Contextualizing Rural Teachers' Personal and Professional Technological Identities

• In Event: 41.084 - Roundtable Session 16
  In Roundtable Session: 41.084-7 - Narratives of Professional Identity Building

Abstract

This paper draws on data from a year-long phenomenological inquiry into the curriculum rural teachers make with technological resources and infrastructures to which they have access. Four teachers in four different rural school districts in the West and Midwestern United States participated in this study. To investigate the technological understandings teachers had as they worked to make curriculum, the researcher developed technological autobiographical narratives with participating teachers to inform how they merged personal and professional identities around their affinity for, use of, and definitions around technologies. This information contextualized the curriculum they made with available resources in their classrooms. Findings inform work on definitions of rural English language arts education, rural access to technologies, and rural teacher identity development.

Author

• Mary F. Rice, The University of New Mexico