility), it is the present action that, in the end, constitutes the relation between meaning and identity. The important point presently is that teacher identities are not entirely restricted by determination. As proposed in this paper, the practice of teaching entails further actions and interests than those indicated by theories of teachers’ professional development. In fact, 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. This perspective invites us to critically analyze the role and identity of the teacher in the current university context. On the one hand, the teacher’s identity panorama of endless becoming perpetuates the image of the subjection of the teacher to the frequent alterations formulated by theories and didactics of learning. Although change, admittedly, is an important aspect of practice, the point here is to focus on the emergence of identity in the present activity instead of giving priority to predefined roles or expected behaviors. This approach offers thicker, more variegated, and open-ended possibilities to understand teacher identities.

On the other hand, a teacher’s expertise, a main qualification and source of identity for university teachers, is challenged. As indicated, the ways of acting and being of the teacher do not necessarily have to do with the teacher’s expertise in the subject but with the love, attention, and interest that is shared. In this sense, research and teaching activities are more closely related than usually conceived. For instance, curiosity for a subject matter, both in teaching and research, is provoked by an interest, demands attention, and is shared (as something to be cared for) among those reunited in the activity. Accordingly, academic identities share more resemblances from the point of view of present activity rather than focusing on their products.

More generally, it can be argued that teaching activities offer possibilities to unfold new forms to experience higher education beyond the requirements of the performative world in which academic practices are embedded. One of many possibilities is inspiring the emergence of study events. Recent theoretical interest in study has made critical contributions to overtly address educational concerns related to the ontological logic of learning discourses and practices (see Biesta 2004; Simons and Masschelein 2008) and to explore new educational paths that focus on the idea of studying (Lewis 2013; 2014; Jiménez 2020a; Jiménez 2020b), especially formulating educational practices to oppose the contemporary university’s managerial organization (Masschelein and Simons 2018; Masschelein 2019; Schildermans 2021). However, it seems that the role of the teacher in study activities is still unanalyzed. The present text aimed to offer a starting point to formulate epistemological examinations about the role and identity of teachers and researchers in the contemporary university based on practices of studying and hopefully to further substantiate analysis about the future of the university in educational terms. Study, as an educational gesture, constitutes a potential form to relate and to be attentive to students and knowledge. With this final remark, the invitation is to consider the university as a practice constituted by events and interests rather than intentions and structures.

Disclosure statement

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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.