Negotiating Multiple Identities: Analyzing the Multicultural Teacher Educating Experience of a Latina Early Childhood Teacher

• In Event: Toward Justice: Centering Identities, Positionalities, and Community Knowledges in Teacher Educators' Work and Learning

Abstract

This study highlights the experience of a Latina teacher educator whose primary professional identity is an early childhood teacher teach a multicultural education course in a university-based teacher education program. Gee’s (2000) identity framework is utilized to zoom into four different aspects (i.e., Nature, Institution, Discourse, & Affinity) of the participant’s multiple identities and to understand the ways in which she made sense of her university-based teacher educator practice. Findings suggest that beginning teacher educators experience tensions and negotiations in taking up the new teacher educator identity due to the other prominent identities they are used to performing in different contexts. Implications for facilitating beginning teacher educators’ transition and implementation of critical multicultural teacher education work are discussed.

Author

• Eun Jeong Jun, Teachers College, Columbia University