Educator Identity Research Articles

Moving away from willful ignorance: A critical whiteness examination of leadership educator socialization.

In the face of calls for the standardization and professionalization of leadership education, a sub-field in higher education, it is important to understand who leadership educators are and how they come to understand themselves as belonging to this sub-field. Recent critiques have arisen about the overwhelming whiteness that permeates the knowledge accepted within leadership education. To be cognizant of that critical perspective, this article applies the critical whiteness studies framework to analyze existing literature about leadership educator identity and socialization. It concludes with recommendations for the field of education to implement in order to combat the impact of whiteness on the field of leadership education.

Exploring Identities of Extension Faculty and Educators as Science Communicators

Exploring Identities of Extension Faculty and Educators as Science Communicators

SoTL as a catalyst for the development of medical educator scholar identity

AbstractThis chapter explores the experiences of undergraduate medical educators with the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and the impact it has had on their educator identity and practice.

A Pilot Study of Supporting GTA Professional Development and Educator Identity in Engineering

Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) significantly contribute to the learning and experiences of undergraduate students. Thus, supporting and enhancing GTA pedagogical knowledge and competencies can improve the learning experiences of undergraduates. Towards this goal, a discipline-specific pedagogical professional development program was created for GTAs in the Faculty of Engineering at a Canadian university. This case study explores the perspectives of participating GTAs, including how they engaged in learning about teaching, what they learned, their emerging educator identity formation, and the challenges they faced during the program. Situated learning theory informed the analysis of participant interviews and focus groups. Findings indicate that GTAs appreciated the situated and embedded nature of the program, reporting limited prior familiarity with pedagogical tools and practices and their application. Results also highlight the need to align GTA roles and responsibilities, providing opportunities to put their learning into practice with the pedagogical knowledge they developed in the program.

CULTURAL COMPETENCE IN EDUCATION: STRATEGIES FOR FOSTERING INCLUSIVITY AND DIVERSITY AWARENESS

Cultural competence in education has emerged as a critical area of focus in contemporary educational discourse, aiming to create inclusive learning environments that celebrate diversity and promote equitable opportunities for all students. This review explores strategies for fostering inclusivity and diversity awareness within educational settings. The foundation of cultural competence lies in recognizing and respecting the cultural backgrounds, experiences, and identities of students, educators, and communities. Through culturally responsive teaching practices, educators can leverage students' diverse backgrounds to enhance learning experiences. This involves incorporating culturally relevant content, perspectives, and instructional approaches that resonate with students' lived experiences. Furthermore, building cultural competence requires ongoing professional development for educators. Training programs and workshops can enhance educators' understanding of cultural diversity, unconscious biases, and strategies for creating inclusive classrooms. Additionally, fostering partnerships with community organizations and engaging families from diverse backgrounds can enrich the learning environment and strengthen cultural connections. Institutional commitment to cultural competence is crucial for systemic change. Educational policies and curricula should reflect a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. School leaders play a pivotal role in creating a culture of respect and valuing diversity among students and staff. Moreover, technology can be harnessed to promote cultural competence through virtual exchange programs, multicultural digital resources, and online forums for intercultural dialogue. Fostering cultural competence in education requires a multifaceted approach encompassing curriculum development, educator training, community engagement, and technological innovation. By embracing cultural diversity and promoting inclusivity, educational institutions can cultivate environments where all students feel valued, respected, and empowered to succeed.
 Keywords: Education, Cultural, Competence, Inclusivity, Diversity, Awareness, Review

Develop Your CORE2 for Career Flourishing: A Career Development Workshop for Hospitalists.

Appreciative inquiry harnesses an individual's strengths to realize positive change, and a flourishing-focused mindset emphasizes engagement, social connectivity, and seeking meaningful work. Though the impact of these models on physician well-being and career planning has been evaluated in graduate medical education, their integration into career development initiatives for faculty has been limited. We designed a workshop to nurture hospitalist career development, based on our CORE2 conceptual framework (character strengths, overall vision, role assessment, explicit goals, and evaluation). We presented the workshop at the 2022 and 2023 Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM) annual conferences. This 1.5-hour workshop comprised four modules and three small-group activities designed to help participants identify their signature character strengths, draft a professional vision statement, prioritize professional roles, and develop SMART goals aligned with these roles. At the 2023 SHM annual conference, 36 participants attended the workshop, and 32 (89%) completed pre- and postworkshop surveys. After workshop completion, participants' self-assessed familiarity with their signature character strengths, knowledge of evidence-based principles to develop SMART goals, and confidence in their ability to write a vision statement and SMART goals all increased significantly (p < .05). This workshop provides a valuable framework for self-directed longitudinal career development and reflection. We build on prior curricula on educator identity formation by guiding participants from identity definition to professional vision development to professional role evaluation to aligned goal creation and iterative evaluation. Our workshop's principles are readily generalizable to clinician-educators across medical disciplines.

Let’s Talk About Writing Support for Plurilingual Graduate Students

Academic writing is an inseparable aspect of graduate school (Holmes et al., 2018) as students’ academic writing is the primary basis for assessment (Turner, 2011). The high-stakes nature of academic writing is magnified for plurilingual students, whose attendance at English medium universities is growing exponentially (Fenton-Smith &amp; Humphreys, 2017). However, there is a scarcity of research that addresses how faculty support writing as an essential practice for plurilingual graduate students, particularly in English-medium universities where English is implicated in structures of power and privilege. Employing a critical analytic collaborative autoethnography (Anderson, 2006; Kempny, 2022) this research uses polyvocal conversations among seven researcher/practitioners to consider the question of how faculty members perceive and respond to the academic writing needs of plurilingual graduate students. Informed by intersectionality (Crenshaw, 2017; Hankivsky, 2014), these conversations illuminate the ways both educator identities and epistemological turns in education theory impact approaches to writing support for plurilingual graduate writers. Importantly, these discussions are implicated in the socio-political contexts of Canadian and Australian universities where systems of inequality act to marginalise plurilingual writers. These contextualised conversations then aim to problematise and revise existent, dominant deficit discourses and pedagogies of writing support for plurilingual students. Findings illuminate the capacity of educators, who are cognisant of their power and place, to generate alternative practices to support plurilingual graduate writers in service of more asset-orientated and inclusive spaces that take advantage of students’ plurilingual repertoires in English-dominant universities.

Navigating Identity Changes Through the Digital Migration: A Collaborative Autoethnography of Social Work Educators

ABSTRACT Online educational delivery is reconstituting educator roles, functions, and expectations, and with that, each educator’s sense of identity as a teacher. This collaborative autoethnography (CAE) explores the experience of three social work educators and the ways in which their identities have shifted as a result of teaching online. CAE provides a qualitative analysis framework which allows for an in-depth exploration of personal meaning-making and the commonalities and differences in the narratives of the authors, while making connections to the literature and the larger context of online education. Four themes emerged in our autoethnographic collaboration as being an integral part of our online educator identities and satisfactions in teaching: (1) the centrality of connection with students, (2) values and beliefs about quality teaching and learning, (3) sense of agency and creativity, and (4) modeling the professional use of self. Synthesizing our findings with the extant literature, we discuss how online teaching shapes educators’ identities, including their sense of self, satisfaction, and motivations. Humanizing educators by acknowledging identity changes in online delivery is an important investment in the sustainability of the academic workforce.

The Hybrid Identities of Choral Music Teacher Educators in Tier 1 Research Universities: A Phenomenological Exploration

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore the “lived experience” of choral music teacher educators (MTEs) in hybrid positions at tier 1 research universities. After interviews with eight choral MTEs from across the United States, three themes emerged from our data: inseparable identity components, reciprocity of selves, and externally derived tension. Inseparable identity components described the ways in which participants sought to align the components of their job with their holistic teacher–researcher–conductor identities. Reciprocity of selves referred to how participants’ teacher, researcher, and conductor selves informed and were informed by each other. Finally, participants maintained security in their own holistic sense of self but experienced externally derived tension as they navigated the structural divide of performance and education in higher education.

Understanding influences on entrepreneurship educator role identity

PurposeDespite the considerable increase in research on entrepreneurship education, few studies examine the role of entrepreneurship educators. Similarly, most frameworks from entrepreneurship education recognize the educator’s importance in facilitating instruction and assessment, but the factors influencing the educator role are not well understood. According to the identity theory, personal factors including self-efficacy, job satisfaction and personal values influence the perspective of self, significance and anticipations that an individual in this role associates with it, determining their planning and actions. The stronger the role identity the more likely entrepreneurship educators will be in effectively developing their entrepreneurial skills as well as the overall learning experience of their students. The objective of this study is to pinpoint the factors that affect entrepreneurial role identity.Design/methodology/approachDrawing upon the identity theory, this study developed a theoretical framework and carried out an empirical investigation involving a survey of 289 entrepreneurship educators across the globe. Structural equation modeling (SEM) technique was applied to analyze and explore the factors that impact the identity of the educators in their role as entrepreneurship teachers.FindingsThe findings show that the role identity of entrepreneurship educators is significantly influenced by their self-efficacy, job satisfaction and personal values. Among these factors, self-efficacy and job satisfaction have the most significant impacts on how educators perceive their role. The implications of these results and directions for future research are also discussed.Originality/valueThe novelty of the current study is derived from its conceptualization of the antecedents of role perception among entrepreneurship educators. This study stands out as one of the earliest attempts to investigate the factors that shape an individual’s scene of self and professional identity as an entrepreneurship educator. The significance of comprehending the antecedents of role perception lies in the insights it can offer into how educators undertake and execute their role, and consequently, their effectiveness in teaching entrepreneurship.

Understanding the professional identity of university-based teacher educators: A systematic review of the literature

Despite increasing interest in university-based teacher educators (UBTEs)’ professional expertise and development, their professional identity remains under-researched. This systematic review of the literature on the nature of UBTEs’ professional identity and how it is formed analyses 88 studies published from 2005 to 2023. We found that UBTEs’ professional identity has gained considerable attention in North American and European contexts, and most empirical studies were primarily based on self-reported, small-scale, and qualitative data. UBTEs’ identities emerging from this work include research-, teacher-, expert- and learner-oriented identities. Individual, interpersonal, institutional and national factors shape UBTEs’ identities, suggesting that UBTEs’ identity formation is complex and contested. Future directions for research are discussed.

Researching Language Teacher Identity Towards Critical Pedagogy

The landscape of teacher education has recently experienced a significant transformation, shifting away from conventional constructivist methodologies towards more socio-culturally grounded and critical pedagogical approaches. This shift underscores the growing importance of exploring language teacher identity and underscores the imperative for in-depth research into its construction within teacher education programs. This evolution is vital not only to enable language educators to gain deeper insights into their students' ideologies but also to facilitate their understanding and cultivation of their own professional identities. Within the framework of critical pedagogy, pivotal concepts such as power, identity, and agency empower language instructors with the tools necessary to actively shape their own identities and effectively challenge the language ideologies held by their students. Consequently, it is essential to investigate how socio-cultural and political contexts influence the identities of language educators and how these educators can proactively mold their identities to meet the diverse needs of their students. Throughout this study, critical pedagogy serves as a lens for evaluating teacher education programs, highlighting how their incorporation can enhance the educational landscape. In light of the dynamic nature of education, particularly in evolving contexts, a critical language pedagogy perspective necessitates further research into the identity of language teachers within the field. This aligns with the assertion made by Kubota (2017), emphasizing the imperative of additional research concerning the identity of language teachers within the realm of critical language pedagogy.

“This Is Your Safe Space”: The Intersections of Rurality, Ethnicity, andLGBTQIA+ Language Educator Identity in the Southeastern U.S.

AbstractIn the contexts of the Southeastern U.S. and globally, the ascendance of parental rights bills has sought to limit what can be discussed in the classroom related to gender and sexuality as well as limiting access to healthcare for transgender, gender non‐conforming, and non‐binary individuals (HRC, 2023). In language education, scholastic and pedagogical pursuits related to the lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ students in classrooms and educators have emphasized consideration of the interconnectedness between language teachers' identities, pedagogical decisions, and place (Coda, 2021; Fogle &amp; Moser, 2017). In rural spaces, language educators can experience increased emotional labor and marginalization (Acheson et al., 2016; Moser &amp; Wei, 2021); however, there is limited attention to rural LGBTQIA+ language educators in contexts such as the Southeastern U.S. Drawing from a larger mixed methods study of LGBTQIA+ rural language educators in the Southeastern U.S., this study centers on one focal participant, Mariana, a cisgender, pansexual ESL educator. Utilizing Butler's (1990) theory of gender performativity and Crenshaw's (1989) intersectionality, findings draw attention to the intersections between Mariana's gender and sexual identities, rurality, and ethnicity, highlighting the tensions and contradictions related to identity performance, pedagogy decisions, and allyship efforts.

Investigating science teacher educator identity through the politics of domestication and critical positional praxis

AbstractThe focus on identity in the field of teaching and learning continues to grow, especially when it concerns equitable outcomes for students. While most attention is placed on students' identities and increasingly those of teachers, lesser addressed are the identities of the teacher educators and researchers broaching the issue of identity. Additionally, identity research is not often linked to relationships between self, others, and transformative action. We recognize these as gaps to be addressed and offer critical positional praxis (CPP) as a response. CPP is the public manifestation of the insights gained through our sense of identity and reflexivity. More specifically, CPP is the actions (or inactions) that express who we are in response to an event in any given social context—especially oppressive ones. In this article, we draw from our own critical autoethnographies, as a context for putting CPP into practice in identity research. Our collective analysis of these critical autoethnographies revealed how our identity development was inseparable from the ways in which we have each resisted the politics of domestication. Our autoethnographies further point to the role of dissent as central to our experiences of becoming critical science teacher educators committed to equity, diversity, and anti‐racism in education. We draw from this analysis to offer recommendations for how identity and positionality can move beyond theoretical constructs toward transformative personal and collective change in science education.

Language Teacher Educators’ Identity Construction through Teaching and Supporting Action Research: A Trioethnographic Study

Action research is a form of inquiry that allows language educators to understand and improve their own practice. The literature suggests that language teachers can employ it as a self-led and self-directed source of professional development and enhancement of their professional identity and agency. However, little is known about its impact on the development of identity of language teacher educators who teach and support action research. Against this backdrop, this article aims to explore the experience of three language teacher educators regarding the influence of action research on the construction of their professional identity. Drawing on verbal and visual data sets, findings show that when teacher educators teach and mentor action research in language teacher education programmes, they can become guiding knowers, reflective practitioners and agents of change. The roles that teacher educators enact may lead to a reflective process that enhances their professional development. These identities connected to agentic growth demonstrate the relevance of including action research in language teacher education programmes as it can help teacher educators nurture their professional identity, particularly concerning their professional knowledge. This study suggests that teaching and supporting action research can become a meaningful entry point for language teacher educators to reflect on their own practice and to carry out action research themselves in language teacher education programmes.

A study on the identity of teacher educators: traits revealed by a Mathematics preceptor of the Pedagogical Residency Program

This study presents partial results of the repercussions of the performance of a mathematics preceptor in the Pedagogical Residency Program (PRP). For this, we chose to use semi-structured interviews as an instrument of data production. After transcription, the analysis was performed in light of the characterization of the professional identity of the teacher who teaches mathematics, proposed by our main theoretical reference. It was found that participation in the PRP enabled the school teacher to play a new role (preceptor), which mobilized a shift towards the constitution of their identity as a teacher educator.

Who do they think they are? Professional identity of Chinese university-based teacher educators

ABSTRACT University-based teacher educators (UBTEs) are critical to teacher education quality. Studies have mainly explored the professional identity of UBTEs who were previously schoolteachers, whereas less is known about those who followed academic pathways. This study examines how UBTEs perceive their identities in the Chinese context, where academic pathways are common. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 34 purposively sampled participants from two university types: first-class normal universities, and provincial normal universities. Five identities aligned with previous research: teacher in a higher education institution; researcher; teacher of teachers; collaborator; and coach. Three new identities emerged from the data: teacher of tradition; questioner; and doctoral student. Similarities and differences in identity perception were also discovered between university types. This study suggests the complexity of being a UBTE is shaped by institutional context, national and cultural milieu, and the nature of teacher education work, and concludes with recommendations for teacher education programmes.

How community and organizational culture interact and affect senior clinical educator identity

Purpose The development of Educator Identity has a significant impact on well-being, motivation, productivity, and the quality of teaching. Previous research has shown that conflicting responsibilities and a challenging work environment could negatively affect the development of Clinical Educator Identity within an organization. However, there is a lack of research that identifies the factors affecting Clinical Educator Identity Formation and provides guidance on how organizations can support its development, maintenance, and advancement. Methods To examine the phenomenology of Professional Identity Development in experienced Senior Clinical Educators in Singaporean hospitals, the study utilized an exploratory qualitative approach. The data was collected from September 2021 to May 2022 through one-to-one interviews. Four investigators analyzed the data using constant comparative analysis to identify relevant themes. Results Eleven senior educators revealed that personal, relational, and organizational factors influenced the development of Clinical Educator Identity. The relational aspect was a vital enabler, while organizational culture was a strong barrier. The study also identified several ways in which organizations can support Educator Identity development. Conclusion The study findings provide insight into how organizations can support the development of Clinical Educator Identity. The results could aid organizations in understanding the areas where they can channel resources to support Clinical Educator Identity development.

Between “Struggle and harmony”: Critical Approaches to New Educator Identity

Between “Struggle and harmony”: Critical Approaches to New Educator Identity

Быть, становиться и принадлежать: профессиональная идентичность педагогов высшей школы

Teacher education plays an essential role in shaping the quality of education, and teacher educators are central to this process. The paper explores the personal and professional aspects that constitute the professional identity of teacher educators, shedding light on their journey from classroom teachers to facilitators of fellow educators' growth. This article delves into the intricate model of professional identity of teacher educators, examining the dimensions of being, becoming, and belonging within this dynamic role. The concept of ‘being’ a teacher educator encompasses the multifaceted roles and functions these educators undertake. The aspect of ‘becoming’ a teacher educator focuses on the transition from classroom teaching to teacher education. The paper examines the two prominent pathways into this role: the academic pathway, driven by advanced academic pursuits, and the practitioner's pathway, chosen by experienced educators seeking a shift from schools to training institutions. The concept of ‘identity shock’ during this transition is explored, along with the heightened intellectual engagement that emerges as teacher educator’s grapple with new challenges and opportunities. The theme of ‘belonging’ uncovers teacher educators’ affiliations with various communities, each shaping their professional identity. The paper highlights the role of collective affinities in shaping teacher educators' teaching methods, research endeavours, and leadership approaches.