Introduction

Teachers are commonly understood as tools for education. Usually, when talking about improving education, what is tacitly been said is: “let’s get teachers better” (Braun 1976). Unfortunately, teachers as humans cannot be treated as a mere collection of detached pedagogical instruments: they have emotions, hopes, and, despite students’ disbelief, their own life (Weber and Mitchell 1995). Even with their deep, in many times teachers are the foremost focus of superficial interventions and research. All in name of reaching the ideal teacher, but is this even possible? How close is the ideal teacher to the unreachable teacher?

Focusing on teachers, by the way, is not fortuitous. In the book “Linking Teacher Evaluation and Student Learning”, Pamela D. Tucker and James H. Stronge (2005) show strong evidence about central role teacher’s play in successful schools:

We know intuitively that these highly effective teachers can have an enriching effect on the daily lives of children and their lifelong educational and career aspirations. We now know empirically that these effective teachers also have a direct influence in enhancing student learning. Years of research on teacher quality support the fact that effective teachers not only make students feel good about school and learning, but also that their work actually results in increased student achievement. Studies have substantiated that a whole range of personal and professional qualities are associated with higher levels of student achievement (p. 2).

I am a biology teacher. In the first contact with my students in classrooms, I usually ask how many of them do not like the subject I minister. To this subgroup, I do a second question: “Did you have a really bad biology teacher in past?” In my experience, when a student hates a subject, there is always a correlation with a harrowing relationship with a certain past teacher: a pervasive image of teaching subject relates to bad feelings about subject learning. This fact is not surprising since students can retain the bad and good effects of teachers for years as show empirical evidence (Tucker and Stronge 2005). Even teachers’ expectations can tamper on students’ learning, in what is called “the Pygmalion effect” (Rosenthal and Jacobson 1968), for example. Previous teachers and learning experiences can take a role in the emergence of the goal of becoming a teacher (Schutz et al. 2001; Lunenberg et al. 2007).

High are expectations above teachers. They are seen as a sort of myth that habits a different dimension of the everyday world, as shown by Sandra Weber and Claudia Mitchell in their work about teachers’ images (1995). Despite changes in pedagogy over the years, the authors say, people have difficulty to picture teachers doing ordinary things, like going to the bathroom. Classical work on teacher sociology elucidates teachers occupy a focal point of community conflict, as they are not seen as students to parents either as parents to students (Waller 1965). Distance between teacher and their students and parents favors unrealistic expectations that bring up unreal images about what ‘teachery’ means (Weber and Mitchell 1995). In fact, the called education crisis is the main narrative which builds up contradictory images on education (Dahlgren 2017). In the words of Jason Whitney (2016):

Teachers in the twenty-first century enter their profession in an era in which there is little agreement about the dispositions and knowledge a teacher should possess, in part because there is little agreement about the purposes of education. It is difficult for anyone—but especially for beginners in the field—to distinguish between what is real and what is imaginary in education, what information is reliable and what constitutes misinformation about teaching (pg. 36).

Teachers’ idealizations are an anxiety time bomb for early professionals, which can impact on rates teachers leave career during the first years of teaching (Darling-Hammond 2003). Career abandon rates are high, and they are commonly correlated with ignored emotional dimensions of teaching practice (Schutz and Lee 2014; Nichols et al. 2016). Teachers are entwined in a complex web of sociopolitical forces that, even when do not drive, constraints work possibilities, in what some authors name as “messy narrative” (Simmie et al. 2016).

Questions about how these images of the ideal teacher are sustained with such vitalities emerge as this chapter’s starting line. Discussion about teachers’ imagined definition of what students must be is already present in literature (Tateo 2019), but I was not able to find a similar framework for teachers’ own imagined future self. We could look at all levels of education on a search for the ideal image of efficiency. But why looking specifically at teachers? This effort could be reasonable for recruitment strategies as sensible administrators (Lee 2005), for reasoning role of teacher efficiency on school accountability (Tucker and Stronge 2005) and for continuous self-improvement as conscious professionals (Mitchell and Weber 2003), just to give some examples. Teachers’ confidence is a factor when trying out new ways of teaching (Postareff and Lindblom-Ylänne 2011), which points out the relevance of teachers’ own expectations. In summary, elucidating the qualities that compose the ideal teacher is of utmost relevance for concocting the next generation of educators (Korthagen 2004; Hobbs 2012).

Field’s Stream

Some efforts are already made in the direction of delineating a cruder image of the ideal teacher. Almost every paper that works on ideal or better or good teacher do some sort of literature review (e.g., Azer 2005; Entwistle et al. 2000; Albuquerque 2010), but I was unable to find a systematical or even an exploratory review about this specific topic. In the works I found in the bibliographic survey, it was common a low rate of co-citation what can mean the field of research about the search for the ideal teacher is compounded for different arrayed streams.

Entwistle et al. (2000) verified in their literature review a confusion about how schoolteachers reflect about their own practice. If researchers do not use the same words, it will be difficult to reach agreements about a topic. What means to be a good teacher? What means to get better at “teachery”? Albuquerque (2010) stats there are three views about teacher efficiency: strategies focusing exclusively on information diffusing and ways of transmission, intrinsic affective qualities as personality and emotional management, and mixed approaches. Another literature classification was made by Entwistle et al. (2000), distinguishing researches that look about students’ expectations, teachers’ beliefs, and conceptions or general consideration of the nature of conceptions.

But if one look closely at teachers’ and students’ answers regarding what an ideal teacher looks like, probably their perspective will be influenced by too many idiosyncrasies, falling in an endless pit. The images of good and bad teachers are embedded in biographies with innumerable dimensions, personal, cultural, institutional, historic, and so on; thus, the construction of teachers’ identity is simultaneously individual and collective (Weber and Mitchell 1995). So, paying attention to teachers’ efficiency as a parameter to good teaching as made for some authors (i.e., Devine et al. 2013) is relevant but not enough, as it is just a biased proxy to a more complex phenomenon. Teacher efficiency is just the causal end of a long process of professional identity construction, where the desired images merge by accumulating multiple professional and personal impressions to compose the ideal teacher (Arnon and Reichel 2007).

One common point emerges from our literature survey: lists of characteristics are the field’s main products even recently, independent of approach (e.g., Mustain 1990; Azer 2005; Delaney et al. 2010). Fred Korthagen (2004) raises a critical view about this practice, as pointed out in this stretch:

In order to ensure sufficient validity and reliability in the assessment of teachers, long detailed lists of skills were formulated, which gradually resulted in a kind of fragmentation of the teacher’s role. In practice, these long lists proved highly unwieldy. Moreover, it was becoming increasingly apparent that this view of teaching took insufficient account of the fact that a good teacher cannot simply be described in terms of certain isolated competencies (pg. 79).

As Raewyn Connell (2009) states, this kind of view can have major impacts on overall education research:

A list of auditable competencies can become the whole rationale of a teacher education programme. There is no need, in such a model, for any conception of Education as an intellectual discipline. There is no need for cultural critique, since the market, aggregating individual choices, decides what services are wanted and what are not. There is a limited role for educational research, mainly to conduct positivist studies to discover ‘best practice’ (pg. 218).

Let us consolidate this argument. First, I must emphasize the reductionist ingenuity intrinsic in such listing making. For Kortaghen (2004), as an example, a more holistic approach is necessary as there is a myriad of levels of change and such complexity will not be encompassed by such analytical lists. At the same time, delivering a list of characteristics of what students or teachers could produce some sort of changing effects on teachers’ practices? Saying yes to this assertive is difficult. On the other hand, such kind of list could bring up important points to teacher teachers, serving as an inspiration to education research and continuing teacher training. But even for that, the limitation cited before to withstand backside of sustaining a naïve simplistic view of “teachery.”

When we blur our research focus and take the bigger picture is clear there is a lot of regional variation on ideal teacher images on lists, despite all globalization processes. Could we say without guilt what means to be a good teacher in Israel (Lamm 2000apud Arnon and Reichel 2007), in Australia (Connell 2009), in England (Moore 2004), or in Turkey (Telli et al. 2008) is the same? Even in a single country, ideologies could cause variation in ideal teacher images. For Chinese Confucian tradition, a good teacher is sawed as a moral authority while for the Chinese Zen Buddhist tradition is as a cognitive revolutionary (Connell 2009). In a country like Brazil, with continental proportions, scarcely it would be the same being a good teacher in the pauperize cities of the northeast as in the rich megalopolises of the southeast.

In fact, under the neoliberal regime, schools made auditable must produce a list of competencies for teachers or, in other words, a list of auditable performances (Connell 2009). Owing to research’ skew of focusing on richer regions and countries (Connell 2009), a list of characteristics of the ideal teacher produced by such kind of research will prioritize unfairness by political bias. The imagery fed gets further, moving away from real teachers and daily practice. A more real and palatable image will be achieved when we see beyond the teacher himself and seek the social, political, emotional and practice contingencies each teacher is soaked (Connell 2009; Simmie et al. 2016), an empathic and imaginary enterprise. Likewise, good teaching is highly collaborative labor increased by competencies and identities diversity, so any system of monitoring will promote a single model of excellence that can be harmful to education system functioning as a whole, specifically when looking at teachers working as a group in a school (Connell 2009).

As indicated by Tucker and Stronge (2005, pg. 25), “teachers today are encouraged to take major responsibility for their own professional development.” Unfortunately, this is not necessarily something good. Such a point reverberates the neoliberal view of education, where education is understood as a quantifiable marketplace and teachers as merely service providers (Simmie et al. 2016). Intrinsic challenge present in teachers’ training is how to ensure a continuously reflective practice without assuming a naïve reductionist point of view about teachers’ practice that reproduces neoliberal values.

A more epistemic point is education itself. There is no such thing as “the” education when we assume an epistemic view. There are too many ways of doing education, too many theories and models of teaching and learning. The same educational phenomenon can be sawed by divergent theories because of intrinsic complexity or by extrinsic like socio-cultural discrepancies (Bikner-Ahsbahs and Prediger 2006; 2014), so not necessarily epistemic diversity is a problem that requires unification (Bikner-Ahsbahs and Prediger 2010). A common flaw in the education field is the problem of omitted epistemological assumptions (Usher 2002; Wickman 2017), which really causes problems, not the intrinsic diversity. The variety of theories and models of teachings and learning reflects the diversity of images about what means to be a good teacher. Even the choice of a form to analyze is imbued in a subjective choice that could tell more about the researcher about the object per se (Usher 2002). To address what specifically means to be a good teacher, first, we would have to compromise ourselves with a specific view of the teacher’s role in education. A theoretic lens that allows assuming what is the function performed by teachers.

But, as Fitzgerald et al. point out (2002, pg. 67), a “narrow representation of education limits our vision of what ‘good’ education might be and privileges a particular mode of learning.” Usually, (unconscious?) choice is for a more naïve positivist view that reinforces the idea of measurable characteristics put on a closed list (Moore 2004; Simmie et al. 2016). For the consequence of this choice, the ideal teacher is seen as a unified proposition or even a push to unification that enclosures the subject of the utopic process of teacher idealization, the teachers’ growing themselves. This unification try could not be farther from reality, where teachers construct their own professional identities expectations by a role model, other people’s comments and/or their own teaching and learning experiences, expectations riches in distorted assumptions and myths (Louie et al. 2000).Footnote 1

A manly difficulty resides on the differentiation between teacher’s role and professional identity, as Deborah P. Britzman (1992) points out:

Whereas role can be assigned, the taking up of an identity is a social negotiation. One must consent to an identity. There is a distinction between learning to teach and becoming a teacher. Indeed, the significant albeit hidden work of learning to teach concerns negotiating with conflicting representations and desires. One must ferret out how multiple interpretations of the meanings of social experience come to position one's identity as a teacher. This involves scrutiny into how we come to know ourselves when we are trying to become a teacher (pg. 24).

From this, we must ensure to not threaten like teachers as “merely victims of society’s cultural imagery,” as described in the words of Weber and Mitchell (1995, pg. 26). As authors defend in consonance with Britzman, teachers are fully capable of breaking out and recreate this imagery in a continuous process of building their own identities, reflecting on their roles as professional, and inspiring new teachers. In this process of improvement, the teacher must stare his or herself deep in, paying attention to unconscious drivers and restrainers that reside in internalized beliefs about teaching and learning (Louie et al. 2000).

Social and Personal Historical Contingency

Here, I will try to guide readers through some forms of seeing the ideal teacher presents in education literature and tangent fields. None will resume itself, but just be a part of a complex theoretical kaleidoscope (Fig. 1). Each session must be different enough to help readers to find themselves in images and feed their own personal assumptions. The proposal is to nurture the pair imagery and imaginary which readers own about the ideal teacher. Doing so, I do not expect to provide a harsh definition of what means to be an ideal teacher. Main point is that each teacher must erect his own ideal self-professional image as a utopic horizon in a dialect exchange with social imaginary while facing professional imagery. Hope is to combat an expectation of direct and simply causality in education, contributing with a more ambivalent and complex understanding “in which discomfort and tension, stress and fear seem to be part of the process of education, as well as self-confidence, passion and motivation” (Tateo 2019, pg. 1).

Fig. 1
figure 1

A colorful view of reflections of glass beads inside a kaleidoscope (Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International CC BY-SA 4.0)

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Mediatic Representations: the Teacher as a Character

Imagination is usually contrasted with knowledge, as imaginative literature is contrasted with fact or purported fact. Legitimate distinctions underlie these contrasts: imagination is not knowledge, nor is fiction factual assertion. But don't separate these ideas completely. Imagination might be a source of knowledge; in imagining things, we might thereby come to know (possibly other) things. And if fictions are aids to imagination, they may lead indirectly to knowledge (Currie 2001, pg. 161).

An inexorable instance of social imaginary about teachers is nurtured by mediatic representations of the profession. By mediatic representations, we could refer to journalistic publications, literature, mass media campaigns and, of course, movies and TV series. Tring to picture images of the ideal teacher made by all these sources would be a Homeric effort that could full an entire paper. As doing so was not objective but helps readers to transit among the imagery of ideal teachers, the choice for this session is to narrow perspective just for movies. Movies intuitively have a more visual appeal that can be a major force on the imagination process: the scenic nature of movies produce more stereotyped images of the teacher. Thank this assumption, I choose to focus on works about an educational view of school movies as defined by Trier (2000; 2001): a movie that in some way is about an educator or a student, even incidentally. Such movies can have social influences on teachers, students and other education actors as parents and politicians.

How this literature delineates the ideal teacher? That is not an easy question, in view of many efforts is made to fight against images produced by the occidental movie industry (to a historical–critical view, see Dahlgren 2017). Some can be found in works on influences made by movies on teachers’ expectations, identities and so ever, or in others works that try to picture and identify stereotyped images presents in movies, both congruent approaches. Less common, few try to use these influences and stereotypes do stimulate critical professional growth, which seems as the dualistic process of imagery/imaginary here pointed. Let us take each one, step by step.

Teachers on School Movies: When the Screen Plays

Unlike other professions as lawyers, surgeons or police officers where the workplace is the main scenario, teachers are not represented in movies by more screen time spend at school, almost as if proper work’s place is not dramatic interesting enough (Kaplan 1990). Seems practically some dimensions of teachers’ work are not considered entertaining enough despite all drama teachers are daily soaked. This divergence can be used to dig up the central question about influences movies have on “teachery”: the dominant image of a teacher in public imagination is a product via tension between two kinds of images, as shown by Lewis and Renga (2016). Such images are fed by the real experiences with the direct phenomena, having teachers and learners as actors, and on the other side, such images are fed by popular culture as movies too. According to Dalton (2004), albeit people will be affected by popular culture in most various degrees, such influence is “inescapable” as we are all in the collision route with the Hollywood ideal. This dialectic process is part of the construction of personal identities as, in the words of the author, “we borrow from the stories of the films we see to help us create ourselves as characters and organize the plotlines of our daily lives” (Dalton 2004, pg. 2). So, how teachers can be influenced by movies that, for example, make relevant aspects of “teachery” invisible?

Weber and Mitchell (1995) show how each generation impressions about education leverage on the construction of nest generation’s teacher identity, as each generation pays for the sins of the generation that as gone before (Waller 1965). Each generation try to change the educational structure is, even in a novel pattern, a conflict between ambivalent images. In this aspect, school movies can produce contingencies to teacher imagery. Notwithstanding movies can be felt to the audience as fresh and new, in parallel they can foretell how teachers are supposed to by, what can be problematic to pre-service teachers (Lewis and Renga 2016).

A fundamentally conservative project as pointed for Moore (2004), teachers present in movies usually deal with educational questions at the symptom level of individual experience particulate from a very small group of few people. Intrinsically, this project avoids asking questions about real socialistically causes of problems education faces what could bring up the necessity for a revolution against the status quo (Weber and Mitchell 1995; Moore 2004; Dahlgren 2017).

Much easier it is to put all responsibility on teachers’ shoulders and to avoid doing so, let us chase imagery built in the literature that analyzes school movies. First, it is necessary to clarify what choices were made. Given the focus given here in the ideal teacher, unideal images will not be treated. Rather, emphasis will be on the stereotypes of the good teacher and their characteristics as analyzed by school movie literature. As these stereotypes feed imagery, these movies’ influence expands.

The first work founded by me was published in 1992 by Leslie A. Swetnam, who wrote about distortions of teachers’ images in media. In dealing with movies, Swetnam established two stereotypes. The first one is called Pied Pipers, as a worldly knew German legend tells about a magician piper who after getting rid of a rat infestation is not paid and gets his revenge kidnapping all children using their music until getting what deserves (Fig. 2). For the author (Swetnam, 1992), in movies such as Dead Poetry Society (1989) and Stand and Deliver (1988) Teachers “have the power to entice students to forsake the values of their parents or community” (pg. 31). This constitutes a conservative position for the author, which in newer publications from different authors will not be reproduced in any analyzes of the same movies. On the other hand, another Swetnam’s category fits on another side of the coin, a perfect and unrealistic image of the teacher which seems like some sort of “superhuman (…) who easily solves all student problems and runs every class effortlessly” (pg. 31).

Fig. 2
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The Pied Piper leads the children out of Hamelin. Illustration by Kate Greenaway for Robert Browning's "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" (Public Domain)

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This image of the super teacher accords with which Mitchell and Weber (2003) call the vision of the teacher as a hero devotedly working and winning against all odds. They investigate the matter of how these movies accumulate popular cultural texts characterized by a romantic view of education. Their analysis’ start points were the two movies, To Sir with Love (1967) And Dangerous Mind (1995), differentiating from Swetnam’s choices. Focusing on school movies that have a teacher as a protagonist, the authors enumerate some hero teachers’ ubiquitous proprieties.

  • 1) Teacher heroes are usually outsiders who are teaching through circumstance rather than choice.

  • 2) Teaching is natural; you do not need training if you’ve got “the right stuff.”

  • 3) Teacher heroes are rare and stand out in contrast to anti-hero teachers.

  • 4) Teacher heroes liberate students by defying the official school rules and curriculum.

  • 5) Real learning occurs outside of school.

  • 6) Teachers become heroic through a turning point of sudden enlightenment, divine intervention, or the “aha” experience.

  • 7) Teaching is a heroic and solitary act. Teachers do not work collectively for reform.

  • 8) Teacher heroes are devoted to their students and are rewarded with their undying love and gratitude in a dramatic scene (pg. 183).

Another author, Dalton (2004), will reinforce these points in an analysis of 116 school movies where she will show how, for most movies, teacher narrative will be existing aside school administrators and other teachers.

Such roles will be split into two types of heroic teachers in supervenient studies. In a specific chapter of his book, Moore (2004) scrutinize “charismatic subject,” one of the discourses presents in beliefs about good teaching. His work will be central to understanding the heroic teachers and their variations. For Moore, there are two basic types of understanding of teachers as heroic: teacher as a caregiver/nurturer and teacher as a savior. Teacher as nurturer is identified as inspired in the pedagogy of love as defined for Megan Boler (1999), where “pastoral” aspects of teaching are more relevant than academics aspects. In these movies, where students are usually characterized as troubled or troublesome, they fight against an unbelieving oppression system, government, school, even their own families, and achieve success through identification with a caring teacher. Savior teacher, for another side, is classified by the author in the following way:

Here the teacher is represented as one who enters the imperfect, put-upon world of constrained, symbolically abused young people, first winning their confidence, then showing them an alternative world and then, if they are really successful, taking some of them into that alternative world (Moore 2004, pg. 56).

For Moore, the second stereotype fits better in Mitchell and Weber’s classification of teacher heroes and it is consonant with Dalton’s analysis (2004), as I will show further. There is often a gender association between nurture as a female teacher and savior as a male teacher, which shows how school movies contribute to gender prejudice in teachers’ work and formation.

Further classifications will follow Moore’s dichotomy even when using different words to classify the hero teachers. Lewis and Renga (2016) will classify teachers as nurturer by the relationship with privileged students that need guidance while savior teachers, for another side, by relations with marginalizes students that need help with their issues. Dead Poets Society and Dangerous Mind are references for each one, respectively. In the same book, Jason Whitney (2016) in a chapter about the role of teacher, real and imagined, will reinforce the same dichotomy but with a divergent emphasis. Whitney prefers to focus on the “struggle” associated with hero strife. For teachers as nurturers, the struggle is achieving a role for inspiration that could bring to students a meaning for living a worthwhile life. The Savior teacher, still, could be better called as warrior teacher. Here, physical clash is usually literal, and it is not haphazard Whitney evokes the image of the inner-city teacher. The inner-city teacher needs even to separate the wheat from the cliff, fighting against irretrievable students to gain access and respect for reparable ones.

A ubiquitous image, many authors agreed, is good teachers do not require professional training because their innate ability sustains them: good teachers are born not made (Weber and Mitchell 1995; Moore 2004; Dalton 2004; Fisher et al. 2008). As heroes, the own narrative gives dynamic necessary to move the history and just is inherent characteristics change the entire students’ reality. This is of manly importance because, if the good teaching qualities are inherent, which is the consequent role of pedagogic training? The answer to this question is obviously, none. This is one of the fundamental discourses about teaching Moore emphases in his book: the charismatic discourse. For this point of view, good teachers are those that have spectacular social skills and who can apply their abilities in challenging contexts (Moore 2004), true daily life heroes.

Adding the hero narrative to teachers’ imagery is a way of romanticizing a ruthless reality: many times, accepting this discourse is easier than facing all difficulties in teachers’ practices (Mitchell and Weber 2003). Although they are necessities for good dramatic narratives creation, these heroic images are not good contributions to the definition of what is an ideal teacher (Fisher et al. 2008). Asking ourselves why these images are so appellative and pernicious is of sharp importance to avoiding accepting acratically the Hollywood Curriculum, a hiding curriculum present in cumulative cultural texts as movies (Micthell and Weber 2003; Dalhgreen 2017). As pointed by Dalton (2004), the Hollywood construction of teachers in his/her aesthetic, ethical, political dimensions is virtually the only model present in popular culture. Contributing to this, present society imbued with the neoliberal narrative ensures success must be understood from an individual perspective (Fisher et al. 2008; Simmie et al. 2016), nourishing an imagery which some authors call cumulative cultural texts about teacher in a heroic position (Mitchell and Weber 2003; Moore 2004).

The Crude Image and How to Shape Her

A hero is the protagonist of his/her own history. This phrase brings a deep problem intrinsic to the image of the good teacher as a hero, either been a nurturer or a savior. In this conception, teachers exist alone in their own history where the others are or supporting actors or antagonists. Teacher enterprise is seen from an individualistic point of view which denies all basic understandings about education. Education is a complex system with many forces and contingencies that underlie teachers’ work (Simmie et al. 2016). Even though this conception can be used to reflective training practices of the hero as a metaphor (Goldstein 2005) and for a Jungian archetype auto-analysis (Mayes 1999), we must ensure to tense this conception so present in common’s imaginary. An intrinsic contradiction, fitting in the hero teacher image fed in movies means many times crossing the ethical boundaries so debated in the education field: principles associated with professionalism as valor to be promoted in teachers’ training (Fisher et al. 2008). On another side, without changing the educational structures, the work of a hero teacher has nothing of revolutionary even being pictured as doing so (Dalton 2004) but contributes with a conservative imaginary of teachers’ work (Moore 2004, Dalton 2004).

Lastly, to start talking about who uses this imagery in a more functional way, it is important to rescue the words from Fisher and collaborators (2008):

If, by watching a film, we question the experience of students, the interplay of teaching and learning, the implications of intellectual, racial, gender and class chauvinism, or what it really means to be a teacher, then perhaps the cinematic experience will have some resonance for critical debate within the profession as whole. In doing this, however, we must acknowledge what is absent from images as well as what is present (pg. 43).

A way of doing so is mixing some of the contributions made by some of the authors. Understanding the role of cumulative cultural texts as pointed by Weber and Mitchell’s books (1995; Michell and Weber 2003) contributes to the critics to the Hollywoodian Good Teacher made by Dalton (2004). By doing so, we could glimpse the discursive change proposed by Moore (2004), where we stop to see the ideal teacher as only intrinsically charismatic, nevertheless, we agree with the role of a more openly communicative teacher can be for his/her students and college habitat. This is possible when we accept the popular imaginary hopes for an empathetic, compassionate and caring teacher (Fisher et al. 2008) but, as teachers and student teachers, we assume no one can be perfectly fit in this image.

If we agree with the position from cinematic representations, with their demands for drama overriding those for authenticity (as pointed for Fisher et al. 2008), how could one use popular images to practically promote professional growth? Some works show trials to doing that. First, it is much easier to depart from images already present in the subjects’ imagination, be for construction or deconstruction of this unconscious imagery, as Mitchell and Weber do (2003). They pinpoint five ways for doing so, videlicet:

1) Do close readings of popular texts; 2) use popular texts as cases; 3) use popular texts as 'conduits' to examining professional identity; 4) use popular texts from the past; 5) use popular texts to develop an empowering sense of community; and 6) create popular texts of reinvention (pg. 171).

Second authors, the main intention must be made evident, that is, doing close readings of popular texts. This approach takes inspiration from literary studies and gives chance to produce critical reads from dominant discourses. Here, the effort is on the construction of teachers’ identities as in others’ works in this specific field do, although not with the same theoretical foundation. Long and Pope (2016), for example, based on the reader-response theory to produce the same type of analysis proposed by Mitchell and Weber. Other authors, as Trier (2000), do not make any theoretical commitment, transiting between cultural studies and theory of spectacle.

Such theoretical diversity calls for a better analysis which is not objective here, but readers must keep in mind there are many theoretical tools available. They can be used to negotiate with students, teacher students, teachers and their imagery about teachery. For helping to do that, in the next section, I will try to look at research on expectations fed by both teachers and students. Despite these expectations are influenced by the school movies’ imagery (Fisher et al. 2008), they have their own novel patterns as readers will note.

Teacher’s and Students’ Expectations: the Teacher as a Demand

As shown in the last session, students and teachers do not initiate their interactions as empty glasses. Movies are one of many sources of cultural texts that imbue teachers and students in bad and good expectations about what means to be an ideal teacher. Having seen one of these sources in more detail, now I will try to look at the analysis of expectations per se. With this, I hope to turn brighter some of the images present in teachers’ imaginary fed by education literature. It is necessary to ensure, however, teaching is just one dimension of student satisfaction (Wiers-Jenssen et al. 2002), so we could not maximize such an analysis’s effort. But doing so I hope to help teachers to relocate their professional identities as finding how to deal with their expectations and another’s.

Even very young children that never stepped in school bring to the classroom their own expectations about teachers, many times in the form of fears (Weber and Mitchell 1995). In dealing with children, teachers’ behaviors are of major importance, as shown by review (Dockett et al. 2010). In this paper, Docket and collaborators reviewed works on images of teachers present in picture storybooks. But more relevant is the way these authors establish the role of children’s’ expectations in learning. They start elucidating how such children’s expectations imply in building positive relationships: knowing what students hope not for just serving this as a product but working upon these expectations as the foundations of a learning construction (Weber and Mitchell 1995; Dockett et al. 2010).

One could point out students do not really know what is best for them. For a long time, children have not an active voice in the educational process, and even when they did, it was as less important. In an old paper, Kratz (1896) made one of the earliest works on the characteristics of the best teachers. His work was focused on characteristics as recognized by children but, interestingly, in his justification, he pointed out children judgment about teachers is “no doubt, is immature and liable to error” (Kratz 1896, pg. 413), so students’ expectations were seen as less important or just confirmatory. One important change occurred in the 1960s and 1970s when researchers start to look at students’ opinions and impressions about the ideal teacher (Arnon and Reichel 2007; Albuquerque 2010) what overlap with the historical change in discourses about charismatic teachers established by Moore (2004). Kenneth A. Feldman (1976) made a systematic synthesis of a large body of research about college students' expectations in the middle of the 1970s.

Since them, so many other researches tried to use expectations both from students and teachers to address the characteristics of the ideal or the best or even the good teacher. About these others works, an interesting point is not even one cites the Feldman’s review: just one cites Feldman (Pozo-Muñoz et al. 2000), but other paper from 1986 which look at perceived instructional effectiveness. What this lack of concision tells us? Criticality is fundamental because we need to confront different empirical shreds of evidence, which is impossible without revisiting major publications in the field, still if not in empirical research at least in theoretical analysis and systematic reviews.

Categories on the Literature

For all pointed in the last paragraph, one could argue about the necessity of synthesizing all lists of characteristics and how they overlap. Such synthetic effort follows a scattered idea by which there is a specific and reachable ideal teacher. A few arguments will be late made posteriorly against such defense in the conclusion. For now, let stick in arguing different instruments can be used, tested and compared, which turn more complicated to do such synthesis in just one session of a major paper. Moreover, some timeless results show students’ assessment of teaching as an instrument fails to capture more deep features of the learning experience (Feldman 1976; Wiers-Jenssen et al. 2002). Here, I will just wander between some of those lists and try to stimulate the reader’s imagination to picture images fed for such kind of work.

My search for papers that made some mention about an ideal, best, better, or even good teacher find out twenty-three articles that try to list characteristics of good teaching. Indirect citations were counted when the direct paper cited presented an entire stretch of the original article contenting the categorization. The older one was from the 1960s (Jacobson 1966) and newer from year twenty eighteen (Millward 2018). Some summarize many categories, more than twenty (e.g. Pozo-Muñoz et al. 2000; Parpala et al. 2011), while others listed just three (Millward 2018). In media, articles used eight categories. Few used more descriptive categories in a qualitative approach (Mustain 1990; Arnon and Reichel 2007) while most preferred more synthetic categorization. Much than half of the papers worked on the students’ expectations about teachers (e.g., Feldman 1976; Delaney et al. 2010; Parpala et al. 2011), while almost the rest of them based these categories on personal opinions, educational ideologies (Lamm 2000apud Arnon and Reichel 2007), institutional documents (Demmon-Berger 1986apud Minor et al. 2002), and bibliographic references (Minor et al. 2002). Just a few worked on teachers’ self-expectation (Das et al. 1996; Parpala and Lindblom-Ylänne 2007) and mixed comparative approach with students and teachers (Devine et al. 2013).

For categories of characteristics listed by such bibliography, I found ten general aspects from the ideal teacher description that can be used not just to stimulate imaginative processes relevant to construction to the professional identity, but as a conceptual framework from analyzing such research field too. How I came with these aspects? First, I summarized all categorizations presents on my bibliography in an Excel table, following the standards from basic textual data treatment, a step prior to more derivate methods like content analysis or grounded theory. I did not make coding, at first, just put all categories as discrete cells on my table and painted all that used the same words, synonymous or semantically equivalent with the same color. The most discrete categories that saw as high frequent by visual contrast, teaching skills, disciplinary expertise, communication, motivation, and personality. With this, I could ensure the mainly of categories applied to literature. But I not wished to exclude any category, as many workers could be biased by their regional demands, to ensure representing diversity. For doing so, I looked for ways of fitting the categories for classification left. Some anecdotic categories could not be excluded even sparse, like role models and general knowledge. Evaluation and professionalism are made up of the categories that were left. No categories were left unclassified on an aspect. The resultant aspects are explained in Table 1. One could note that the aspects go from the most unmeasurable to the most measurable, which is not a coincidence. The effort was to guarantee the teacher's aspects that are usually institutionally evaluated or personally judged.

Just one paper presented categories that embrace all these general aspects (Pozo-Muñoz et al. 2000), others just embrace five aspects average. These aspects are not equally represented in the literature too: teaching skills and disciplinary expertise have been present in more than 70% of articles while evaluation, role models, and general knowledge were present in just less than 30%. As some papers tried to analyze how students and teachers give valor to some feature’s contribution to teachery, just analyzing the presence of a category in a paper it is not enough to seek the weight of this to the conception of the ideal. In fact, I will not try to argue against or for specific aspects, as this could negate or neglect different teaching styles (Grasha 1994), instead, I hope such characterization help to see the different aspects raised by the literature that describe how teachers and students are seeing (and hoping for) the ideal teacher.

One List to Bring Them All

Theoretical positions in education are, by definition, not neutral. Ways we see how teachers should be, or characteristics they must present, is the product of sociohistorical context. Arnon and Reichel (2007), inspired in the iconic book edited by Joy A. Palmer Fifty modern thinkers on education (2001), resume how different theorists see how teachers should be seen:

The teacher as ‘midwife’ (Socrates); as artist in the use of knowledge (Plato); as the conductor of dialogue (Bergman); as purveyor of culture (Cicero); as liberator (Freire); as one who focuses on teaching discipline (Breiter); as role model (Aristotle); as empiricist (Locke); as trainer (Watson); as educator in accordance with nature (Rousseau); as essentialist (Bagley); as creative teacher (Luvenfeld); as socialist (Barth); as existentialist (Frankel); as mediator (Feuerstein); as child centered (Neill); and as post-modernist (Foucault) (Palmer et al., 2001, pg.443–444).

Let take one of them as an example. Paulo Freire (1995) stands in favor of a dichotomy in which he splits manner to teachers see their roles into reactionary teachers and progressive teachers, what could be called as a liberator. Starting from that, Freire sustains from a narrow political located position, progressive teachers are best teachers and they present the following characteristics: humilities, lovingness, liberalism, and tolerance. How could one classify such categories of the ideal teacher according to this Freirean view? Is this a role model? Are those characteristics cited from own teacher’s personality or teaching skills pedagogical located? I raise this question to ensure readers no categorization will be capable of covering all diversity of ways of understanding the educational phenomena of trying to be the best teacher we could be. In fact, aspects here pointed out do not have this ambition. They are just a peepshow (Fig. 3), different images superimposed. Yet, this position conveys a pluralistic view of teachers training to ensure diversity of practices and competencies, it is important to guaranty to readers I am not seeing they are all equality equivalent. If the discussion was about minimal someone must present to be a teacher, would be completely different. But in dealing with maximum one professional can reach, invariably will trespass necessity to some theoretical commitment made clearly.

Fig. 3
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Illustration to Adolph Glasbrenner’s Guckkästen made by Theodor Hosemann (1835)

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Other works not considered in this session survey were made feeding divergent ways of seeing the categorization of the ideal teacher by teachers and students. In the Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices, two papers presented brought interesting thoughts. Fitzgerald and collaborators (2002) presented a search for intersubjective aspects of teachers’ practice and Louie and collaborators (2000) tried to expound the myths about teaching. These two works use some form of autobiographic analysis, a type of narrative research as defined by Creswell (2012). Narrative research could help to give voice to divergent untold histories, by needs the care to guarantee the experience presented it is not too personal to preclude promoting reflexivity by identification. On another side, rethinking ways to tell teachers histories it is relevant to help seek new ways of analyzing as search for successful practices against failure culture in school (Libâneo 2015).

In this session and previous I tried to show how ideal, best, better and good are used to classify teachers in education literature that used those words literally to qualify ways of being a teacher. Understanding I did not try to deplete diversity of ways to define what is ideal to teach, but reaching some sort of quantitative asymptote about, now I will swerve to divergent literature. Keeping interested in divergences more basic than theoretical dissonances, but which could justify such a variety of theories, the focus will be on aesthetic perspectives of teaching.

Aesthetic of Teaching: the Teacher as Beauteous

When talking about the ideal, intuition is to evade in trying to reach just the best. Excluding metaphysical debate and looking just at the semantic level, the word ideal refers to what could be without any sort of limitations (Woodford and Walter 2004), while, I argue, best carry the meaning of what is possible given circumstances. Despite all the difficulties, we try to reach the best getting better and better as possible for us. But better, like beauty, is a question of taste. We can assume each one has his preferences and turn getting better in an individualistic enterprise. But human beings are intrinsically social (Wilson 2012), and we can reach real realization just by collectivization. Only the feeling we are doing good is not enough without recognition for our pairs and beloved ones.

When I said better is a question of taste, definition of taste was borrowed from Anderhag and collaborators (2015a, pg. 750) for who taste is defined as “how people through talk and actions make distinctions about what kind of language, objects, and people belong and do not belong in a certain practice.” For this view, the taste is understood as a proxy to motivation and covers affective, cognitive, valuation and standardization aspects (Anderhag et al. 2015a, b).

Even with such definition, this session’s first paragraph can sound as cheap talk since it could be applied in any context; for a teacher, an engineer or an artist. That is his merit and flaw. Such ideas are mischievous as easy to glue, but justly for this, they can be important since bringing some sort of trueness on them. Enterprise of getting better in the direction of an ideal pass by idiosyncratic tasty choices sometimes unconsciously made and under the influence of a myriad of complex factors like a social and historical contingency.

Inquiring what we think is good in the sense of pleasure and emotions related is, before all, a philosophic question (Wickman 2017). The philosophical field interested in searching for answers for enjoyment questions is the aesthetic (Miller 1998) and there is an increased interest between the role of aesthetics in bridging emotions and learning (Hobbs 2012). What makes someone feels the joy of learning something? And what is this question’s relevance for a teacher?

First, we must take a step back and make an important distinction. Questions of taste and what is good reside between the line of pleasure and rightness. Not necessarily what is good in the sense of pleasure, what is unpretentiously tasty, will go hands in hands with what is good by its correctness. In fact, sometimes to reach the right we must fight natural assumptions that can be tremendously uncomfortable. This discrepancy is what can trace the distinction between an aesthetic questioning of what is good to an ethical one. The Freirian definition of progressive teacher I presented in the last session, for example, is about a good teacher for an ethical point of view and could be pleasant but only if we share current values. The philosophical debate about taste is translated today for aesthetic judgment thanks to argue taste has an ethical influence when we see our values being reproduced: for another side, aesthetic would need to be contemplative and disinterested (Shelley 2017). Although I am aware of intersections between aesthetic and ethic, (as pointed by Levinson 2001), here I made the choice to focus on aesthetic aspects that do not overlap with ethics reasoning which leaves this as a future research line.

Second, we all know that taste is historically and socially situated (Anderhag et al. 2015a, b). A pleasant class today probably will not be so pleasant for different students in the timeline. Same way, a pleasant class in Japan maybe will not be so pleasant for other students from different countries. We must be aware that taste is intrinsically subjective, but this must be not enough to stop us from asking aesthetic questions.

Let us now rescue those last questions with a focus on this strictly aesthetic point of view in a paraphrase. What makes someone thinks a lecture is unmissable? Revell and Wainwright (2009) tried to answer this question by interviewing geography academics and students. They found their sample group tends to prefer lectures that have interactivity, clarity and passion/enthusiasm. Let us focus on this last one: authors say all responses are much similar and were an emphasis on “the degree to which she/he can bring a subject to life” (pg. 211). Such a choice of words is not trivial. As the expression referred to some sort of artistic activity where crafter made possible to, for example, an immaterial piece of art seems like something from real life, or what can produce real feelings in their audience. No wonder teachers seem for some as certain kind of artists, since they can promote the joy of students (Smith 1970).

Performing the Teacher Itself

One form of art is easy to compare to teaching as they overlap: acting. Whether in how acting as teacher influence teachers’ impressions about teaching or in the way teachers perform in their work. The first one was already analyzed in the mediatic representations session, so let’s pay some attention in the last. As I showed, motivation is taken as an important part of being a good teacher so the capacity to teacher show (and provoke) enthusiasm plays a central role in his performance.

Actors usually play their roles in more controlled environments with an aisle to fade out. In contrast, teachers are always interacting with their audience in a more intimate way in a play he/she is the only one knows that is a performance. Despite those differences, actors have a variety of techniques to sustain attention focused on them and the audience engagement that can be useful to teachers apply in the classroom (Griggs 2001). The book Acting Lessons for Teachers, Using Performance Skills from Robert T. Tauber and Cathy Sargent Mester (2007) presents a huge contribution to a teacher training based on those acting contributions. On the other side, as reviewed by Elyse Lamm Pineau (1994) teacher-artist theoretical conceptions have some sort of philosophically appealing but are not methodologically instructive because of hazy of appealing to unconscious process. For now, I will pass by this question and let the unconscious process associated to psychanalytic jurisdiction to intersections to psychanalysis and education (i.e., Franco and Albuquerque 2010) which are not the scope here.

Talking about teaching as some sort of acting or performance as did by Griggs (2001) and Pineau (1994) has the relevance of bringing to light certain teachers’ behaviors in the classroom relegated to the background in education literature. Without that perspective, gestures, voice intonation, dress code and other subjective corporal aspects of teachers are taken as too intimate to be analyzed. Body experience of being a teacher, emotions, sensations, and physical existence are understood as secondary compounds to teachers training, even being central in teachers’ practice. The technological advance and distance learning evoke questions about indispensable of the presence of the teachers’ bodies in classrooms which raises the complexity of this issue (Voltolini 2007).

Human communication has verbal and non-verbal aspects. When we talk about communication aspects of teaching, both are embraced. Teaching skills, for another side, are usually focused on what and how to say. Non-verbal aspects, still, play a relevant role in motivation: who never fell into sleep in a lecture by a monotonic speaker? Comparative research show students are more sensitive to nonverbal compounds of teachers’ behaviors than teachers assume (Babad et al. 1991), and the proper teachers are aware of the impact of their body language in their students (Benzer 2012). In an odd work, Liando (2015) made a differentiation between verbal and non-verbal characteristics of the ideal teacher. Her results showed classroom behaviors as looking when talking and smiling at the class as a whole, moving around the class when teaching, and having a relaxed body position when talking are seen for students as behaviors that favor learning. The natural conclusion for those results will be tremendously advantageous to teachers that can follow actors’ guidelines with respect to a physical awareness of their own body and voice.

One facet of acting is the costuming. A character’s costume shapes his identity and establishes the first bridge to the audience starts to accept the fantasy fabricated in proscenium (Monks 2009). Each piece of the costume carries some sort of information (Monks 2009) which communicates to imagery already present in public thought, exciting their imagination. For teachers it is different? Our parents teach us since early to not judge people according to their external appearance, but most teachers admitted the importance of their dressing habits in the classroom (Benzer 2012). Clothing can operate as cultural texts read by students (Weber and Mitchel 1995). Students pay considerable attention to the costumes of teachers (Weber and Mitchell 1995), in fact:

When a teacher enters a classroom for the first time, it is not necessarily her or his ideas that first attract students’ attention. It is the body and how it is adorned and clothed—how it looks, sounds, moves and smells. Whether or not we realize it, the image we project precedes us, introduces us, and inserts us into the communication we have with students. This applies to most teaching situations, from kindergarten to university (Mitchell and Weber 2003, pg. 124).

Looking at how student teachers draw other teachers she noted they paid much attention to clothing details (Weber and Mitchell 1995), so the dress codes compound a huge dimension of imagery of teachers. In the meantime, such costume imagery is not so variable since parents and children tend to appreciate familiar blandness as a dress code to teachers (Weber and Mitchell 1995). Dressing the duty uniform is a way to avert wear and tear thanks to familiarity it brings to all involved (Mitchell and Weber 2003). Cultural images are not the only fountain to teachers dressing habits since their individual personalities play a central role (Weber and Mitchell 1995). But if we see teachers as actors in some sort of performance, which means in their professional context they are not just themselves but something more, we can convert their unconscious choices to the rational meaning of their bodies as texts. In the words of the specialists:

Traditional teaching involves somebody inducting some body into a body of knowledge. The English language acknowledges the bodily component of teachers and teaching. Yet although we may talk figuratively of a student body or a corpus of knowledge, in order to cultivate the mind, we mistakenly feel we must ‘get past’ the physical, personal body which can be distracting or even dangerous. Learning environments have historically upheld clothing customs (academic gowns, strict dress codes, and uniforms) aimed at hiding, disciplining, or covering up the body in order to focus on mind. However, even if we are all dressed alike, we still teach with and through our bodies (Mitchell and Weber 2003, pg. 127).

Aesthetic Education

Looking at teaching as performance is highlighting one aesthetic dimension of education and any curriculum that pays attention to this kind of practice dimension will by consequence be aesthetically situated. Aesthetic education, however, cannot just be reduced to how teachers can be pleasant to students. First, aesthetic education can have a broad or narrow definition, as outline Wang (2018): looking at education practice through artistic means configures as narrow sense, while to let the search for beauty impress on education practice is broad since it has philosophical significance. Second, the aesthetic definition can be associated with an aesthetic object, an aesthetic judgment, an aesthetic attitude or an aesthetic experience (Shelley 2017). This philosophical diversity implies in a variety by which one can see education aesthetically. The perspectives cited before understand teaching as a performance or acting are better fitted in an aesthetic attitude and uses aesthetic education in a narrow sense.

Not unusually, aesthetic education is seen as standing against technical views of education. An aesthetical perspective is pointed as a panacea against some problems on education practice as to be too “rational, diagrammatic and instrumental” (Pike 2004, pg. 20) or “robotization and systematization and alienation” (Greene 1984, pg. 126). Even if I do agree with critics about the obsession to seek effectiveness (Pike 2004) and impact this can have about teachers’ mental health (Codo 2006), I have to admit I always saw myself skeptical against educational propositions that fail to show material applicably on teacher daily practice.

For example, when an author lays emphasis on how feelings, perceptions, and imagination can play a certain role in learning that is why teachers should pay attention to fosters this on students' behave (Greene 1984) is smooth to picture an image to a teacher’s applying such point. Meanwhile, let us take argues like “that there are aspects of our knowledge that are not open to scientific or rational understanding because we are always placed in a situation (…) that could not be exhaustively analyzed” (Pike 2004, pg. 26). Agreeing with this statement traps us in a black box statement, where sense cannot be accessed and we just have knowledge about inputs and outputs extrinsically, not his intrinsic behavior. How teachers could apply ideas than do not stimulate their imaginations?

One of the contributions from aesthetic to education is overcoming subjective trivia of appreciating itself an encounter or seeing something just as a commodity (Docherty 2018), even when they are not specifically talking about art products, but daily experiences as teaching and learning. This promotion of aesthetic experiences on teaching is the manly nominal application of aesthetics on education and we have one person to say thanks: John Dewey.

Dewey’s aesthetic for experience is dominant because the author has a huge influence on both education and aesthetics (Martin 2003). To Dewey, education must use and promote imagination, sensibility, and experience (Dewey 1997), aspects associated with what he calls aesthetic experience (Pugh and Girod 2007). Dewey states we must promote education to worthwhile experiences are aesthetic in sense “knowledge, skills, and prosperity (beyond mere subsistence) does not end in themselves but means to more satisfying experiences” (Wong et al. 2001, pg. 319). The transformative aspect resides in the transaction, where both experiencer (person) and experienced (world) are modified irreversibly (Girod et al. 2010) which makes sense with the vision of teaching as an interminable or impossible profession (Britzman 2009; D’Agord 2010).

Conclusions

The ideal teacher is, above all, a utopic horizon. Difficult is to say someone ever reached at least one or some conception of the ideal—maybe because it is historically unsettled. Sigmund Freud (1964) in the essay “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” already place: for some professions is intrinsically impossible to reach satisfactory results. Marta Regina Leão D’Agord (2010) starts his research for Freud’s statement and look at “teachery” incompleteness: teaching/learning dualistic process do not surcease but transforms itself and all subjects involved at every step. D’Agord’s work vibrates together with Britzman (2009, pg. 14), as she points an inherent aporia in discussion about teacher’s professional image: “while there are particular skills and techniques that may help us out of a mess, they cannot help us with how the mess feels or even judge whether the mess is needed.” Teachers need to travel through the incompleteness mess of their own professional image (Fig. 4). The irremediable conclusion is the ideal teacher is commonly composed of a (bad) static made-by-list image or an unrealistic cinematic performance, which does not accommodate in the incompleteness of “teachery,” a more dynamic joyful image. Looking at more unusual lines for research is a priority to teacher’s teachers to bring up a more processual view of the construction of their teacher students’ self-images as ideal teachers. Teacher reflectivity (Mayes 1999), aesthetics of teaching (Girod et al. 2010), teachers as role models (Lunenberg et al.2007), and emotional dimensions of teaching (Schutz and Lee 2014) are aspects deserving of such attention, some already pointed in this work.

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Erik Johansson's surrealistic photography

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I agree with the position assumed by Moore (2004), in consonance with others authors (Smyth et al. 1999), that seeking to become a good or better teacher it is inviable if made through an externalist conception (as defined too by Albuquerque 2010) like a profile or template. Such crystallized image is not a comfortable place for a teacher to be. I did not assume here a stand for or against a certain definition of good or bad teacher purposefully. Instead, I stand we all should seek as professional and/or professional formers better understanding about ourselves and others.

To do that as a teacher trainer, we must consciously raise rich imagery of the ideal teacher, feeding teachers’ imaginary about their professional expectations with more doable and cozy aspirations (see Lewis and Renga 2016). As pointed by Weber and Mitchell (1995), in this effort, we must stand against tendencies to oversimplify natural cultural imagery in a one-dimensional view. Authors point the dialectical relationship between schooling and popular culture. Here, I point to another dialectical relationship: imagery produced by different forms of seeing the ideal teacher in education literature and teacher’s imaginary. If they think could reach the ideal, and if yes, what kind of ideal teacher they would want to be. To nurture this relationship as a healthy one, we must fight against a picture of “good teacher” in the singular, and promote it in the plural (Connell 2009).Footnote 2

The ideal teacher is not just one. There is no learning without desire, and multiple desires imply in rich imagery of diverse ways of imagining who and how is the best teacher possible. The word desire here cannot be understood as just erotic desire, but the intrinsic libido that moves us and pushes aspects of our personality as curiosity and passion (Britzman 2010). Passion was pointed as not just relevant in motivating students (Devine et al. 2013) but as a whole research field (Day 2004) on bridging the desire’s role in the seduction associated with making students care about the class subject (Hobbs 2012).

As a famous citation from Montaigne’s essay opening states, fortis imaginatio generat casum, which means, the strong imagination creates the event (Docherty 2018). We spend a huge amount of time in our own minds interacting with mental projections of reality which have power, and to wield this power, “we must see the world we are creating in relation to the raw material that shapes our imagination” (Lewis and Renga 2016, pg. 66). Our imagination as a teacher in perennial formation is moved by the desire while transits between the social imagery, being modified and modifying the social images of teaching. Movies, education literature, and our aesthetic impressions contributing to this dynamic, as shown, and all influence how we think that we can be teachers. In this process social models of professional being in conflict so much with the personal ideal teacher as well as our possibilities of applying our impressions on the reality practice (Arnon and Reichel 2007).

In disagreement with Arnon and Reichel (2007), not just the discussion about the ideal teacher that was centered in categories is enough to break the cycle of maintenance of pernicious images by older teachers to early teachers. We need to overflow the categories of idealization to show they are not enough. Good teachers know how to teach not ends in the cognitive tools, but in the emotional management in the classroom (Day 2004). The aesthetic education brings some contributions as giving voice to teaching dimensions as flavor, taste, emotions abundant in the classroom experience. But some deeper impressions need for more revolutionary analyses as using the psychanalysis (Britzman 2009; D’Agord 2010). Calling “charisma” as a relevant aspect in the classroom as pointed by many papers, for example, could be a process of “transferential illusion” (Moore 2004). Teaching can be a mess sometimes, and such an indetermination of teaching does not have to be seen as something evil (Pike 2004) if we take into account teacher emotional labor and the temporality proper to the psyche D’Agord (2010). Further contributions from psychanalysis to the fabrication of ideal teacher images need to be made.

Students need teachers that are present, body, and soul. Not just cognitively engaged but reaching some level of self-consciousness just possibly with the courage to look deep to their thoughts and use what finding in their favor. Rescuing, Dewey understood implies learning as a process that bridge daily experience to an aesthetic experience (Pineau 1994) associated with I call the sublime of reappraising the previous understanding present in an unwelt, a self-centered world as defined by Uexküll’s semiotic theory, to a more intersubjective comprehension. Such cognitive accommodation may probably be harsh and yet somehow beautiful, fitting in the definition of sublime (Zangwill 2019).

Central to this process is the role of students’ assumptions of reality functioning works. The feeling of anticipation how things should do or be creates the anxiety necessary to a full experience (Wong et al. 2001) and instigates the process to have a dramatic end, the consummation, where the protagonist as in a hero journey see yourself obligated to reconsider your world assumptions (Goldstein 2005). In the words of Wong and collaborators (2001, pg. 321): “the individual looks forward to, imagines what may or may not be, and is surprised, disappointed, or fulfilled when consummation occurs.” So, teachers are interwoven empathically in a myriad of sensations experimented by their students as their thoughts and assumptions about daily life change. This is extremely consonant with the vision that teachers must find a way to be made presents in their classrooms, in the sense of experience stated by Dewey, where mind and bodywork in unison (Ingman 2018).

Such intimacy of these topics of research call from the development of more educational theories that can take account of internalist questions of teachers’ images. Research on teacher identity formation undoubtedly will bring some light on what means to be a good teacher (Tateo 2012) and much is being produced in the field of identity formation of teachers (for a review, see Ahmad et al. 2019) and science teachers (for a review, see Avraamidou 2014). Unfortunately, the available theories do not consider the role of the dualistic process of imagination and imagery under-emphasis on this paper. Further research can evaluate the theoretical impact of such approach and their contributions elucidate here on the professional identity formation of teachers, an entirely new line of research that can be developed by that.

Table 1 Aspects of the ideal teacher presents in the categorization literature
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