Critical Events, Emotional Episodes, and Teacher Attributions in the Development of Teacher Identities

• In Event: Challenges and Opportunities: Exploring the Social, Political, and Cultural Influences on Teacher Identity Development

Abstract

In this paper the authors discuss a model for understanding how beginning teachers make sense of their emergent professional identities while transacting within social historical contextual constraints and affordances. Drawn from extant research, the authors describe how teachers’ reflections on critical classroom events, related emotional episodes, and subsequent attributions of these contextual events serve as entry points for identity-related work (Authors, 2007; Authors, 2016). The authors provide data illustrating how transactions among critical events, the emotions associated with those events, and their attributional analysis inform the kind of teacher they are becoming. The proposed model is based on four key processes identified in previous research: (1) Teacher goals, standards, and beliefs; (2) Teacher identity emotional episodes; (3) Teacher attributions, and (4) Identity adjustment. The authors will use these key processes to talk about particular changes and development in teachers’ identities and to offer implications for teacher education and policy.

More specifically, the authors will describe a model that is based on data they collected from beginning teachers that provides evidence for the transactions among the aforementioned four key processes within various contexts. The authors suggest that teachers’ incoming goals, standards, and beliefs about what they think teaching will be like may be confronted by their ongoing classroom experiences. These experiences have the potential to challenge those goals, standards, and beliefs. Thus, based on their data, they suggest that, teacher identity emotional episodes (frustration, helplessness, stress, surprise, joy) offer important feedback for teachers upon which to reflect and react. The resulting identity development may not to be immediate, but the result of ongoing experiences through which teachers must reflect, analyze, and make sense of for a cohesive teacher identity to continually emerge within their social historical contexts. The authors will argue that the attributions teachers make regarding autonomy and agency help to guide the nature of that professional teacher identity development.

Authors

• Paul A. Schutz, The University of Texas - San Antonio

• Sharon L. Nichols, The University of Texas - San Antonio

• Robyn Schwenke, The University of Texas - San Antonio