Hopcke (1995: 7) describes the mask as ‘the place in the personality where public and private meet’…What goes on behind the mask is …called ‘private life’” (Jung 1928:305) and there may be a situation in which ‘the excellence of the mask is compensated by the ‘‘private life’ going on behind it.’ (Jung; 1983: 95). In this paper we wish to investigate, through the medium of philosophical psychology and history, the myriad ways in which the trickster myth and disposition influences the pedagogical practices of the teacher. This, we propose, impacts on both the professional sense of the self and the entailments of the classroom. The work centres on Leitch's (2006; 2010) arts-based empirical work, which deploys a Jungian understanding of masks as a device for unearthing the unconscious of the teacher as person and professional. This we knit together with Conroy's philosophical and historical analyses of the ambiguous identity of the teacher and the liminal spaces where these identities find pedagogical expression. From these researches we unearth the way in which teachers simultaneously negotiate the diverse and conflicted terrain of the everyday requirements of the social system that is the classroom and school, and the potential passion and idealism for opening up complex understandings and readings of the world. In other words, we argue, the effective teacher demonstrates the capacity to constantly negotiate the spaces between the prosaic and the promethean. This way of understanding teacher professional identity resists the commonly held assumption that the teacher can or should disaggregate her professional and personal identities and hold them separately. Rather the analysis here proposes a view of the teacher as one whose multiple identities ebb and flow between the private and the public, the light and the dark, the free and the contained. Moreover, we argue that using the creation of masks as a heuristic for, and performance of, self disclosure offers a more comprehensive account of the entailments of an authentic educational encounter and is more likely to facilitate the teacher in being a more rounded and versatile personality.

Two approaches (i) Historico-philosophical analysis of the role of the myth of the trickster in the cultivation of our understanding of knowledge and its dissemination through is metaphors and archetypes. (ii) During various university based development programmes teachers participated in mask workshops. Each participant created a mask or series of masks that represented the face(s) or personae they experienced in being a teacher. Participants were encouraged to explore their final mask, which embodied any ‘inner’ and/or ‘outer’ felt sense(s) or experience of who they are and what they project as teacher. These performative enquiries encouraged the teachers to better understand the complexity of their own professional identity. (lll) The emergent understanding of the role of the trickster myth is subsequently used as a heuristic for deepening our appreciation of the complex inner-outer life of the teacher and its implication for pedagogical engagement.

Arts-based methodologies are under-represented and under-utilised in making sense of the complex interplay between the personal and public identity of the teacher and that a considered employment of these techniques (rooted in Jung's psychology and Campbell's historical anthropology) offers an important resource to teacher educators for the cultivation of a more robust understanding of the teacher as pedagogue. The trickster offers a metaphor that may be used to signpost a different, liminal way to signpost a different, liminal way of making sense of the role and person of the teacher.