The embodied academic: Body work in teacher education

I am a lecturer in education, but entered academia because my experience in secondary school teaching was required for teacher education. As such I followed the traditional pathway of teacher educators transitioning from professional practice to become a lecturer in higher education (Boyd and Harris, 2010). Had I been asked two years ago if I considered myself an embodied academic, my answer would have been that I thought of myself as an embodied practitioner. This has more to do with my hesitation to identify as an academic than to describe myself as embodied. Even after several years in academia I would have considered myself a teacher and identified with that embodied teaching identity. Like the research participants in Boyd and Harris’s (2010) study, I clung on to my “identity and credibility as [a] school teacher” (p. 10). My motto at the time – “once a teacher, always a teacher” – is proof of that. I would not have called myself an academic, but I was definitely embodied.