Remaining a student of teaching forever: Critical reflexive insights from a lifetime of multiple teacher identities in the Republic of Ireland

In this narrative inquiry, I share critical reflexive insights from interrogation of my multiple teacher identities all the while seeking to remain, in the words of Dewey, a student of teaching forever. My insights chart teaching as a practice of emancipation enacted as a messy narrative of discursive struggles, joys, and contradictions. In a pre-Covid-19 world, the cartesian logic under-writing the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) reduced the search for a personal ethics of self to a morality of obedience by codes and laws for a universalist teacher identity. Instead, I position my identities as a successful teacher, academic, and activist drawing from critical, feminist, and post-colonial perspectives to offer a counterpoint to a narrow politics of reflection. I offer an alternative theorization of a politics of principled resistance in the search for an emancipatory ethics in teacher education and to assure education’s social responsibility for a just global world.