Agency and Professional Identity among Mobile Teachers: How Does the Experience of Teaching Abroad Shape Teachers’ Professional Identity?

• In Event: Teacher Education in Social Context

Proposal

Teacher mobility has increased steadily in recent decades (Toraman et al., 2020). This mobility is part of a broader globalisation phenomenon (Beck, 2000), whereby diverse immigrant populations across the world—students and teachers alike—have converged in schools (Brooks et al., 2017). Mobility enables teachers specifically to experience teaching in a foreign country as part of their career or through teacher training programs (Kabilan, 2013). This type of experience has been viewed as contributing towards expanding teachers’ horizons around both values and pedagogy, and consequently to the development of their professional identity (Ospina & Medina, 2020). Professional identity, in its most basic form, comprises a teacher’s response to the question, ‘What am I doing here, in the classroom?’; it is a context-dependent and non-linear formations circumstance (Mockler, 2011a). In other words, teachers construct their professional identities in accordance with their context, personal experiences, and professional goals. As such, teachers’ professional identity develops in tandem with their sense of agency, in that they exert agency within a given context to construct their professional identity. This process has been examined in the literature through an ecological approach, noting that the development of teachers’ professional identity occurs in relation to their perceptions of the broader context and the possibilities it provides (Priestley et al., 2015b). Simultaneously, teachers’ professional agency shapes their context, thereby contributing to a reshaping of their professional identity (Buchanan, 2015).
New global employment opportunities, which allow teachers to integrate the experience of teaching abroad into their teaching careers, may challenge perceptions of professional identity and lead to new processes of identity building within an international context. Our study examines the interaction between teacher mobility and the construction of teachers’ perceptions of their professional identity. It focuses on a group of Israeli teachers who had taught abroad for a moderate period (one to four years) through the World Zionist Organization’s Teacher Emissary Program. Through this program, Israeli teachers move abroad to teach in Jewish day schools. We interrogate the implications of teaching abroad on teachers’ identity perceptions, as well as the ways in which they exert agency to overcome challenges. Our study seeks to examine retrospectively the implications of teachers’ exposure to overseas education systems on the shaping of their professional identity perceptions following their return home.
Our findings indicate that the main tool teachers utilise to construct their professional identity is agency. Other studies have already indicated that identity and agency have similar mechanisms and modes of construction (Pease-Alvarez et al., 2010), and should be viewed as intertwined (Alsup, 2006). Whereas some consider agency as a means to create an identity (Tao & Gao, 2017), others depict a complex circular relationship between identity and agency, whereby identity promotes agency, and then agency creates new connections in an identity, reshaping it (Buchanan, 2015). This conceptualisation of the inter-relationship between identity and agency posits the two notions as near equals in a dynamic system.
Our study has shown that in certain situations, agency is dominant over identity and becomes the prevailing factor guiding the shaping of teachers’ professional identity. The experiences we examine, of emissary teachers from Israel who taught abroad and then returned, offer a new lens on the identity-agency relationship. The new context and different workplace expectations they encountered abroad often clashed with their perception of their identity and forced them to negotiate between their professional identity and their new reality, so they could integrate into schools and deliver their work. All teachers’ stories reveal the tremendous learning they undertook as an intrinsic element of their experience. They addressed differences in culture, pedagogical expectations and school systems by applying agency, manifested in various ways, ranging from full acceptance and integration to opposition and even rejection.
On their return to Israel, teachers once again faced a new ecosystem, but that transition supported their initial professional identity prior to their experience abroad. This ‘turning back of the clock’ allowed us to examine whether the agency that teachers demonstrated during their time abroad would stick once the ecological balance reverted to its pre- mission state. Our findings suggest that teachers integrated select elements of their contexts abroad, to varying degrees, into their current professional identity. Among the teachers who demonstrated stepping up agency, we found that the international teaching experience shaped their personal and professional-pedagogical identity, as they adopted pedagogical principles based on epistemologies influenced abroad, involving issues such as the teacher’s role and specific teaching methods. In addition, they adopted values less common in the Israeli system, such as exhibiting a deeper understanding of the other, and of the varied needs of children. In contrast, we found the current professional identity of teachers who demonstrated pushing back agency to be influenced by two factors that resulted from their time abroad; namely, they tended to incorporate the use of technology learned abroad into their Israeli teaching, and they learned to recognise their personal abilities (such as an ability to stand up for themselves, or to cope with complex realities).
Therefore, our findings suggest that agency is an important path through which teachers shape their professional identity. The way that teachers express their agency strategy, considering the context in which they are placed, shapes the way they subsequently interpret their experiences and integrate parts into their professional identity. Our study contributes to the current state of the art on how teachers construct a professional identity in a global context. Identity and agency are conceptualised in the literature as intertwined (Buchanan, 2015). We highlight the role of agency in professional identity construction. We argue that in the context of mobility, teachers’ identity construction emerges from their applied agency choices, as being migrants (even temporarily) challenges their professional identity.

Authors

• Itamar Rosenfeld Rosenfeld, Tel Aviv University

• Miri Yemini, Tel Aviv University