According to a report from the International Labour Office, most European member countries do not regard the under-representation of ‘ethnic minority’ teachers within their workforce as a significant issue (Brant & Rymenans, 2000). However, during the last decade in the UK and some Western countries, education policies have been implemented to redress the imbalance. The rationale for their recruitment drive is predicated on the need for positive role models within society for the benefit of the profession and pupils alike (Carrington & Skelton 2003). There remains a dearth of research from the perspective of marginal groups consequently diminishing the potential for alternative epistemological stances to inform academic discourse. This paper, concerns such teachers’ embodiment of the notion of role model, to ask, “How do teachers working in schools, where there is a pre-dominance of pupils with the ‘same’ culture as their own, understand their position as a ‘role model’?” Specifically, the paper sets out to examine the ways that a teacher’s ascription of his/her liminal position is played out as social action and intentionality within culture matching pupil-teacher relationships. Those occupying the liminal position, and constructed as ‘Other’, have a perspective on their own experiences and on workings of the dominant power group (Denzin & Linclon, 2000). I will first critique the concept of a ‘role model’, in developing a social psychology of self and subjectivity. I will take a theoretical position, which allows for subjects to engage in more active problematization of their own situatedness in power and their own responsibility for the effects of power. The self is understood as both an acting subject and at once as subject to. A poststructuralist view of ‘role model’ thus reconceptualises the teacher self as a form of working subjectivity (Zembylas, 2003). This paper will argue that teachers’ understanding of their own subjectification, is enacted through the discursive spaces provided for pupils. Such created spaces, acknowledge the contingency of their pupil’s life-world choices. I will further assert that such teachers interpret and reconstruct their positions through the material, cultural and social discursive context to which they have access. Drawing on Foucault’s (1988) concept of “care of the self’, the final section will discuss a participant’s understanding of agency and how this is negotiated through strategies of resistance and self-formation.

The research is in the narrative mode of inquiry. This is part of a wider study on teachers understanding of ‘role model’. Qualitative approaches, using semi-structured interviews, are generally regarded as providing the sort of ‘experiential understanding’ that the study aims to achieve. The data for the paper is based on interviews taken with four teachers (two of Asian heritage, two of African heritage). Focus is given to one of the participants (Alex), together with data from a follow-up interview. Alex’s metaphorical account of “Walking the Path”, is a constitutive force of the narrative, and through which, he asserts legitimacy, authority and authentic knowledge of his life-world. Using the genre of the bildungsroman, his account gives further attention to the dynamics of localized micro-level normalizing power and discursive positioning.

The research aims to gain a greater understanding of how teachers position themselves and how their knowledge of the political, social, cultural and historical context of the lives of their pupils, inform their interaction. The research may contribute to debates around teachers’ roles and identity formation and could provide practitioners with insights around identity and the induction/ acculturation of teachers into the profession.