The Self-in-Context: Teachers' Multiple Identities in the Context of Practice

• In Event: Consequential Teaching: Centering Teachers' Identities-in-Practice in Complex Times

Abstract

Persons look at the world and themselves from the positions in which they are persistently cast as well as draw from an existing lexicon of culturally-produced types such as, but not limited to, gender, race, ethnicity, class, etc. (Author, 2011; Holland et al., 1998). In other words, educators as well as students construct themselves, and each other, by building upon the “narratives” that are available to them in the cultural world of a given classroom. An identities-in-practice approach considers the individual as an actor operating among the cultural forces that inform the construction and positioning of the self in a given context; Holland et al.’s (1998) practice theory of identity construction addresses the sociohistorical, contextual, situated nature of identities through their conceptualization of cultural worlds as “figured worlds” (p. 49). For example, in schools students characterized as achievers when they pass standardized tests, learn “mainstream academic knowledge” (Banks, 1993) and master the dominant “culture of power” (Delpit, 2006) implicit in the enacted curriculum—the curriculum jointly created by students and teachers during instruction (Snyder, Bolin & Zumwalt, 1992). In order to support students’ achievement, teachers are expected to prioritize and uphold particular goals, values, and aspirations that will promote student success. Therefore, teachers’ as well as students’ multiple identities are constructed amidst the numerous subjectivities they must negotiate along with their ascribed or assumed positions as educators, learners, and achievers.

Grounded in this practice theory framework, I approach the figured world of the classroom as the context in which teachers’ and students’ experiences of the enacted curriculum and identities-in-practice are negotiated (Author, 2011). In the papers that follow, educators from a broad spectrum of experience and teaching contexts, ranging from K-12 to early college, discuss their own understandings of identity and experience in relation to their practice. After introducing the framework and making a case for its application in the context of classroom and schools, I demonstrate how the lens of identities-in-practice in figured worlds renders visible the interrelatedness of teachers’ multiple raced, classed, and gendered identities and literacies, among others, and discourses of achievement by introducing four vignettes (Papers 2-5, below).

Collectively, we draw on critical autoethnography (Camangian, 2010) turn to the individual, relational and context-specific work that can help educators engage authentically with the dynamic work of collaborative, inclusive, anti-racist, and vision-driven teaching and learning that is also grounded in the positionalities of teacher educators, scholars, and practitioners (Carter Andrews et al., 2021). Such reframing in teacher education and development has broad impact for the discipline by building capacity among teachers to draw from critical autoethnography to support transformative teaching and learning (Caraballo & Soleimany, 2018), as they develop culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies (Paris and Alim, 2017) in the interest of educational equity and social justice.

Author

• Limarys Caraballo, Teachers College, Columbia University
  Presenting Author