Drawing on research identifying how teachers’ capacities to sustain their effectiveness in different phases of their professional lives are affected positively and/or negatively by their sense of identity, this paper illuminates a series of four teacher self-study inquiries, centering on mask-work. For some time, educational researchers such as Day (2007), Bullough and Pinnegar (2009),Keltchermans, (2009) have recognized that sustaining professional commitment, nurturing a passion for teaching and children, generating hardiness and renewing a sense of moral purpose are crucial to good teaching. Theoretical Framework: Emanating from psycho/analytical psychology and echoing Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical notion of the presentation of self in everyday life, the concept of the mask is most frequently associated with the writings of C. G Jung (1875-1961). Jung referred to the ‘persona’ as the “social mask that one wears to adapt to the perceived expectations of others” (Russell-Chapin & Rybak, 1996: 173). Post-Jungian therapist, Hopcke (1989: 87) writes of Jung that he “saw the persona as a vital sector of the personality which provides the individual with a container, a protective covering for his or her inner self.” Despite postmodern critique of Jungian essentialism and its apparent lack of political and cultural engagement (see Hauke, 2000 and Rowland, 2001 for well-presented defenses), I argue that there is contemporary, heuristic value in adopting a Jungian framework of the persona as a constitutive feature of subjectivity for exploring the complex interface of the personal and professional in teacher identity. There are two significant hypothese by which the Jungian concept of the persona/mask might to be reinvigorated to provide an analytic frame for understanding teacher identity projects: (i) since masks serve as “mediators” between our selves and the outer world (Hopcke, 1995) and indeed within and between our ‘inner’ selves, teachers may negotiate, through self-reflection, narration and performance, the thresholds and relations within their personal and professional lived experience in more tangible and meaningful ways; (ii) if the persona signifies the unexpressed, underdeveloped (or, in Jungian terms, ‘shadow’ psychological side) of the individual, mask-making affords opportunities for teachers to symbolise and make sense of any unlived aspects, emotional ambiguities or ideological aspirations in their teacher identity - the seed-bed of dispositions - and how these are effected and shaped by rules, structures, practices and professional life phase. Thus, creative self-study, incorporating masks, is construed as a ‘place of choice’ for the self, where qualities of enthusiasm, commitment, passion, empathy and passion, so central to the purposes of teaching, may be in suspension awaiting rediscovery, restoration or redirection that should lead ultimately to constructive and/or radical personal and social action in the world.

The site of this inquiry is a university masters-level program based upon a thirty-hour module on critical pedagogy and personal development. The module culminates in mask-making workshops of approximately ten hours duration. The aim of this self-study activity is for participants to reflect upon and engage with the face(s) they present in their lives as a teacher and to express creatively, through three-dimensional representational images/artifacts, an embodied sense of what (and who) they present professionally, and what remains beyond the surface. Four cameo presentations of teachers at different professional life phases are featured, using a métissage of image and dialogue that emanate from each of the teacher participants’ engagements with their masks. Later discussion draws upon an analytic frame of 'the persona' to explore notions of teacher identity and how arts-based forms of teacher self-development might contribute to supporting and sustaining teachers at differing career life stages.

. Teachers at each of the phases of the professional life cycle showed that their professional sense of self was capable of containing frustration, uncertainty and unevenness and where uncertainty resides within the acts of a self that is committed to ‘becoming’. Performance is a vital agent of necessary social change and this work illustrates how performing stories/scenarios gave participants a sense of agency in cultivating and owning dispositions and ultimately professional choices in action. The enactment of biographical and experiential elements appeared to work more deeply than if they had simply written and reflected upon their professional life issues as prose. The study shows that the creative development of individual masks discloses teachers’ complex, occasionally dislocated narratives of personal/professional identity. Subsequent improvisation with their masks is shown to engage teachers emotionally with tensions and dissonances within and between their various personae and personal, professional and political contexts at each of their respective life phases. Storylines ultimately become reframed and, in a number of instances, lay claim to reinvigorated commitment, self-determination and initiatives for change. Contemporary approaches to teacher professional development need to be extended and re-imagined beyond the prosaic concerns with technical competence.