Developing Teachers’ Professional Identities Working Through Identification Complexity Toward Authentic Recognitions

• In Event: White Teachers, Where Are You Now? New Research on White Teacher Identity: Identifications—Processes—Becoming

Abstract

Because identity is simultaneously unitary and multiple, continuous and discontinuous, individual and social (Clarke, 2009; Akkerman & Meijer, 2011), teacher education should work with complexity, helping students make use of the shifts in thinking that might lead them toward stronger pedagogy (Horn et al., 2008). With this understanding, for example, that white, middle-class preservice teachers rely on old scripts instead of drawing deeper connections between their experiences and course readings about systemic inequities (Mueller & O’Connor, 2007), we have to revise our forms of questioning, our requirements for writing assignments, and our assessment strategies to better support preservice teachers’ learning.

With this complexity in mind, this teacher research reflection (Cole & Knowles, 2000), working through narrative and qualitative analyses of preservice teachers’ written reflections, classroom interactions, and other texts, provided for preservice and professional teachers’ understandings and experiences related to how race impacts one's work as an educator. This teacher research reflection recognizes process identities or identifications as critical first step toward teacher education that makes space for deep study of self-in-society. This teacher research reflection drives at preservice and professional teachers’ professional identifications as

1.An ongoing, shifting process

2.Contextually, socially and culturally mediated (thus, rendering educators both agentic and constrained)

3.Growing through tension, often in the interaction between scientific and spontaneous concept development

4.Critical to building a personal theory of teaching and learning that positions the self within an unjust social order as an advocate for all students.

The teacher research reflection articulates, in its conclusions, the increasing exigency to work through process, identification, and becoming in the authentic development of preservice and professional teachers.

References

Akkerman, S. F., & Meijer, P. C. (2011). A dialogical approach to conceptualizing teacher identity. Teaching and Teacher Education, 27(2), 308–319.

Clarke, M. (2009). The ethico-politics of teacher identity. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 41(2), 185–200.

Cole, A.L. & Knowles, J.G. (2000) Researching teaching: Exploring teacher development through reflexive inquiry. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Horn, I. S., Nolen, S. B., Ward, D., & Campbell, S. S. (2008). Developing practices in multiple worlds: The role of identity in learning to teach. Teacher Education Quarterly 35(3), 61-72.

Mueller, J., & O'Connor, C. (2007). Telling and retelling about “self” and “others”: How pre-service teacher (re)interpret privilege and disadvantage in one college classroom. Teaching and Teacher Education, 23, 840-856.

Author

• Ann Mogush Mason, University of Wisconsin - River Falls