Narratives of Teaching and the Quest for the Second Self

Abstract

The more I work with students studying to become teachers the more convinced I am that narratives of teaching make an invaluable contribution to understanding what it takes to teach well. At their best, these stories are guides to the challenges, pitfalls, and joys of educating children. Placing readers in classrooms with all their vivid and concrete particulars, these narratives depict teachers answering the call to teach (Hansen, 1995; Isenberg, 1994) and offer both prospective and experienced teachers irreplaceable, vicarious experiences of teaching. They encourage teachers to look very closely at the problem of educating creatively and engender new hope about the importance of teachers' work (Keizer, 1988; Kohl, 1994; Rose, 1989). The protagonists in these narratives grapple with all of the difficulties that make teaching in contemporary schools so daunting, but their stories highlight the imagination and commitment of teachers who see possibility in the most trying of circumstances. They reaffirm the role that teachers can play in humanizing and democratizing students and in unleashing their ability to make a difference in the world. Furthermore, these teaching narratives are guides to living well. They show that fostering student growth necessitates that teachers experience their own ongoing self-development--their quest for their second selves (Graham, 1995; Inchausti, 1991; Jackson, 1995; Schubert, 199t; Witherell, 1991). Great teaching grows out of a clear and often reinvented sense of self, and the most moving teacher narratives chronicle the appearance of a better self as well as a better teacher (Witherell, 1991). The Second Self One theme emerging from Robert Inchausti's The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People (1991) is the significance of the second self in highly accomplished servant leaders like Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, and Lech Walesa. In extending themselves to make a difference in their communities, these leaders uncovered new dimensions of their selves not previously discernible. For Inchausti, discovering and creating the second self is an ethical accomplishment (p. 12)--the self within our power to fashion from the choices we make and the everyday experiences we accumulate. Exploring and understanding the self has no real end in this conception and is reciprocally linked to continuing to serve others and in living as full and as rich a life as possible. Our true being is not encoded in some psychological destiny, nor high above us in abstract revolutionary ideas, but rather all around us, perpetually at hand in our families, our past, our public and private lives, our rites and our works, and in our possibilities and responsibilities. For it is in these concrete matters that the world addresses us, asks us who we are, and calls upon us to recollect our origins with gratitude and resolute love of life (Inchausti, 1991, p. 12). Inchausti urgently conveys that the work of making the self is the labor of a lifetime occurring in concert with others, not in isolation from them. Our second self is most likely to emerge, ironically enough, when we lose our sense of ourselves in service to others. We can answer the call to service, as Coles (1993) has most recently labeled it, in many important ways. Teaching stands out as one of the most ordinary, yet extraordinary of vocations, one of the most selfless, yet self-enhancing responses to this call. The process of reconstructing the self can be equated with the search for meaning. Taylor (1989) indicates that an important source of meaning for people in recent times has been in articulating and expressing their sense of what matters and in revising and expanding this sense in the course of living out their lives. Meaning and purpose, from this point of view, are not abstracted from experience, but invented and discovered as a manner of living ordinary life (Taylor, 1989, p. 23). Another way to understand this notion of second self is to think of it as the self that builds upon but is different from the self one is born with. …