The Logics of Teaching: How Institutionalized Ideas about Teaching Shape Teachers’ Professional Identities

• In Event: Exploring the Opportunities, Challenges, and Dilemmas of Institutional Logics as a Tool of Educational Research

Abstract

In this article, I bridge institutional logics (ILs) with theory on teacher professional identity to empirically examine the deeply institutionalized, taken-for-granted ways American society has come to think of teaching (e.g., as a moral calling, as a profession, as labor) are internalized by K-12 teachers. More specifically, I ask: What are those underlying conceptions of teaching? Do they persist across diverse state policy contents? And, to what extent do teachers internalize these conceptions in their professional identities?

Drawing on survey data from 950 K-12 teachers across four states (CA, NY, FL, and TX), I develop original survey measures to capture what I term teachers’ “institutionalized conceptions of teaching,” and examine the relationship between those ILs and teachers’ professional identities. Through an exploratory factor analysis, I surface three primary conceptions of teaching (i.e., ILs): (1) an accountability logic, (2) a democratic logic, and (3) a moral calling logic. I then surface a typology of teacher professional identity through a latent profile analysis, and examine the relationship between ILs and teachers’ professional identities. I find that the accountability logic harms teachers’ sense of professionalism. Teachers’ report a higher sense of professionalism when they view their roles as rooted in a moral and/or democratic service to their communities. These findings suggest that supporting the professional well-being of K-12 teaching may demand shifting the deeply institutionalized norms of the profession to be more aligned with teachers’ democratic and moral aims—rather than our system's deep norms around external accountability.

These survey items offer the field with new methodological tools to study ILs at scale; however, their development presented several challenges. To develop the survey items, I followed previous survey ILs scholarship (e.g., Bridwell-Mitchell, 2013; Bridwell-Mitchell & Sherer, 2017) and inductively derived items corresponding to each major cultural institution (i.e., bureaucracy, professions, markets, democracy, religion, family) (Thornton, 2004). I bridged this theoretical work with previous empirical work on the ILs of teaching (Author, 2024) to develop a specific set of items which reflected propositions of how each logic may inform teachers’ conceptions of their roles. Though I refined these items through cognitive interviews with teachers and expert interviews with institutional scholars, distilling the complex theoretical nature of ILs presented a significant challenge, and will require continued refinement.

The affordance of this approach is that it allowed me to study the institutional field of K-12 teaching at scale, across diverse policy contexts. Previous scholarship has posited that professional identity acts as the bridge between ILs and organizational and individual behavior (e.g., Bévort & Suddaby, 2016; Blake, 2023); however, efforts to study this relationship at scale have been limited. Additionally, the approach of using exploratory factor analyses to inductively surface ILs (Bridwell-Mitchell, 2013) offers one potential pathway to addressing the field’s methodological challenge of studying how multiple ILs “cohere” together in practice (Lounsbury et al., 2021). Together, this paper offers the field with the methodological tools to continue to examine the ways in which ILs become inhabited at the individual-level.

Author

• Maya Kaul, University of Pennsylvania