Mapping the inner landscape of Australian TAFE teachers: navigating contours by explicating critical spirit

Abstract

In The Courage to Teach, Parker J. Palmer (1998) explores the inner landscape of teachers by elaborating his proposition that “We teach who we are” (p. 1). What is highlighted is that in order to teach well teachers need firstly to know their self-hood and then to connect it with what they do. With this in mind, this chapter explores ruminations around my research into a particular site in the inner landscape of teachers’ work. That site is illuminated and mapped by applying a concept known as critical spirit, which is used to describe the dispositions of the critical thinker (Oxman-Michelli, 1992; Siegel,1988). The intention is to seek support for the notion of critical spirit being part of the inner terrain of a group of Australian Technical and Further Education (TAFE) teachers working within the current period of new vocationalism. Taking a socio-cultural vantage point I begin with the claim that TAFE teachers are endeavouring to travel the terrain between discourses that position them as educators responsible for skilling an economy and those that position TAFE teachers as liberal educators, concerned with the developing person and the enactment of civil responsibilities. I make claim to critical spirit as a discourse, and move to presenting a coding framework for exploring elements of critical spirit within TAFE teacher narratives. The results of this analysis are discussed in terms of their relevance to these teachers’ identities and their engagements with their world of work. The mapping of this landscape and the navigating of these contours are articulated in an attempt to reflect upon ‘what might be’ in relation to a larger research project.