Teachers’ Professional Identity Negotiations in Two Different Work Organisations

Abstract

Recent studies have described professional identity as the interplay between individual agency and social context. However, we need to understand how these are intertwined in different kinds of work settings. This paper focuses on teachers' professional identity negotiations as involving the work organisation, the professional community and individual agency. The data were gathered from two work organisations representing different management cultures and sources of control over teachers' work. Open-ended narrative interviews were used, focusing on teachers' own experiences and perceptions. A data-driven qualitative analysis was applied. Our findings indicated that different work organisations provided differing resources for teachers' professional identity negotiations. Teachers were more committed to their work organisation if they had enough agency, if they had opportunities to practise their own orientations towards the profession, and if major changes were not imposed on their working practices from outside.

Professional identity tensions of beginning teachers

“…They state that teachers' identity is both unitary and multiple, both continuous and discontinuous and both individual and social. Vähäsantanen et al (2008) take the view that professional identity is the interplay between individual agency and social context, reasoning from a socialpsychological perspective, while Lasky (2005) uses a sociocultural approach to understand the interplay among teacher identity, structure and agency. In order to gain insight in the way teachers acquire their professional identities, Coldron and Smith (1999) drew on social theory and philosophy.…”

“…Agency is the extent to which someone feels in control of their goals and own actions (Ketelaar, Beijaard, Boshuizen, & den Brok, 2012;Metcalfe & Greene, 2007). Teachers in profile 1 seemed to want to feel in control of the choices they made in their work, which were based on their own interest and motivations (Vähäsantanen et al, 2008), but they felt limited in experiencing agency by the conflicting orientations of others regarding learning to teach. Teachers with care-related tensions mainly experienced tensions around the desired and actual support they give their students.…”

Teachers’ positioning towards an educational innovation in the light of ownership, sense-making and agency

“…Teachers who experience agency within their work feel in control of the choices they make within their work and that these choices are based upon their own goals, interests and motivations (Vähäsantanen et al, 2008). Ketelaar, Beijaard, Boshuizen, Den Brok | Teachers' positioning towards an educational innovation in the light of ownership, sense-making and agency 7 Agency is thus shaped by both the teacher and the school context (Lasky, 2005), as teachers need to experience a certain amount of autonomy and room for negotiation within their school to make their own choices (Beijaard, 2009;Coldron & Smith, 1999).…”

“…Agency, at last, might be seen as a vehicle to give direction to one's career as a teacher and stay true to oneself (cf. Vähäsantanen, Hökkä, Eteläpelto, Rasku-Puttonen, & Littleton, 2008). By investigating teacher change through the lens of these three concepts, we aim at find themselves, and the design and message of the policy for implementing the innovation (Spillane et al, 2002).…”

Untitled

“…Having space to enact agency and being able to self-initiate are crucial means for validation. Though typically validation may come in the form of aligning one's self with what other members from the same community of practice (CoP) (Trent, 2012;Vähäsantanen et al, 2008), validation may also come in the form of knowing what is practical and beneficial for students (e.g. Hayes, 2010;Liu & Xu, 2011) and knowing ways to transform pre-existing culture and structures to accommodate learning (Pantić & Florian, 2015).…”