Voices of Identity in a Chicana Teacher’s Occupational Narratives of the Self

The research area of teacher narrative inquiry has identified links between the personal and professional identities of teachers. Although teacher narrative inquiry takes narrative texts as its data, insufficient attention has been given to the functions of narratives as forms of discourse that are utilized in the construction of identity. In the present study, the concept of narrative identity guided the analysis of a Chicana teacher’s personal experience narratives. The analysis of six narratives told during interviews conducted across a year’s time examined how the voices in the narratives, communicated through reported speech, represented the relational, discursive, and ideological social worlds within which the Chicana teacher’s occupational identity was shaped. The reported speech in the Chicana teacher’s narratives quoted the voices of significant Others, such as her family members and the parents of her students. The Chicana teacher’s narratives crafted her response to the tensions and challenges that these voices represented to her emerging occupational identity as a bilingual education teacher. In her narratives, the Chicana teacher also constructed continuity across the distinct phases of her occupational identity as a bilingual teacher that included transitions from college student, to novice bilingual teacher, to experienced bilingual teacher. René Galindo is an Associate Professor in the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Colorado at Denver and has a Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. His recent publications on language policy, bilingual education, and immigration politics have appeared in the Harvard Latino Law Review, The Journal of Latinos and Education, and Latino Studies.