This paper is intended to introduce the concept of “the heart of a teacher” proposed by the American scholar P. J. Palmer to reaffirm the significance of teachers’ inner selves and life awareness in the enhancement of quality education and teaching. Through an analysis of G. Biesta’s discourse about the “subjectification” as an educational purpose, and the researcher’s experience of actualizing humanistic pedagogy by means of exploration of the practices of “thinking with walking” and “dialogue of learning circle”, it is an attempt to serve as the reference for the development of subjectification of life education in teacher education, and to help pre-service teachers to care their agency in terms of technologies of self.
In this paper, the researcher firstly tries to discuss the values and significance of narrative for the teachers’ professional development, to offer the possible methodologies for cultivating and refining the consciousness of the “teaching self,” which is crucial for quality teaching and teacher education, by reviewing the researcher’s exploration of actualizing humanistic pedagogy. It is attempted in this paper to assist pre-service teachers in continual dialectics of “becoming oneself” to reclaim “the heart of a teacher,” as the reference for initiating the approach towards the subjectification of life education in teacher education.