Title:
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Radical reflexivity : assessing the value of psycho-spiritual practices of self as a medium for the professional development of teachers
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This thesis discusses a case study of a psycho-spiritual retreat programme
comprising an eclectic bricolage of technologies of self, ranging from the
contemplative, to the artistic and the psychotherapeutic. It explores the possibility
that such practices can be understood as a Foucauldian care of self, enabling
teachers to participate in a radical reflexivity around subjectivity. It is argued that
such reflexivity, whilst not directly concerned with teachers' professional identity,
is transformative within their professional practice. Evidence to substantiate this
hypothesis is sought in semi-structured interviews with participating Spanish and
Mexican teachers. These interviews explore the teachers' understandings of their
'before', 'during' and 'after'. What had they experienced? How had it affected their
understandings of themselves? How had these new understandings affected the
ongoing construction of their identity as teachers?
Interview data is organized and analysed through three complementary areas of
problematization; Questions of Purpose, Questions of Order, and Questions of
Performance. Evidence in and around these fields is embedded in a debate around
subjectivity, teacher identity and education informed by thinkers of becoming
including Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze and Britzman. Assessment of the value of
the experience is also made using the psycho-spiritual referents of the retreat
programme itself, as elaborated by its founder Claudio Naranjo.
The empirical-theoretical analysis of narrative evidence poses questions about the
established limits of traditional teacher development opportunities and of the
'service' oriented paradigm of professional ethics. The care of the self as a radical
reflexivity, in which the teacher examines their constitution as human beings,
might provide 'a way out' for teachers stuck uncreatively in their own historical
subjectivities and the dominant educational paradigms. In such a way concrete
examples of radical reflexivity in action could usefully contribute to debates
occurring around alternatives in teacher identity discourse.
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