Despite the increasing centrality that teachers’ role is gaining in the national and international political agenda, teachers are not feeling more valued or important. On the contrary, this social attention is translating into an increase of pressure on them, leading to a particular crisis under the form of moments of paralysis, panicking, and even complex of inferiority. It is common, in an informal conversation with a teacher, to identify a certain difficulty in explaining which value, sense, and purpose her task has. This difficulty seems to be a manifestation of this crisis of identity of the teacher.

In this paper the identity of the teacher is understood as the combination of the teacher’s subjective experience on her profession and the role that she perceives society recognizes her with. Teacher’s professional identity is then an individual construction which refers to her own history as teacher, as well as to her social characteristics.

In order to address this crisis of identity of the teacher, the paper will start by presenting some examples in which this crisis manifests itself.

The first example will be on the crisis of pedagogical authorityof the teacher through the cultural manifestation of the ‘crusade against homework’ that has been taking place in Spain this past year. Expressed in many different ways, the main claim is that the amount and the kind of homework every child gets from school should be established by law, so enough free time is guaranteed (for families to spend ‘quality time together’, children have time ‘to play’, and so on). Everything started in the online social pressure platform of “Change.org”, where a mother filed a petition against homework, having a great echo in the mass media. This petition culminates in the announcement of a “strike” of homework during November 2016. Political parties have also joined the fight against that homework. Into all this, teachers show certain uncomfortableness when confronted with this discussion; however they do not arrive at verbalizing or posing in writing why they are feeling like that. This paper will try to clarify the reasons of this particular discomfort of the teachers, mainly that behind a fundamental questioning of their pedagogical authority.

The second example this presentation will explore is the presentation of the models of “good” teacher. In order to better understand this assumption of different models of teachers that are promoted, defended or desired by society, we are going to focus on two examples, one that looks backwards, and a second one that looks forwards. The first example one (“the democrat teacher”) is the contemporary reconstruction of how the teacher was in the Second Spanish Republic during the 1930s. This reconstructed model has being presented (by the combinatorial effect of a collection of movies recently produced settled during the times of the Spanish Civil War, and scholars studying Spanish history of education in the early 20th Century) as a prototypical ‘ideal teacher’, who is now part of the actual collective imagination. The second (“the innovative teacher”) is  a kind of teacher that is being proposed by different stakeholders as being driven by new methodologies, who is emotional-caring, a peer with her students. The presentation will analyze how both are contraposed yet unreachable for different reasons.

The paper will, firstly, address the manifestation of teacher’s crisis identity through the mentioned examples; secondly, it will highlight that Taylor’s work on frameworks can serve to new approach in order to understand the issue better. And finally, the current sense of identity confusion will be presented and put in relation with the imperative of constant change, which is a trend in all Europe. 

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