Constructing a Teaching Identity Through Planning to Teach The Diary of a Young Girl

• In Event: Roundtable Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: Investigations of Preservice Teacher Identity Development

Abstract

Using Critical Discourse Analysis, I analyze one student teacher’s unit plan for teaching The Diary of a Young Girl. I trace the ways she discursively constructed her professional teaching identity through positioning herself and her students in relation to the text. My analysis showed her construction of herself as a teacher resulted in a problematic approach to the teaching of The Diary. By universalizing and dehistoricizing the text, she underestimated her students, offering them limited learner positions, and narrowing the teaching of this text. Despite questioning by her field instructor about her approach, she resisted changing her plans, grounding her rationale in her “knowledge” of her students and their capabilities.

Author

• Laura C. Haniford, University of New Mexico