As Davey (2013) argues, despite the use of the term in educational policy research, there is wide disagreement and diversity in the notion of teacher professional identity. This is because some scholars use the terms ‘identity’, ‘self’, ‘self-image’, and ‘self- narratives’ interchangeably, while others use these to mean different things. Reviews indicated that like other professionals in society, teacher professionalism rests on three pillars: knowledge, autonomy, and responsibility (Carr & Kemmis, 1986; Day, Pam, Stobart, Kington, & Gu, 2007; Furlong & Maynard, 1995; Furlong, Whitty, Whiting, Burton, & Miles, 2000). According to these scholars, these three variables define professional identity relevant for analysis because, to a greater or lesser extent, it is reshaped by their beliefs, lives, and work. As Day et al. (2007) state:
identity is an important determinant, and plays a crucial part in influencing
teachers’ emotional well-being and effectiveness. Teachers’ sense of professional and personal identity is a key variable in their motivation, job fulfilment, commitment and self-efficacy; and is itself affected by the extent to which
teachers’ own needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness are met. (p. 102). According to Davey (2013), the use of the term ‘identity’ in education literature draws from psychological, sociocultural, and poststructural theoretical perspectives. It is argued that the psychological perspective rests on the argument that identity is a stable aspect of an individual and the external contexts had less impact, although they had effects on its formation (Day, Kington, Stobart, & Sammons, 2006). This means that in the context of marketisation, who teachers are and what they do is an outcome of
“internalized mental models or ideals located within them ... [although this]... may change in response to external events, but they can only be constructed by individuals as
However, those who focused more on sociocultural factors of identity formation criticised this psychological position. For example, Wenger (1998) expanded the psychological perspective to include the individual, societal, and cultural contexts of identity construction. Wenger conceptualises teachers’ and students’ identity construction in terms of the daily practices they perform. He argues that identities may take multiple forms and be constructed in complex interactions during practice . He conceives identity as “negotiated experience”, “community membership”, “learning
trajectory”, “nexus of multimembership”, and as a “relation between the local and the global” (p. 149). For Wenger, identities are reconstructed in a community of practice through participation and non-participation as part of the social and define the individual as a member of the community performing a social practice, which he calls a community of practice. Building an identity consists of negotiating the meanings of our experience of membership in social communities. The concept of identity serves as a pivot between the social and the individual, so that each can be talked about in terms of the other.. In the sociology of education, an individual’s identity as a social phenomenon may be expressed in terms of the concepts of subjectivity — power, practice, and ideology — because, ideally, these are primarily variables of an
individual’s characteristics constructed and reflected in discourse. For example, according to Wenger (1998):
There is a profound connection between identity and practice. Developing a practice requires the formation of a community whose members can engage with one another and thus acknowledge each other as participants. As a consequence, practice entails the negotiation of ways of being a person in that context. (p. 49).
However, Wenger’s theory emphasised ‘social participation’ and ‘non-participation’ as the major determinants of learning, without an emphasis on history, effects of discursive power, ideology, and resources, which may facilitate or hinder ‘social participation’ and, thus, meaningful culture, knowledge, and identities. Ideologies, power, and resources, which are discursive in nature, are significant aspects in the learning process and may facilitate or limit it. Further, despite explaining the ways in which identities
may be reconstructed in a social context, Wenger’s theory does not explain the various
kinds of identities that may be reconstructed in various sociocultural and historical contexts. The theory backgrounds the political influences that may influence identity reconstruction in particular sociocultural and historical contexts. Based on these criticisms, a poststructuralist perspective was put forward, as I discuss below.
On the other hand, poststructuralist perspective on identity that focuses on identity construction in social and political institutions. It can be constrained and facilitated, among other factors, by discursive structures of power relations and access to essential economic and sociocultural resources in the process (Gewirtz & Cribb, 2009). In this case, individuals may construct different, similar, or collective identities because, in most cases, “individuals actively choose and negotiate their identities” (p. 137). However, such choices are constrained or facilitated by discourses that are accessible to them. For Gewirtz and Cribb, there is variation among some people in making these choices because some people face more constraints than others do
“because processes of identity construction take place within networks of power and differential access to economic, social and cultural resources” (p. 137).
Gewirtz and Cribb (2009) further argue four main properties of identity in the
poststructuralist sense. First, “identities are never fixed, nor one-dimensional. Rather,
they are fluid, contingent, plural and hybrid.” (p. 139). Because identities are about the ways individuals think they are and in struggling to redefine their current positioning using available discourses, they transform their identity. This makes individuals different or similar from others whom they want or do not want to identify. Second, a group of people may share a collective identity if they have or want to have similar interests, thinking, beliefs, attitudes, or ideologies (p. 140). Third, identity relates to the social class variables of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, age, and occupations that are shaped by them and the practices of people involved in their daily lives. Fourth, drawing on Giddens (1991), Gewirtz and Cribb (2009) argue that in the postmodern context, identity is a reflexive project, implying that peoples’ identities are reflexive of rapid and frequent social, economic, and political changes.
Similar to the concept of identity, the meaning, scope, and role of human agency transforming actions and practices has been critically debated over the past four decades. More specifically, poststructuralist understandings of human agency differ significantly from the humanist (Davies, 1991). According to Davies, for humanist scholars, “to be a person is to have agency” (p. 341), and agency is substituted for concepts like free will, freedom, self-regulation, rationality, authority, and ‘power to’. However, poststructuralists (Benson, 1990; Davies, 1990, 1991) reject this position and propose that people’s agency is constructed within discourses available to them. That is, people with more access to discourses will have more agency than others who are not (Davies, 1990).
In view of this position, I view teachers’ and students’ agency in the context of marketisation policy reforms as being mostly determined by their positioning within the intersection of marketisation and other policy discourses. For example, as discussed in Chapter 9, each teacher responded to dominant discourses that passively positioned them in different and particular ways, depending on their available personal and
collective positions and resources. Thus, some chose to ‘improvise’ teaching aids from
the environment, others borrowed from fellow teachers in the same or other schools, and others purchased their own marketised books from bookshops because they were being positioned as passive, dependent, and mechanical workers through inadequate access to those resources.