Influence Of Teacher Identity In Literature

While the teacher role is prescribed by ―organizations like the National Council for the Accreditation of Institutions of Teacher Education (NCATE), media, teachers and administrators, and indeed, teacher education institutions themselves as a way of asserting what makes a good teacher‖ (Guadelli & Ousley, 2009, p. 931), teacher identity is negotiable. The prescribed role of a teacher could be viewed in essentialist terms in that NCATE sets the standards that a teacher is supposed to adhere to and states what competencies a teacher is expected to possess. However, even in adhering to such standards, teachers constantly negotiate their sense of self in different teaching contexts, serving different students. This is the constructivist sense of teacher identity. What teachers do (their role) cannot be analyzed in isolation from who teachers are (their identity) because action and identity formation go hand in hand (Somers & Gibson,

1994). A narrative construction of identity highlights this important link. The term identity within teacher education literature is somewhat challenging to define (Beauchamp & Thomas, 2009). First, some of the literature uses the term teacher identity to encompass both the personal and the professional aspects of teaching (Day, 2002; Day & Kington, 2008; Walkington, 2005), while other

381). From a socio-cultural perspective Lasky (2005) claimed that “teacher professional identity is how teachers define themselves to themselves and to others” (p. 901). Kelchtermans (1993) described the professional self as “a conception about themselves as a teacher and a system of knowledge and beliefs concerning ‘teaching’ as a professional activity” (p. 447) and that it is “formulated in terms of the general principles that govern the teachers’ professional behavior” (p.