Exploring the Professional Identity Formation of Elementary School Teachers in Postmodern Perspectives

• Main Authors: WANG, YU-WEN, 王郁雯
• Other Authors: CHOU, SHU-CHING
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/977vsk

博士 === 國立臺北教育大學 === 課程與教學研究所 === 105 === Many people believe that teachers play an important role in student learning and educational accomplishment; therefore, ensuring teacher quality is an essential task today. In order to improve teacher quality and teaching effectiveness, a system of Teacher Evaluation for Professional Development and the standards for teaching performance have been established by the Taiwanese government. However, teachers are able to develop their professionalism mainly drawing on their professional identity. Because teachers have their own thinking and action toward being a professional, which are greatly related to their professional identity, setting a standard makes it difficult to promote teacher professionalism. Moreover, teachers have become standard followers. They are hardly considered professional teachers. There is often a gap between the expectations of educational reformers and personal belief. In this dissertation, I use a postmodern perspective to explore: (1) how three elementary school teachers from different teacher education systems perceive their professionalism; (2) how these teachers negotiate the meaning of being a professional teacher with dominant discourse’s creators in relation to their professional identity; (3) how their professional identity has been changing through ongoing negotiating, deconstructing, and reconstructing the meaning of teacher professionalism. Utilizing a case study, the findings indicate that teacher education influences the formation of a teacher’s professional identity, which is connected with how they react to political discourse and expectations from principals, colleagues, and other stakeholders. The teacher who was cultivated by the Normal School system tends to follow the expectation of educational reformers; however, the other two teachers do not take people’s expectations seriously. They have been more flexible fitting into school culture. Besides, teacher’s professional identity has been constantly in forming and reforming process, in which the teacher training system, school culture and important others are the main mediums. Moreover, I have also discovered that teachers’ professional identities have been changing through negotiating with creators of teacher professional discourse. The teachers in this research have been self-positioning when they encounter the different periods of teacher professional discourse. In addition, the teachers’ professional identities have been “in-between” in the same context; they often see themselves including the identities of a learner and a teacher. The “in-between” identity demonstrates somehow the characteristics of conflicting or intertwining. In fact, these transformations do not indicate that their professional identities have been a fixed condition. The teachers constantly position themselves while interacting with different professional discourse within society. In conclusion, teacher professional identity shaping is ongoing, becoming as well as shifting. I suggest that educational reformers and policy makers must reconsider the means and content of professional development. Teachers can effectively develop professionalism when drawing on their professional identity.