Another Impossible Endeavor: Considering Teacher Perception and My Work With Janet Miller

Abstract

This chapter is a narrative reflection shaped by personal experience, academic mentorship, and a long-standing effort to interrogate public perceptions of teachers and teaching. The author recounts a seemingly mundane—but deeply unsettling—interaction during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic with a medical receptionist that triggered deep-seated feelings about the societal devaluation of the teaching profession. Through this exchange, the author examines the emotional and intellectual labor involved in navigating reductive and often hostile rhetoric about education and educators, particularly during a moment of heightened public scrutiny. The author revisits this experience as a site of ongoing interpretation and inquiry through a self-reflexive lens shaped by years of mentorship with Dr Janet Miller and poststructural approaches to narrative inquiry and conceptions of identity constructions. The author engages in an exploration of identity, vulnerability, and resistance, shaped by poststructural understandings of the self as shifting, incomplete, and always in process. Rather than offering solutions or resolutions, the author attempts to embrace discomfort, complexity, and contradiction in an attempt to honor the “necessary incompleteness of teachers’ stories.”