Professional Identity Matters: Agency, Emotions, and Resilience

• In Event: 31.035 - Teacher Identity Development Situated in Dynamic Social and Cultural Contexts

Abstract

Schools in many countries have been subject to a continuing series of externally-initiated reforms over the last two decades. These reforms are widely reported to have resulted in increased bureaucracy, scope and intensity of work, external surveillance, and changes in the nature of teachers’ professional orientation to work, which consequently challenged existing professional identities to comply with ‘performativity’ agendas. Given the challenges and pressure to respond to these increasingly functionalist expectations and demands, in this paper, I examine associations between teachers’ agency, motivation, emotional wellbeing, working contexts, learning and resilience, as key components of their sense of professional identity, professionalism, and perceived effectiveness.

The paper takes as given that: (1) a core defining feature of teacher professionalism is a positive sense of professional identity; (2) identity is an amalgam of the personal and professional selves, and is represented through the dynamic interplay between motivation, efficacy, agency, emotions in the context of personal biographies, workplace structures, cultures, and policy influences; (3) teachers’ professional identity is inherently unstable, and subject to fluctuation. Its formation and management are not entirely rational processes; (4) preserving a strong, positive sense of professional identity requires on-going emotional as well as intellectual energy. Both a continuing sense of agency and emotional wellbeing are “factors that have a bearing on the expression of identity and the shaping of it” (Beauchamp & Thomas, 2009, p. 180), and (5) whilst resilience is essential for these to be sustained, by itself it is an insufficient condition for building and sustaining a sense of a positive professional identity through which teachers remain committed and able to teach to their best and well.

These three strands: (1) identity, efficacy, and agency, (2) identity and emotions; and (3) identity and resilience are often reported in isolation, separated by the different ontological, epistemological, and ideological positions of teacher educators, critical theorists, and school improvement researchers. I argue that to succeed over time as professionals, teachers need to have and sustain a positive sense of professional identity. Key components of professional identity are individual and collective efficacy, agency, emotional management, and a capacity for resilience. These do not exist independently of each other, but are in a dynamic relationship. They are influenced by individuals’ inner strength of purpose but mediated by their workplace contexts and cultures and unanticipated personal experiences. In particular, in this paper, I highlight how the focus on external policies to raise academic standards of student attainment tend to diminish teachers’ broader sense of positive professional identity, lead to frustration, disengagement, and alienation, and erode teachers’ willingness and ability to teach to their best.

Author

• Christopher W. Day, University of Nottingham