Suspended in perpetuity?: teacher professional identity in a time of educational reform
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing upon Foucauldian poststructuralist theories of discourse, governmentality and identity, this study employs critical discourse analysis techniques to examine teacher professional identity within the context of educational reform between 1995 and 2004 in the province of Ontario. Problematizing notions of profession(al)(ism)(ization) in teaching and conceptions of teacher identity, the study examines the contextual production, sustenance and consequences of public, media, government, teacher organizations and collegial and administrative representations of teachers and teaching as they manifest as effects of power and as they are positioned and ascribed to and within particular normalizing discourses and practices. The data set for the study consists of the transcripts of 14 interviews and other textual data including newspaper columns, letters to the editor, government news releases and policy documents, internet web-sites and teacher-produced materials. The study reveals that many of the discourses that constitute teaching construct particular subject positions for teachers to occupy that are frequently and highly incongruent with the perceptions that teachers have of themselves. The study reveals that the normalizing power of deeply-rooted and firmly-held assumptions about what it means to be a teacher continue to govern and sustain particular mentalities that effectively keep teachers under perpetual scrutiny and surveillance. Despite some teachers' efforts to reject, resist and subvert these discourses, teachers' professional identities remain under perpetual negotiation and revision. Theoretically, this study makes a specific contribution to the literature on teacher professional identity and more generally to the ways in which individuals make meaning. By destabilizing the notion of an essentialized professional identity in teaching, this study has begun an examination of the apriori assumptions that are taken as commonsense when referring to teachers as professionals and teaching as a profession. The study suggests it is important to continue exploration of the nature of and ways in which teachers (and others) respond to the discourses and their inherent power relations that construct teachers' work and the effects these have on teacher identity and the evolution of the teaching profession. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)
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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 | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 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".