Teacher Noticing as Self-Portraiture: Relational Practices

Abstract

Teachers and academics increasingly experience emotional stress, often feeling overwhelmed, undervalued, and disconnected from their work, because of heightened performance demands and accountability pressures. The chapter questions how to shape inner professional life with the process of noticing, contributing in a regenerative way to their daily experience of teaching. Specifically, the chapter explores the role of teacher noticing as a dialogical, relational, and identity-forming process, drawing on Dialogical Self Theory as a central theoretical lens. Through art-based analogy, based on Rembrandt’s practice of self-portraiture as self-inquiry, and vignette, collected in the last academic year from my experience as a teacher educator, I conceptualise noticing as an affective, ethical, and reflexive engagement with one’s multiple identity positions. Teacher noticing results as a dialogical practice embedded in the affective life.