A Global Review of Current Trends in Teacher Identity Research and Practice

• In Event: Teacher Identity and the Contemporary Development of Teachers in Educational Systems Globally

Abstract

This presentation offers an analytical review of 44 recent publications on teacher identity in order to characterize the current state of the field. To find all academic articles and books published during 2009-2021 written in English, we employed three online search terms: “teacher identity,” “teachers’ professional identity,” and “teachers’ professional identities.” One hundred titles came up. To reduce this to a manageable amount, we retained only those that focused on PK- 12 teachers (eliminating work that focused on teacher educators or school leaders). Next, we removed books or articles that employed teacher identity only tangentially—i.e., that didn’t centralize it. And, finally, we removed any pieces written by us authors. Forty-two articles and two books remained. Twenty-five countries are represented in our sample and the work spans methodological genres: qualitative (n=28), quantitative (n=6) , mixed-methods (n=6), and conceptual (n=4). Employing preset, emergent, and axial coding, we read and coded all 44 texts and engaged in two phases of comparative analysis to identify themes, analyze teacher identity within and across the articles and books, and assemble the review in the paper we propose here.

Our review yielded several overaching themes about teacher identity related to research or teacher learning. Our paper and presentation will unpack the themes and discuss them in the context of what contemporary studies of teacher identity tell us about studying and supporting the development of 21st-century educators as active members of education systems. Identified themes are the following: (1) Teacher identity frames teachers predominantly as individuals and could benefit from considering teaching as a collaborative activity. (2) As teacher identity has become global, it has been opened up for new definitions and uses. (3) Conceptualizations of teacher identity put forward in research studies are not always aligned with the research methodologies employed. (4) Recent studies of teacher identity nicely centralize the role of context in teacher development and add value by attending to dimensions of race, class, gender, and religious orientation in teachers. (5) Although teacher identity as a concept has matured and advanced over the last decade, there is room for teacher identity to grow and increase its usefulness. Our presentation will discuss the contours and implications of these five themes, and provide constituent recommendations.

Presenting periodic reviews of the research around educational topics is important for several reasons. One is that new generations of scholars must be fluent in the research lines that preceded them—reviewing recent research aids in that endeavor. Another is that we improve fields of research only by identifying gaps and limitations to address moving forward; unless we look across studies we will never see what is missing or what deserves focused attention. And the third is that only by seeing how the past becomes the present can we be intentional about the future. In these systematic ways, we expect that our paper and presentation will leverage understandings of recent empirical work on teacher identity into useful research and practice for the future of teacher learning, teacher lives, and teaching quality.

Authors

• Brad Olsen, The Brookings Institution

• Rebecca Buchanan, University of Maine

• Christina Hewko, University of California - Santa Cruz