Enacted identity: Broadening conceptions of teacher learning

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recent decades have seen extensive efforts across education policy and research to support mathematics teachers to learn and enact more student thinking-centered approaches in classrooms. While sociocultural theory conceives of learning as involving shifts in practice and identity, studies of teacher learning typically focus on changes in teaching practice alone. Conversely, studies of teacher identity often focus on the narratives teachers construct about their professional lives rather than how they behave in the classroom. In this study, I take up recent calls to investigate mathematics teacher identity as a performance of self in practice, arguing that this enacted identity is visible and open to analysis as teachers participate with students in the classroom and that changes in enacted identity over time are a form of teacher learning. Drawing on qualitative analysis of three elementary mathematics teachers’ classroom interactions before and after classroom-embedded coaching, I examine two shifts in teachers’ enacted identities – the enactment of control and the enactment of patience – which illustrate how such shifts are intertwined with practice and represent teacher learning. This conceptualization of teacher identity has implications for how researchers study teacher learning and teacher educators design professional development experiences.