Teaching and the process of identifying the teacher-self

With Paul Ricoeur (1994) we say that the first intention with this paper is to indicate the primacy of reflective mediation over the immediate positing of the teacher as a subject. This indicates that reflective mediation has a primacy in the learning process of teacher education. The second intention with this paper is to distinguish two major meanings of the process of identification depending on whether one understands by ?identical? the equivalent of the Latin ?ipse? or ?idem?. There is a major conceptual difference between idem-identification understood as sameness and ipse-identification understood as selfhood. We argue that the teacher has to be identifying her self with her teacher-self, her selfhood as a teacher. This process of identification indicates a dynamics which never lets the teacher self rest in sameness. In this work we understand the teacher-self as related to the learner-self. They are related in the act of teaching and learning. A teacher?s selfhood is related not only to the learners of today and yesterday but to their world as it unfolds in the future. One of our challenges in working with pre-service and in-service teachers in different projects in schools is how these aspects on reflective mediation may be built into the work of the teachers through relations to the learners and to the organizing of the school society. What we have so far emphasized and experimented with are dialogs between teachers, ways of documenting teaching processes and systematization ofways of teaching.