Collective Identity Formation and Exploration Among Teacher Teams in a Professional Development Context

• In Event: Designing Professional Development Contexts for Teacher Agentic Identity Exploration, Motivation, and Learning of Instructional Practice

Abstract

Purpose
Teacher Professional Development (PD) programs often employ groups to facilitate participants’ engagement (Voogt et al., 2018; Yoon, 2018). However, positioning teachers in groups triggers processes beyond social interactions that motivate engagement; it creates collective identities that reflect the group’s experiences, actions, and learning. In this paper, we investigated the formation of collective identity and its framing of teams’ engagement in a summer institute teacher PD that focused on supporting social studies teachers’ agency in exploring their role identities as discussion facilitators.


Theoretical framework
Collective identity has been defined in different ways (e.g., categorical membership, group affiliation, activist movement; Polletta & Jasper, 2001). Here, we define it using the Dynamic Systems of Role Identity (DSMRI; Kaplan & Garner, 2017) as the group’s collective role identity, which comprises the members’ shared beliefs, goals, self-perceptions, and action possibilities about the team as a collective agent. We asked: How did the PD context frame the formation of teams’ collective identities and agency to explore their discussion facilitator role identities?


Methods
On the first day of the five-day PD, participants identified a personal dilemma around facilitating discussions, were placed in groups of five based on the similarity of their dilemmas, and were asked to decide on a shared team dilemma. During the following three days, teams explored their dilemma with 12-15 high school students who were assigned the role of student engagement experts. Teams planned activities for co-investigating teaching (ACTs) in the morning, enacted them with the students in the afternoon, and at the end of each day, reflected and iterated their activities for the following day. On the fifth day, each team produced a collective visual narrative of their learning journey throughout the PD (see Figure 2). Here, we focus on two of the six teams in which all high schoolers provided consent to be video recorded.

Data sources
Data for this study included: (1) field notes, video, and audio recordings of all team activities, (2) team products, including plans and a Padlet page of team members’ emergent thoughts, and (3) end-of-PD visual and oral narrative about the team’s journey of experiences and learning. Analysis of each data source was guided by the DSMRI, focusing on the collective identity content, structure, and process of formation.

Results
DSMRI analysis of each team’s data highlighted the content, structure (tensions and harmony), and dynamic processes of collective identity formation around negotiating the relevance of the team’s dilemma to its members, the team’s goals, its collective self-perceptions and definitions (e.g., values, positionalities), and the action possibilities for exploring their dilemma. Teams’ social composition and interactions manifested in somewhat different processes with less and more cohesion within their emergent collective identities.


Scholarly significance
The findings highlight the role of PD design whose structure scaffolds team formation around collective identity exploration in the nature of participants’ engagement in identity exploration, as well as the complex, dynamic, and contextual nature of collective identity formation.

Authors

• Avi Kaplan, Temple University

• Abby Reisman, University of Pennsylvania

• Timothy Patterson, Temple University

• Lindsey Graham, University of Pennsylvania