Becoming transformative intellectuals.

Why is it important for teachers to become transformative intellectuals? Are all teachers willing to become so? Well, certainly there are many personal and social factors that should be taken into consideration to answer those previous questions.
From what I perceive, commitment and optimism towards the teaching profession are two essential elements in the process of becoming transformative intellectuals. Being committed educators will assuredly lead to students who feel committed to their learning experience. Teachers should be capable of engendering enthusiasm for any task or educational project. But in order to achieve such an ability they should primarily believe in their own and in their students' competence to fulfil any set goal. And this has inevitably to do with optimism. Whenever you believe that something can be possible in spite of the apparent difficulties, you are being an optimist. I truly think that teachers with an upbeat view are more able to succeed in their teaching aims and are even more able to increase those aims as time passes by.
According to Larry Cuban, Trasformative educators should have as primordial aims "the creation and implementation of forms of knowledge that are relevant to the student's specific contexts and to construct curricula and syllabi around their own and their students' needs, wants and situations. Such a task, he adds, makes it imperative for them to maximize sociopolitical awareness among their learners using conciousness raising, problem-posing activities". This makes reference to the necessity that teachers become well-informed practitioners not only in relevant social and political matters but also in effective ways to catch their students' attention provoking a feeling of curiosity and a need to look at those matters with a critical eye.
Finally, for teachers to become transformative practitioners, it is essential that they become "concerned with the affective dimension of human beings". This side of the teaching task cannot be neglected due to the inevitable fact that students are human beings with emotional and affective needs and they expect that the teacher satisfy those needs in any possible way. They many times may do things that might seem irrational and this is mainly becuase of their natural thirst for attention and affection. This aspect of transformative teaching should not be left aside, though it certainly may make the teaching task even more demanding.
Maybe this is time to ask ourselves what type of teacher we would like to become? And how can we prepare ourselves to face the different challenges of everyday teaching? Again, optimism seems to me the clue for more promising and satisfactory teaching results.