All human beings are both unique individuals, and individuals who belong to various collectives and institutions. As individuals, humans act and interact and are influenced by the various collectives and institutions to which they belong, family, school, and so forth. Education is the institution that influences the public part of young people’s identities.  I am concerned with how education through the teacher can make individual students capable of participating, connecting themselves, developing and including others in a collective. In light of this, how can we then theorize and philosophize about the processes of educating the next generation to become capable human beings (Ricoeur 2005)? An important premise for living a good life is to allow people to think about their life together and to act according to what they imagine is a good way of life, for themselves and others. My position is that education, as a process of teaching and learning, deals with what teachers and students do together. In line with a Ricoeurian philosophy, I think that these processes are best understood in terms of practical reason. Practical reason is not a domain of science. Practical reason is a domain dealing with how people act and suffer (Ricoeur, 1991). To consider teaching through practical reason implies that I start with the teacher and deliberate about her practice, and then relate this practice of teaching to students’ learning (in teaching). Another question is inherent to this approach; how can one understand the difference between the field of practical reason and the field of theoretical reason? In this paper I will describe and discuss three modes of reflexivity of teaching,

Much research on education focuses on the identity of the teacher. Teachers are described collectively through the identity of being a professional teacher. The collective identity of a worker is always related to the work she does and the responsibility she takes in doing this work. Descriptions and stories about being a professional teacher are therefore a part of an individual teacher’s identity. This means that her identity relates to how she participates in the teacher community. Let me exemplify these same structures as they can be found in a person who is in charge of the production of agricultural goods on a farm, a farmer. The identity belonging to a farmer refers to his or her professional work. In the practice of farming, there are many specific acts, seemingly different, but all belonging to the same practice. For instance, the farmer needs to know how to plough the fields with a tractor, feed and care for the animals, have knowledge about nutrition, pedigrees for good breeding, accounting and so forth. All these acts are part of the practice of farming. A person’s identity is closely related to his or her acts within a practice. In this way, the quality of knowledge in this relation between the person and his/her acts is established over time, which in short means: who you are relates to what you do. This means that through the acts of farming, a farmer identifies with what s/he does, in the same way that many teachers identify with the teaching in their classrooms. The foundational question of my research is: Who is the teacher? The question “who?” is a question of identity. To question the identity of the teacher, as a research question, is a way of referring the identification of the teacher to the memory of the person who teach. According to Ricoeur’s works “Memory, History, Forgetting” (2004) and “Oneself as Another” (1994) the patterns that refer to oneself as a person are patterns of memory.

The philosophy of Paul Ricoeur challenges the continental philosophy of Kant through a reworking of the conception of judgement. In the three critiques of Kant there is a pattern. Human acts are subsumed under a rule. Ricoeur says that Kant’s first critique proceeds from the above to the below (Ricoeur, 2000). Ricoeur’s critique is that this limits human action as rule-governed. It does not open the possibilities for human action seeking a good life for oneself and others. This basic critique is used as a frame in my research to theorize teaching as a semantic of actions. To discuss what knowledge is in teacher’s practices expressed as a semantic of actions, I have developed three modes of reflexivity of teaching. These will be explained and discussed in the paper. Through these three modes of reflexivity, I try to show how knowledge is expressed in teaching. I then have to clarify that I use an action theoretical approach, defining teaching as action – as that which happens here and now (in the present). To discuss subject knowledge as a rule-governed structure in relation to teaching as an expression of practical knowledge raises some challenges in relation to a teacher’s ability to perceive students in teaching, to what students do and say. A teacher’s perception is formed by what is stored in her memory (Bergson, 1991). The paper uses the three different modes of reflexivity of teaching as a reference for the focus of a teacher's attention to different knowledge in memory. Since the memory of a person has a close relation to the identity of a person, these three modes of reflexivity of teaching relate to three expressions of a teachers' identity. This means, there are three different answers to the question, who is the teacher? These three different expressions of teaching refer to three different explanations for what is important knowledge for the teacher.

This paper is a problematisation of the practical knowledge of teaching by referring it to the speculative theory on memory by Henri Bergson (1991). Furthermore, it problematises what knowledge in education is. Knowledge in education has to do with the differentiation between knowing how and knowing that (Ryle, 1946, Anscombe, 2000). My way of problematising this is to question and try to answer, what education do through teaching. The reflexivity of teaching then refer to the different answers to the question about the identity of the teacher. Who is the teacher?

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