What kind of a being is a teacher in contemporary educational culture, riven as this is with complexity, ambiguity, conflict and paradoxical intent? How do teachers experience and represent themselves in this context and what implications do these self-representations have for the way in which they conduct their pedagogical practices most especially with respect to plurality and otherness? In responding to these questions, this paper will divide into three parts. Part One will ask whether or not the teacher has been subjected to a dichotomizing tendency in post-industrial society, which has disaggregated their personal and professional identities and in doing so deprives them of personal resources to be deployed in the service of their professional engagements in a plural polyphonic world. Part Two will discuss whether or not the recently rehabilitated concept of ‘enstrangement’ (Conroy, 2006 ; 2009) holds more explanatory promise for understanding and supporting the professional experience of contemporary teachers than notions of ‘alienation’, ‘false consciousness’ and ‘estrangement’ that pervade Marxist/post-Marxist ideology/discourse (McLaren,1998; 2006) on critical pedagogy, teachers and schooling. Enstrangement replaces the idea of being estranged, ‘being made strange from without’ by emphasizing the pre-existing condition – an onto-psychological enstrangement - that we are ‘already strange from within’ /dislocated/estranged from ourselves and argues that such an understanding of teachers’ ‘felt sense’ is more embracing of the complexity and ambiguity so often evident in the conflicted expressions of the profession in modern western society. By means of creative self-study methods (Leitch, 2008), Part Three provides an exploratory illustration of the ways in which teachers, at various stages of their professional careers, represent this interiority, this ‘felt sense’ of being enstranged both personally and professionally. Creating masks as self-representations, the associated teacher narratives disclose critical/ conflicted inner experiences as between their individual teacher beliefs and their professional practices, which we will suggest may be harnessed in the service of education that engages more effectively with plurality and otherness. Further, we will illustrate how this helps to understand, with greater clarity, how teachers make “unsystematic, uneasy, pragmatic, and uncertain unions and connections” (Craig, 2004) through such self-study, and are frequently moved to make positive meaningful change in their professional learning environments and pedagogical practices.

Parts One and Two will engage and debate the key issues through philosophical and historical analysis. The empirical element of Part Three will draw on arts-based inquiry methods within the qualitative paradigm. This element will report on the use of mask work (mask-making and narrative) as a form of teacher self-study. The goal of this creative form of self-study is for teachers to develop individualised masks as artifacts that externalize the 'felt sense' of being a teacher in contemporary society. Through engaging with the mask, by such means as reflective enacting and narrative methods, teachers develop an intrapersonal dialogue between those parts of their personal and professional selves/identities, previously beyond their conscious awareness, that are represented symbolically by the mask. This intrapersonal dialogue provides an entrée into various feelings relating to what we term 'ontopsychological enstrangement' (conflict, ambiguity, fragmentation) experienced by teachers at various professional career phases.

Conclusion: through the judicious deployment of the concept of enstrangement and in-depth self-study methods, we offer a view of teachers which may be more nuanced than their formal representations often allow. In doing so, we gain greater insight into teachers ‘inner landscapes’, their identities and self-consciousness and the ways in which they straddle, interact with and often subvert the contradictions that pervade their professional existence(s) and engagement(s) and thus better equip them to respond to the complexities of their students' lives.