The Value of Teacher Identity as a Conceptual Tool for Understanding Teacher Development and Educational Equity

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium illuminates the value of teacher identity as a conceptual tool to investigate the complexity and the promise associated with how teachers create and negotiate their professional selves in practice. The four papers rely on a frame consistent with recent teacher-identity and language-teacher identity studies, and use that frame to investigate populations of early-career teachers with an eye toward how teachers simultaneously construct their complex professional selves and are constructed by discourses and material resources. Consistent with this year’s annual meeting theme, the studies here help the field understand the various kinds of diverse and democratic complexities—linguistic, personal, sociopolitical, and educational—that feature into how teachers develop understandings of themselves, ultimately having a potential impact on educational equity.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Lives of Teachers

Chair

• Manka M. Varghese, University of Washington

Papers

• Straddling Two Worlds: Preservice Teacher Identity Development at the Cross Section of University Programs and P–12 Schools - Rebecca Buchanan, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Experiences, Education, and Expanding Understandings of Literacy in Relation to Teacher Identity - Betina Hsieh, California State University - Long Beach

• Provincializing English: Race, Empire, and English Teacher Identities - Suhanthie Motha, University of Washington

• Language Teacher Identity: Thai Heritage Language, Culture, and Religion - Jitpicha Jarayapun, Royal Thai Navy- Language Center

Discussant

• Brad Olsen, University of California - Santa Cruz