Teacher identity
المؤلف:
Steve Thornton & Sue Wilson
المصدر:
Enhancing Teaching and Learning through Assessment
الجزء والصفحة:
P132-C13
2025-06-25
505
Teacher identity
Teaching is a complex profession. As recognized by teachers themselves in developing the AAMT Standards for Excellence, excellent teaching is dependent upon knowledge, action and beliefs. These three aspects of teaching excellence do not exist in isolation; each influences and depends upon the others, and they are intricately woven to form the complex fabric of teaching. It is the teacher's motivations for, and feelings about, the complexity of teaching that we call teacher identity.
Twenty years ago, Shulman (1986) discussed the distinctive kinds of knowledge necessary to be a teacher, identifying pedagogical content knowledge as a key aspect of excellent teaching. More recently he has articulated a taxonomy of learning, culminating in commitment and identity, which are realized as values are internalized and character developed. He argues that an educated person's "commitments always leave open a window for skeptical scrutiny, for imagining how it might be otherwise" (Shulman, 2002).
Mayer (1999) distinguishes between role and identity in self-formation as a teacher, suggesting that core beliefs constitute one's teaching identity. Students' reflective journals indicated that teaching personalities were privileged over pedagogical and subject knowledge, and that pre-service teachers often felt that what they were learning in their university studies, and what they were asked to do in schools during the practicum, were contradictory to their personal feelings about what it meant to be a teacher. Drake et al. (2001) describe teachers' identity as their sense of self as well as their knowledge, beliefs and orientations to work. They describe the many influences on primary teachers' sense of identity, in particular some of their feelings of failure as students in school mathematics and their struggle to make sense of and incorporate new ways of teaching.
Building on Lave and Wenger's (1991) influential study of five apprenticeship learning situations, Adler (1998) emphasizes that knowledge about teaching is tied to the context of teaching, that it is dynamic and that it is "simultaneously personal and social". She suggests that this knowledge is not acquired in the academic study of teaching, but that it evolves through "legitimate peripheral participation in a community of practice" (Lave & Wenger, 1991), of which pre-service education is one ingredient. For Adler this knowledge is tied to pre-service teachers' identities, and is built through discourse and through making the hidden assumptions of teaching transparent. Mayer (1999) also stressed the need for pre-service teachers' personal theories to be made explicit, deconstructed and problematized through reflection and discourse.
Thus it would appear to be essential to construct learning and assessment opportunities in pre-service teacher education that promote the formation of habits of mind that enable pre-service teachers to link theory and practice (Ebby, 2000), through reflecting on their own teaching in a framework that makes explicit not "how to be" an excellent teacher of mathematics, but "what it is to be" an excellent teacher of mathematics. In Boud's (2000) terms, assessment in pre-service teacher education must be sustainable.
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