Exploring Teacher Identity: Teachersâ Transformative Experiences of Re-constructing and Re-connecting Personal and Professional Selves
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research explored the complexity of language teacher identity from a holistic perspective involving two features: the integration of teachers’ personal and professional experiences, and the application of conscious/rational and intuitive/tacit thought processes. \nThe study examined four ESL teachers’ beliefs, perceptions, and interpretations about the influences of their important personal, educational, and professional experiences on the development of their teacher identity. It also investigated the overall impact of an autobiographical reflective process combined with a guided visualization activity on the re-construction of participants’ perceptions of teacher identity. \nThe interdisciplinary theoretical orientation was grounded in theories and concepts from psychology and educational research, e.g., Personal Construct Theory (Kelly, 1955, 1963), the complementary nature of reason and intuition, and the concept of “perspective transformation” (Mezirow, 1978, 2000). The methodology was heuristic research (Moustakas, 1990, 1994) and methods included reflexive autobiographical journaling, guided visualization, and in-depth interviews.\nThe results confirm that teacher identity is deeply embedded in one’s personal biography. Participants’ beliefs, perceptions, and interpretations nurtured in the family environment strongly influenced their school experiences, career choice, instructional practice, teaching philosophy, and teacher identity. The use of the guided visualization technique, integrated with rational reflection, considerably enhanced the depth and breadth of participants’ self-understanding and personal/professional growth, which is an important methodological contribution of the study for teacher development.\nThe results strongly suggest that it is essential to explore teachers’ personal life experiences in order to gain a holistic understanding of the dominant influences on the development of teacher identity. The study presents a model for designing a longitudinal professional development program offered in a series of workshops to raise teachers’ awareness of the implicit influences on teacher identity and instructional practice through the application of both conscious/rational and intuitive/tacit methods to access their beliefs, perceptions, and interpretations of their life experiences.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".