We Teach Who We Are |Find Teaching Jobs, School Jobs, & Cultural Diversity at TeachersOfColor.com: Teaching is a most personal and political act, not simply a job, career, or vehicle for sharing one’s subject. I think that it is impossible to separate the act of teaching from who we really are and the self that enters the classroom. As Parker Palmer inquires in The Courage to Teach, “Who is the self that teaches? How does the quality of my selfhood form—or deform—the way I relate to my students, my subject, my colleagues, my world?” Too many students are learning in classrooms where their educational experience is “deformed” by educators who have not explored the relationship between who they are and how and why they teach. For teachers, students, and school communities, we must explore, “who the self that teaches” is.
When we engage in self-reflection, we must acknowledge the multiple identities that compose the self. I enter this work as an African-American woman as my primary identity. However, I must acknowledge that there are other aspects of identity influencing my work and the way students see me.
