Teachers-in-Context(s): Unpacking Professionalism(s) Through a Multiple-Case Study of Five Elementary School Teachers in Cyprus

• In Event: Teachers in Context(s): Portraits of Vulnerability and Adversity

Abstract

This paper discusses elementary teachers’ constructions of professionalism by attending to their (hi)stories of professional lives in particular social and institutional contexts. Combining theorizations of teacher professionalism and biographical research, the cases of five female teachers in the Republic of Cyprus are utilized to explore how teachers’ (hi)stories, materialized in particular temporal and spatial boundaries of their professional lives, intersected with their negotiations of social identities, their interpretations of their school contexts, and their constructions of students as social and academic beings. This discussion thus contributes to understanding teacher professionalism as a social and (forever in-the-making) political project, framed by historicity and context and yet in flux as it is instantiated in the mundaness of the everyday of the classroom.

Authors

• Stavroula Kontovourki, University of Cyprus

• Stavroula Philippou, University of Cyprus

• Eleni Theodorou, European University