“Teacher identity” is a popular topic for discussion and reflection in teacher education programs. We ask pre-service teachers to consider pervasive cultural and personal images of teachers (as expert, caregiver, authoritarian, and so on) in order to accept or resist these images as they contribute to the construction of their own teacher identity. Discussed in theory and aspirational language, teacher identity appears to behave in a reasonably orderly fashion; however, once the novice teacher is introduced to the dynamic world of teaching, teacher identity can become an absolute mess to untangle. As an approach to research, posthumanism offers us a chance to see this mess as beautiful in its lively, evolving, and relational condition. This posthumanist project takes to heart that in order to understand concepts such as identity differently, we must also look differently. After Taylor (2018), who describes posthumanist research as “allowing oneself to be lured by curiosity, surprise, and wonder” (p. 377), I conduct a diffractive auto/ethnographic study to find out what happens if I take seriously the value of play in research, wondering what can be gained, in terms of understandings of teacher identities, through cartomancy (i.e., tarot readings) as a potential source of knowledge. This unconventional approach to research allows me to give generous attention to these teachers’ identities by acknowledging their connections to other selves, other humans, non-humans, and more-than-humans. Through this project, I find an expanded sense of self-perception and an increased recognition of a teacher’s multiple, connected, changing, and changeable identities.

 Tarot cards, drawn from the deck and arranged on a table into spreads, are indeterminate, endlessly rearrangeable narratives (Tatham, 1986). When cards are shuffled and drawn during a tarot reading, a new story is formed—“And no reading can be final: the spread leads [the reader] to make one story today; tomorrow, [they] may return to it and craft a quite different story, the change a function of circumstances” (Tatham, 1986, p. 582). Tarot readers and querents (i.e., the person getting the reading) layer the archetypal images of the tarot cards upon their own identities and situations, focusing but not limiting the scope of self exploration. Tarot can provide a space that is both/neither inner or outer because of its semiotic significance: the cards are physical, material things outside of ourselves, yet they represent events, feelings and identities within us. As we conduct a reading, we are making and remaking the meaning of what was before, what no longer is, and what will be. Like Ellsworth (2005), I see the transitional spaces of research-creation events such as tarot readings as opportunities for “interactive openness” wherein “change itself can then be seen as something other than opposition” (p. 34). Research-creation events are opportunities to shape change.

In this manner, a deck of tarot cards operates as a narrative device (although not always a linear narrative) to make visible, even tangible, diffractive discourses surrounding a person’s identity and the intermingling of entities that makes our identities shift and grow. It might even fulfill—in an unexpected way—Zembylas’s (2005) call for “An approach that recognizes that discourses and performances are not absolutely determining” and that might “begin to provide teachers with spaces for reconstituting themselves and their relations with others” (p. 40). No tarot text is authoritative. This project hopes to give teachers the opportunity to participate in an intentional (re)design of their identities, more fully aware of the embodied and collaborative process that is always already occurring.

Research-creation is a creative, interdisciplinary approach to academic research that challenges hegemonic ideologies of research methods and products (Loveless, 2019). The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada defines research-creation as “an approach to research that combines creative and academic research practices, and supports the development of knowledge and innovation through artistic expression, scholarly investigation, and experimentation” (2021). My background in performance art and literary theory opened my thinking up to the possibility that something like cartomancy—interpreting tarot cards—could be seen as an artistic practice. That is, cartomancy can be an act of storytelling shared between the reader, the querent, and the cards. Loveless (2019), referring to the ideas of Thomas King (2003) and Donna Haraway (2003), asserts that “the telling of stories is a political performative. A world-making, knowledge-making practice” (p. 21). Stories are “material-semiotic events” (p. 21) that change not only the way we see the world (episteme), but the world itself (onto), because it changes how we live in the world (ethico). By participating in tarot readings, teachers were able to shape the stories they believed about themselves. Utilizing a diffractive auto/ethnography (Taylor, 2018), I conducted tarot readings for friends who self-identify as teachers; this practice produced the interviews and readings, and written responses. The interview/tarot readings I do during this project are research-creation events (Truman, 2017). The word event takes the focus off of the researcher, the participant, or the materials, and instead draws the focus to the moment that these entities come together. Thinking, reading, writing, and researching diffractively enable us to take a constructive, positive, and generous approach to our work because diffraction places us in an epistemological state of abundance. Approaching auto/ethnography diffractively means paying vigilant attention to the ways that subjects are entangled in a vast web of beings. For Taylor (2018), diffractive auto/ethnography “offers a possibility to attend to a more-than-human world, to tune into a more flattened ontology of non-individualized, co-constitutive being, and to question a whole array of humanist binaries” (p. 376). Labels such as researcher and participant get messy when we acknowledge that we are constantly reading ourselves through each other.

By taking up tarot reading as a method to tinker and mess with teacher identity, I do not aim to suggest it as a tool to be taken up ubiquitously or programmatically. Rather, I present it, after Ellsworth (2005), as an illustration of an anomalous, speculative, experimental approach to the pedagogy of teacher education. I share my method(olog[ies]) as an imagining of the (im)possibilities that feminist poststructuralist, posthumanist play brings to education research. My project does not “fix” what has come before. Carol Taylor (2018) says of the work that goes on in posthumanist higher education, it is neither a wholesale reversal of what has gone on previously nor an installation of some indubitably ‘new’. It is, instead, a mixed and patchy phenomenon in which new-old (theories, narratives, practices) jostle in entangled matterings which may, just may, be generative of more response-able ways of knowing about ‘our’ place in (relation-with) the world.” (p. 372) You might imaginatively engage with this project in a subjunctive mood: let us conduct tarot readings as if we could learn from it. Embarking on this exploration, I hope, alongside Ellsworth (2005), “to contribute to efforts to reconfigure educators’ conversations and actions about pedagogy as the force through which we come to have the surprising, incomplete knowings, ideas, and sensations that undo us and set us in motion toward an open future” (pp. 17-18). Approaching teacher identity in a playful manner through tarot reading is not just meant to be a respite from the mundanity of traditional research methods, nor is it a call to revolution. It is an intimately radical effort toward making the identity of the teacher a liveable one.

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