Teachers and Teaching

theory and practice

ISSN: 1354-0602 (Print) 1470-1278 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctat20

Shaping teacher identities and agency for the

profession: contextual factors and surrounding
communities

Auli Toom

To cite this article: Auli Toom (2019) Shaping teacher identities and agency for the profession:
contextual factors and surrounding communities, Teachers and Teaching, 25:8, 915-917, DOI:
10.1080/13540602.2019.1703619

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2019.1703619

Published online: 22 Jan 2020.

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TEACHERS AND TEACHING
2019, VOL. 25, NO. 8, 915–917
https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2019.1703619

EDITORIAL

Shaping teacher identities and agency for the profession:

contextual factors and surrounding communities

The articles in this final 25 jubilee year issue of Teachers and Teaching: Theory and
Practice explore the central themes in learning to become and develop as a professional
teacher in a variety of social interactions and physical environments. The articles
elaborate deeply the interplay of individual and contextual factors of the teaching
profession as well as their diversity and complexity. They focus on the essential role of
teacher identities and their formation, the role of emotions as well as identity negotia-
tions of individual teachers, in relation to the work of teaching, and in different
surroundings. Some of the papers also focus on the ways in which collegial support,
broader contextual factors and leadership contribute to teacher’s professional agency and
their work as teachers. A wide spectrum of research designs and methods have been
applied, and both quantitative and qualitative data sets have been utilised in the studies.
The first article utilising a qualitative case study approach, explored the pre-service
teachers’ identity construction process in the teaching practicum in China. Rui Yuan
utilised the lenses of possible selves theory and identity conflicts theory in the study, and
found out that various social interactions and everyday practices in schools played a key
role in the identity construction process. Through the analyses reported in the article
‘Confrontation, negotiation and agency: Exploring the inner dynamics of student teacher
identity transformation during teaching practicum', Rui Yuan demonstrates how pre-
service teachers managed the tensions between their core identities and new emerging
identities. The author found that the participants experienced both supportive and restric-
tive environments in teaching practicum, which allowed them to build and extend their
identities in a variety of ways. Through agency and affordances in the contexts, the pre-
service teachers negotiated new identities and enhanced their ideal identities for their future
work as teachers. The study as a whole emphasises the importance of focusing system-
atically on identity construction processes in pre-service teacher education programmes
and supporting explicitly early career teachers’ awareness of their shifting identities.
The second paper considers the social interaction aspects of classroom space among
toddler teachers in the USA. In ‘Being there with children: Workplace, teacher body and
a caring self,’ Koeun Kim reports a qualitative study in which the focus was on elaborating
how the nature of the social interactions formulate teachers’ work and shape their identities
as caring teachers. It was found in the study that teachers’ presence, emotions and physical
bodies matter: they played a significant role in how the practice of early childhood
education was realised. The study clearly demonstrated how committed teachers in the
study were to their identity as caring teachers when doing their work. It was especially
found that in being present and caring effectively for children, teachers needed to regulate
their physical and emotional selves, The study underlined the importance to teachers of
stepping back for a while from the social interactions with children, due to them being

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

916 EDITORIAL

emotionally and even physically burdening. These might be the next steps to be taken in the
development of teacher’s professional practice, co-teaching and collaboration.
The third paper ‘A narrative inquiry into a rural teacher’s emotions and identity-in-the-
making in China: Through a teacher knowledge community lens’, by Jing Li and Cheryl
J. Craig explores also the teacher’s identity and emotions as well as their relations to the
communities relevant to the teacher’s work and professional knowledge. The authors
collected reflective narratives and conversation recordings with the online teacher com-
munity of one Chinese veteran teacher. The study increases our understanding of the
important contributions of teacher knowledge communities to teacher’s work, and how
this veteran teacher perceived them to having influence the ways he made sense of his
professional experiences, enabling him to grasp the ‘best’ aspects of his identity both
professionally and personally in his demanding daily working environment. In the fourth
article, ‘Using dual systems theory to conceptualise challenges to routine when trans-
forming pedagogy with digital technologies’, Christopher Blundell, Kar-Tin Lee, and
Shaun Nykvist utilise a specific theoretical approach to analyse and understand the role
and importance of routines for teachers who aimed at changing their pedagogies with
digital tools and technologies over an eight-month period. The study emphasises how
integration of digital technologies and development of pedagogies can be related to the
broader changes in classroom interaction, for example, in teachers’ and pupils’ roles,
relationships and behaviours. They further point out how this can test teachers’ practices,
ways of working, and help to develop deep routines even further. Results especially
showed that teachers’ how established practices in classroom management, and regulat-
ing pupils’ misbehaviours and engagement were challenged. This resulted initially in
uncertainty among teachers, but also allowed them to think and create new routines. The
study provides empirical evidence of the ways in which teachers can be encouraged and
challenged to develop further in the middle of their everyday work.
The fifth article by Jessica Whitley, Susanne Gooderham, Cheryll Duquette, Shari
Orders and J. Bradley Cousins presents a study on the use of differentiated instruction
practices with diverse student groups in grades 7–12 in Canada. In ‘Implementing
differentiated instruction: A mixed-methods exploration of teacher beliefs and practices’
they explore the teachers’ use of differentiated instruction practices and especially the
individual and contextual variables related to them by utilising survey (n = 4875) and
focus group (n = 46) data sets. The results showed that teachers’ beliefs, self-efficacy and
support they perceived to receive from the organisation were related to the differentiated
instruction practices they implemented. The article demonstrates the variety in teachers’
conceptions and practices as well as orientations and justifications in applying differ-
entiated instruction in their own classrooms. The results of the study also encourage the
promotion of teacher learning in the profession in the middle of their everyday work and
utilising colleagues and other schools as resources in the developments.
The sixth paper ‘Extension and remodelling of teachers’ perceived professional space’, by
Øyvind Wiik Halvorsen, Liv Eide, and Marit Ulvik explores shaping of teacher agency in
various professional conditions. The study utilises sociocultural understanding of teacher
agency as a contextually shaped capacity to act in professional spaces. The results are
based on the analysis of interviews with upper secondary teachers in Norway. The study
identified exam, curriculum, accountability demands, school leadership, colleagues, stu-
dents, learning materials, subject traditions and purposes as conditions that mediate
 TEACHERS AND TEACHING 917

teachers’ professional space. The results of the study highlighted the importance of
subject as a resource for teachers. The study also identified extension and remodelling
as aspects of mediation related to teacher’s professional space and further to their agency.
In the seventh paper ‘From professional isolation to effective leadership: Preschool
teacher-directors’ strategies of shared leadership and pedagogy’ Merav Aizenberg and
Izhar Oplatka investigated pre-school teacher-directors’ professional isolation and cop-
ing methods through a qualitative study. With semi-structured interviews as the primary
data source, the authors aimed to find out how preschool teacher-directors in public
municipal preschools deal with these demanding professional aspects of teachers’ work.
According to the study, teachers coped with the isolation through professional support
from a variety of sources, professional collaboration, launching educational development
projects and professional development. The results emphasised shared leadership and
different forms of pedagogies as most effective strategies.
In the final paper of this Issue, ‘Beginning teachers’ work satisfaction, self-efficacy and
willingness to stay in the profession: a question of job demands-resources balance?’, Lisa
Björk, Johanna Stengård, Mia Söderberg, Eva Andersson and Gunilla Wastensson investi-
gated Swedish teachers’ (n = 328) experiences of their first year in the profession. Teachers
especially differed in their perceptions of their work satisfaction, self-efficacy and will-
ingness to stay in the profession. Through the quantitative analyses of the job demands and
resources reported by the teachers, the authors extracted four different work situations: the
advantageous situation, the balanced situation, the threat situation, and the pressed situa-
tion. These showed how different the working situations can be among the early career
teachers, and, indirectly, the variety of the support needs among them. The results can pave
the way for even the deeper research on early career working conditions and be utilised
when designing support structures for the early years in the profession.
Teaching is continuously shaping and changing in a variety of ways due to the
individual, contextual and systemic factors related to teachers and teaching. The results
of the studies in this issue show how research on teacher identities, practices and ways of
working remains of vital importance in taking forward our understandings of the
challenges faced by all teachers. They enable us to increase our understanding of the
evolution of the phenomena, and develop theories and methodological approaches which
may contribute to the development of teachers and teaching in practice, and thus to the
further improvement of education in schools. These have always been the major goals of
the Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice for 25 years, when Professor
Christopher Day has been the Editor-in-Chief and successfully established the journal
as one of the main forums of the field. The research field on teachers and teaching and
even beyond has benefited significantly of his contribution.

Auli Toom
Centre for University Teaching and Learning, Faculty of Educational Sciences,
University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
auli.toom@helsinki.fi