Student teachers’ professional identity

This paper presents the findings of a qualitative interview study of the professional identity of 45 student teachers. The students described their personal experiences in teaching their own subject and the positive and negative emotions that were evoked. Students emphasized failure or success but not what they had or had not learned. Broader social contexts and professional relationships within the teaching community were marginalized.The study suggests developing the social aspects of learning to teach by supporting teacher identity formation in initial training. Stronger links between teacher education and society might better prepare students for their future work.     

Learning about ourselves from others: transformation of artists’ identities through community-based arts practice

Community-based arts projects can act as powerful learning opportunities in a variety of lifelong and life wide contexts. Many of these projects involve artists, who usually undertake a leading role to ensure that some type of transformation takes place for those involved. The impact on the leaders—in this case the artists—is difficult to identify, even if they have been involved in several community-based arts projects. In this paper I provide insights drawn from my doctoral thesis. There I explored the cumulative impact on artists who work on community-based arts projects, what transformations and learning occurred for them as a result of working on these projects, and how those experiences contributed to their identities. My study involved hermeneutic phenomenological/narrative research approaches based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with 12 visual artists. Data were analysed using a recursive and spiralling process and were subsequently presented thematically as a neonarrative. The findings discussed in this article relate to the artists’ attempts at reconciling aspects of their individual, social and cultural identities by challenging their own as well as the community’s perceptions of artists. The cumulative effect of being involved in community-based arts practice also provided the artists with ongoing identity capital in that they came to realize that they learnt about themselves by connecting with others. The findings contribute to the emerging debate that challenges the narrow view of measuring the value of community-based art projects based on instrumental and public worth, and invites exploration of the private and intrinsic impact on individuals.     

新闻语篇中残疾人身份的构建

研究媒体折射出的残疾人身份对于当前我国构建和谐社会和传播正能量都有着重要的意义。文章从系统功能语法角度,考察情态和评价资源等语言项目,试图揭示新闻语篇中残疾人身份的建构。语料来自China Daily中有关残疾人报道,采用定性分析的方法。研究发现媒体折射出的残疾人具有弱势身份、患者身份和自强身份;媒体在构建残疾人身份时,运用的话语策略,不利于残疾人主体身份的构建,媒体有义务采用有利于话语和谐的策略推动和谐社会的建设。     

职前英语教师教育实习期身份建构叙事探究

本文采用叙事探究方法,以一名职前英语教师为研究对象,探索其实习期身份建构及其影响因素。研究表明,该教师在实习期建构了批改工具、良师益友、学习者、多面手及教师预备兵等多重身份。影响其身份发展的个人因素主要包括个人过往学习经历、反思能力和情感,社会因素主要为重要他者和学校文化。本研究对推动职前教师积极身份建构和职前教师教育具有重要意义。     

Teacher identity past and present: What can a genealogy of schooling tell us?

ABSTRACT

The evolution of teachers’ identities in Australia highlights the struggles between state and civic over the control of schooling and also the contingent nature of the teacher identity itself. A genealogical analysis of this history makes visible these contingencies, but more importantly suggests that little reckoning has been afforded to teachers’ agency within these social struggles. This gap in understandings of teacher identity, as even potentially agentic, highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of teachers and their transformative potential. In particular, it calls for a focus on teachers within elite private schools because these costly schools are highly influential as the aspirational model for schooling provision. If teachers’ agency in these neoliberalised spaces were possible, if they could be empowered in their stewardship of the educational enterprise, then their activation would be crucial in any wider reform effort.     

Between continuity and change: identities and narratives within teacher professional development

This year-long ethnographic case study examined high school teachers’ participation in technology-focused professional development. By pairing a dialogical perspective on teacher identity with a micro-level analysis of narratives, findings indicate that teachers use language and other semiotic resources to express their own identity as well as to acknowledge, expand on, and counter others’ identity claims. Moreover, technology integration may challenge teachers’ established identities or threaten their authority in the classroom. This analysis suggests that teacher educators need to value teachers’ established and emergent identities as well as create space for dialogic narratives in order to facilitate technology integration in schools.     

The role of emotions in student teachers’ professional identity

This paper presents findings of a qualitative interview study of the role of emotions in the professional identity of student teachers. Strong positive and negative emotions (mostly related to pupils and supervisors) were expressed about personal teaching experiences. The results confirm that emotions play an important role in social learning and, therefore, influence the development of professional identity. The two most important findings were that negative emotions exercised the strongest influence and that supervisors neglected the role of positive emotions as a support for learning. The study supports the concept that it is important for teacher educators to help student teachers understand their emotional experiences (focusing foremost on positive factors in their experience) and to develop the ability to express their own emotions in addition to understanding the emotions of others.     

A Longitudinal Examination of Racial Identity and Racial Discrimination Among African American Adolescents

This study tested the longitudinal association between perceptions of racial discrimination and racial identity among a sample of 219 African American adolescents, aged 14 to 18. Structural equation modeling was used to test relations between perceptions of racial discrimination and racial identity dimensions, namely, racial centrality, private regard, and public regard at 3 time points. The results indicated that perceived racial discrimination at Time 1 was negatively linked to public regard at Time 2. Nested analyses using age were conducted, and perceptions of racial discrimination at Time 2 were negatively linked to private regard at Time 3 among older adolescents. The findings imply that perceived racial discrimination is linked to negative views that the broader society has of African Americans.     

Analysing the socio-psychological construction of identity among pre-service teachers

A teacher’s representation of self is crucial in how they construct their identity. In this article, it is argued that pre-service teachers’ identities are intricately linked to their perceptions of the teaching profession. This paper explores the social construction of identity among pre-service teachers and the implications for professional identity. It focuses on pre-service teachers in Kenya. The findings presented here are primarily based on semi-structured interviews distributed among students enrolled in a Kenyan university. They highlight pre-service teachers’ difficulty in overcoming the negative perceptions of the profession and building positive identities of self as teacher. They also underscore the need for training programmes that take perceptions and representations of the teaching profession into account when formulating training curricula.     

Daily Intragroup Contact in Diverse Settings: Implications for Asian Adolescents' Ethnic Identity

This study examined the daily‐level association between contact with same‐ethnic others and ethnic private regard among 132 Asian adolescents (mean age = 14 years) attending four high schools ranging in ethnic composition diversity. The data suggest a positive daily‐level association between contact with same‐ethnic others and ethnic private regard for adolescents, who were highly identified with their ethnic group and who attended predominantly White or ethnically heterogeneous schools. In addition, using time lag analyses, contact with same‐ethnic others yesterday was positively related to ethnic private regard today, but ethnic private regard yesterday was unrelated to contact with same‐ethnic others today, suggesting that adolescents' identity is responsive to their environments. The implications of these findings for the development of ethnic identity are discussed.     

Multiple Identities in a Multicultural World: A Malaysian Perspective

Recent research in second-language acquisition has revealed that the language learning process is a complex interplay of many variables in which social roles, relationships, power relations, and identities are constantly reconstituted. Most research studies on language and identity have been conducted in predominantly English-language native-speaker settings (McKay & Wong, 1996; Peirce, 1995). This article presents the findings of my doctoral research study on the relation between language and sociocultural identities of English as a second language (ESL) learners in a multicultural society in Southeast Asia. Using a qualitative research approach, 14 Malaysian participants were interviewed using critical ethnography research methods (Carspecken, 1996). They also had to write a personal narrative and complete a questionnaire. The findings reveal that in a multicultural, postcolonial society such as Malaysia, identity issues are far more complex and multilayered. Identity shifts take place frequently in strategic and nonstrategic ways as the participants find their way in society in search of acceptance and belonging.     

When morality meets politics in development

This paper advances the thesis that there is an important role for political engagement in the development of moral identity. When young people take their moral interests into the realm of political action, moral identity is annealed and a lasting new level of maturity is reached. Political participation is not the only path to a mature identity, but it is effective and supported by empirical findings and theory. This thesis contrasts with positions that follow from more familiar theories of moral development which emphasise reasoning over identity, pit the individual against institutional moral traditions and view moral identity as a private possession rather than a shared and public relationship. Attentiveness to political engagement puts focus on developmental processes of dealing with competing interests and on institutions that serve as repositories of moral traditions, thus linking youth to moral communities. As a result, individuals are able to form identities in relationship to established traditions within a context of democratic practices that allow individuals and institutions to function intelligently and freely in a pluralistic society.     

Identity and agency: pleasures and collegiality among the challenges of the doctoral journey

How do doctoral students develop their identities as academics? In this analysis, we explore identity from the perspective of agency – humans as active agents. The analysis was based on the collective data from three earlier studies in different contexts. Embedded in the data were expressions of agency linked to affect – both positive and negative – in which doctoral students were acting to shape and not just be shaped by their experiences. Key findings were evidence of collective student identity as well as supervisors modeling and affirming student agency. Both these findings are pertinent in rethinking doctoral pedagogies: the latter provides a model for supervisors to explicitly model student agency, and the former suggests the value of creating opportunities for collective identity in which students act as positive agents in improving their own doctoral experiences.     

Exploring transition to postgraduate study: Shifting identities in interaction with communities,practice and participation

There has been relatively little research to date that has explored the transition to postgraduate study. This paper reports findings from a project (funded by the UK's Higher Education Academy) that sought to address this gap. The research project was ethnographic and explored university practice and student participation in five UK universities. A significant emergent feature of the research was that a multiplicity of identities construct student experience and contribute to student transition. This finding provides support for learning theory that argues for inextricable links between learning and wider social identities. Moreover, the process of negotiating an academic identity in light of wider experience and university practices emerged as a key factor in understanding transition together with the imperative for independent study, which was a particularly powerful practice that necessitated complex identity negotiations in order to enable full participation in the university community of practice.     

Immigration and supplementary ethnic schooling: Ukrainian students in Portugal

Immigration from Eastern European countries to Portugal is a recent phenomenon. Within the last decade, economic migrants from Ukraine, Russia, Romania and Moldova set up a number of supplementary schools across the country. No academic attention has been given to the phenomenon of supplementary ethnic schools in Portugal, whilst there is a growing interest in and beyond Europe in the ways they serve as cultural, social and political sources for identity negotiation, and structures for social capital formation in migrant communities. This study addresses this gap in knowledge. Drawing on a survey completed by 184 students between the ages of 12 and 20, attending eight Ukrainian supplementary schools, this paper contributes to wider international research through its mapping of the population of Ukrainian schools in Portugal and examining students’ reasons for attendance, highlighting both positive and negative aspects of their experiences. Recommendations are made for schools in light of the findings.     

‘Fitting in’ or ‘standing out’: Working‐class students in UK higher education

Drawing on case studies of 27 working‐class students across four UK higher education institutions, this article attempts to develop a multilayered, sociological understanding of student identities that draws together social and academic aspects. Working with a concept of student identity that combines the more specific notion of learner identity with more general understandings of how students are positioned in relation to their discipline, their peer group and the wider university, the article examines the influence of widely differing academic places and spaces on student identities. Differences between institutions are conceptualised in terms of institutional habitus, and the article explores how the four different institutional habituses result in a range of experiences of fitting in and standing out in higher education. For some this involves combining a sense of belonging in both middle‐class higher education and working‐class homes, while others only partially absorb a sense of themselves as students.     

Language and Identity Construction of China’s Rural-Urban Migrant Children: An Ethnographic Study in an Urban Public School

This article investigates the identity construction process of China’s rural-urban migrant children through analyses of their discourses and of their use of language. Rural children have relocated to the urban centers with their parents on a massive scale over the past decades as China has undergone rapid economic changes. Many migrant children are able to attend urban public schools, and their identity construction emerges as an important issue that attracts increasing public and scholarly attention. This study draws on ethnographic data and presents four examples to illustrate the complex process of migrant identity construction. The results show that the migrant children deploy a range of linguistic features and claim multiple identities; in order for their identities to be established in social reality, they have to go through negotiation processes in which their identities are evaluated, ratified, challenged, or denied. Language is at the center of such processes.     

Educating the Whole Child for the Whole World. Edited by M. Suarez-Orozco and C. Sattin-Bajaj

Abstract

Academics are confronted with multiple and conflicting narratives as to what it is to be an academic. Their identities, however, are not entirely of their own making. Through a qualitative study, and deploying a social realist perspective, this paper analyses academic identities in Chile and attempts to locate the patterns of identity in the context of a marketised higher education system. The data were collected in both a state and a private university. The results suggest that distinct kinds of fragilities may be emerging among Chilean academics (ontological and contractual fragilities). These two fragilities can be traced to the attendant structures of the university system at an institutional level (reputational fragility in the public sector and a branding fragility in the private sector). The paper concludes by observing that, although the power of the structures is considerable, there are still spaces for agentic responses.     

Constructing national and European identities: the case of Greek‐Cypriot pupils

The European Union’s increasing attention to social and cultural matters has been expressed through the notions of European citizenship and identity which are to be developed among children, adolescents and adults. Whether, and if so, how, children perceive a European identity to coexist with national identities is a challenging and relatively under‐studied question. This paper presents part of the findings of a study conducted in December 2000 which explored the ways in which 140 10‐year‐old Greek‐Cypriot pupils constructed their national and European identities. Results indicated that, despite positive attitudes towards Europe, pupils attributed little significance to the European identity, whereas national identities were extremely important. The discourse developed revealed essentialist and a‐historical representations of national identity, and an instrumentalist approach to Europe. Social psychological insights from self‐categorization theory are employed to explore whether the two identities were construed as in the same or different typical levels of abstraction. These findings are discussed within the broader socio‐political context of Cyprus and European integration.     

Connecting religion and teacher identity: The unexplored relationship between teachers and religion in public schools

It is increasingly acknowledged that for individuals to participate in a pluralistic and democratic society, they must understand religious conviction and difference. In educational literature, the discussion surrounding education and religion focuses on the implications for students. It is important to consider what this may mean to the teachers, as teachers directly influence student learning. This article uses literature on religion, multiculturalism, teacher identity, and popular culture to connect teachers' private religious identifications to their professional identities in public school classrooms. It supports future research in this area and provides a theoretical framework for subsequent studies.