The spectrum of the journey: Narrating identities during professional learning in pivotal response treatment for novice elementary teachers of students with autism spectrum disorder

In Ontario, Policy/Program Memoranda No. 140 (PPM 140) authorizes educators to utilize Applied Behavioural Analysis methods to support students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in the classroom. Although typically favoured, inclusive policies are difficult to translate into practice without training (Lindsay et al., 2013). Novice educators (i.e., first five years of their career) are at the cusp of developing a teacher identity as they are shifting roles from that of a teacher candidate to what it means to be a professional teacher.Symbolic interactionism (SI) is one theory deemed useful for narrating and investigating identity. According to Blumer (1986), SI is a theory which investigates how individuals develop subjective meanings and how those meanings are reformed during an interpretive process producing different behavioural responses. Within the teaching profession, physical objects refer to space or material. Social objects refer to the interactions with individuals. objects are beliefs about professional development (PD) and identity (Blumer, 1986).Current studies do not address how teachers with larger classes may implement evidence-based practices, such as Pivotal Response Treatment (PRT). Even when general education teachers do receive training in PRT, an investigation into identity is missing. This doctoral dissertation investigates how a professional learning in PRT in Ontario may influence novice (i.e., first five years of their career) elementary educators' (i.e., JK-Grade three) identity as a teacher from a qualitative (i.e., narrative inquiry) design. Results from interviews, journals, and focus groups revealed themes. Physical objects included (1) accessibility to tangible resources and in-class trainings, (2) motivation/accountability, (3) barrier of time, (4) barrier of COVID-19, (5) barrier of staffing, and (6) barrier of size/needs of a classroom. Analyzing social objects revealed (7) student relationship building, (8) classroom staff communication, (9) low parental communication, and (10) distance support from administrators. Conversations around identity detailed how (11) early educational experiences and (12) previous characteristics associated with a teacher impacted a present (13) definition of teacher identity as the philosophy of teaching. This exposed themes such as (14) advocating for accommodations, (15) life-long learner, (16) self-reflective, (17) connection between personal/social self, and (18) a generalist role. (19) Micro-level solutions such as obtaining more strategies for themselves, and (20) macro-level solutions such as dedicating more time within teacher education programs and in-person training were also discoursed.Physical and social objects had a direct impact on objects. The first premise of symbolic interactionism, meaning, delved deep into how novice educators acted towards objects based on the meanings assigned to them throughout the study. Through social interactions (i.e., premise two - language) with myself as the researcher, the research study, the other participants, and stakeholders in their school climate, an investigation into the interpretation process (i.e., premise three - thought) revealed the above themes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

"From Heroes to Scapegoats”: Teacher Perceptions of the Media and Public's Portrayal of Teachers during COVID-19

This study examines teacher perceptions of the media and public's portrayal of teachers and teaching during COVID-19 from the initial school closures in March 2020 through the reopening process of the 2020–2021 school year. Drawing upon data from 122 full-time, public-school teachers in Massachusetts, findings include teacher perceptions of such portrayals as mischaracterizations, not inclusive of authentic teacher voices, and lacking in complexity. Furthermore, teachers perceived a shift in portrayal over the course of the pandemic. © 2023 Kappa Delta Pi.

Education, identity and diversity

The aim of this chapter is to show the complexity of identity development in a highly diverse world. The chapter begins with a discussion of difference and diversity, followed by an exploration of the concept of identity. It shows the role of education in the development of identity and some of the problems that may arise when identity development is neglected or obstructed. It briefly touches on educational programs that could support positive identity development and ends with the implications of identity in teacher education. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Collaborative identity development during a global pandemic: exploring teacher identity through the experiences of pre-service high school teachers in England

Since early 2020, COVID-19 has had a substantial impact on teacher education. We consider novel aspects of how pre-service teachers have collaboratively developed their professional identities during the pandemic. Drawing on findings from forty-five interviews with pre-service high school teachers working in England during September 2020 – June 2021, we share how collaborative identity development was central and occurred in a variety of spaces, communities and modes. Collaborative identity development featured in how pre-service teachers saw themselves making a positive contribution to society through education and, in strong subject connections. Reflection that is collaborative, personalised, iterative, and separate from notions of formal progression enables positive identity work. Notions of identity are absent from international policy initiatives in ITE (Initial Teacher Education). This case study provides insights for policy makers in and beyond England who aim to support teachers at the beginning of their career so that they are retained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of European Journal of Teacher Education is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

"Should I change myself or not?": Examining (Re)constructed language teacher identity during the COVID-19 pandemic through text-mining.

On the basis of interviews with 20 Chinese EFL teachers and text-mining analysis, this study investigates the reconstruction of language teacher identity during the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of context, agency, and practice. The word co-occurrence analysis and collocation statistics with modal verbs coded by KH Coder 3.0 demonstrate that English teachers face two types of identity reconstruction processes: (a) situational context related to various changes, and, (b) interactional context that causes communication difficulties with students. How teachers enact agency is influenced by their teaching experience. Through practice, teachers reconstruct their identity as solution seekers, positive learners, and confident professionals.

Early Childhood Education Teacher Workforce: Stress in Relation to Identity and Choices.

The early childhood education teacher workforce is consistently relied upon to bolster children's academic and socioemotional development in preparation for kindergarten and long-term outcomes. This is especially true of children who, historically overlooked and marginalized, are labeled "at risk." While research has focused on pervasive stressors as obstacles to these classroom professionals (e.g., teacher/teaching stress, curricular mandates, quality assessments, COVID-19), there is less research on stress in relation to the formation of teacher identity; specifically, how stress contributes to and detracts from the formation of a teacher's micro-identity, and how negative impacts of stress to the micro-identity may contribute to teachers' decisions to leave the field. Although once considered to be one of the fastest growing industries, The Great Resignation, as it has come to be known, estimates up to 25-30% of the workforce leave annually. To better understand the choices teachers make to leave the profession, the current study examined the influence of stress on teachers' microidentity by centering the voices of six Head Start teachers. Implementing a qualitative design, this investigation asked (a) Who are the Head Start teachers in the workforce today? (b) What are the particular stressors with which they contend? (c) How does the micro-identity of these teachers change as a result of stress, and what are the potential choices that follow? Results and findings indicated that Head Start teachers experience (1) stress as reality, (2) stress-shaped identities, and (3) identity-mediated choice. Implications and insights are discussed. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10643-023-01468-w.

Pedagogy in a pandemic: Responsibilisation and agency in the (re)making of teachers

This paper focuses on the making of teachers as educational subjects within a specific socio-historical context. It attempts to create a critical ontology of teacher identity, as highlighted by pedagogical discourses during the initial stages of the Coronavirus Pandemic in Hawaiʻi and the subsequent school shut down during the 2020 Spring semester. Through autoethnographic practitioner inquiry, I analyse the relationship between education and the state, the historical and contemporary discourses at play, and the tensions of teacher agency in (re)shaping teacher identities. The paper analyses educational continuities and discontinuities in Pandemic discourses, specific to my context but resonant with national trends within the United States. These include the affective governance of responsibilisation, the amplification of inequalities, the shifting perception of the teaching profession, the proliferation of divergent pedagogical discourses and technologies, and increased teacher agency in (re)making their own identities, roles, and responsibilities within the ambiguity of the socio-historical context. © 2021 Pedagogy, Culture & Society.

The pedagogical and socio-affective dimensions of identity tensions and teacher agency: Case studies of university English teachers teaching online

The unprecedented switch to online education during the Covid-19 pandemic has posed many challenges for language teachers, such as conducting authentic language interactions with reduced modalities in virtual classrooms. Language teachers, therefore, have been confronted with identity tensions of how to reposition themselves to adapt to this new teaching space. How teachers experienced and responded to these identity tensions is critically important to the success of online education, yet this issue remains underexplored. To address this gap, our case studies drew on multiple rounds of individual interviews with four university English teachers who taught online during the pandemic. Findings reveal that individual teachers experienced varying degrees of identity tensions on the pedagogical and socio-affective dimensions. To tackle these identity tensions, the teachers took wide-ranging agentic actions in pre-, in-, and/or after-class stages to maintain an identity, adopt a new identity, switch between identities, and/or redefine identities. Findings are discussed in terms of differential identity tensions brought by online teaching to individual teachers, as well as the complex interplay between identity tensions and teacher agency. The study concludes with implications for online language teaching and language teacher development. [ FROM AUTHOR]

‘Becoming More of a Fairy Godmother Type of Teacher’: Teacher Identity Negotiation in a Time of Pandemic

The first years of the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic have brought unanticipated and far-reaching change to the ways language teachers have had to conceptualise and implement their practices. Many teachers have been compelled to move rapidly from classroom to online teaching which has had a substantial impact not only on their sense of identity, but also their sense of confidence in their usual practices. In this chapter, I draw on the reflections of Australian teachers working with international students in the English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students (ELICOS) sector, several of whom I have worked with in these early pandemic years as a facilitator of action research, as part of their professional development. Together with their colleagues, they needed to rapidly adjust their professional expectations, roles and practices. The chapter draws on short narrative comments from these teachers and illustrates how they and their colleagues drew on new concepts and mindsets to negotiate their teacher identities and to discover how they could best work with their students in the change to online environments. The data show that social, cognitive and emotional factors were major influences on these negotiations of identity. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Caring is pedagogy: Foreign language teachers’ emotion labor in crisis

While the shift to remote teaching at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic was experienced across all sectors of higher education, university-level foreign language teachers were impacted in particular ways. Interpersonal communication, such as discussion of students’ daily lives and their feelings, is integral to language classroom discourse. The decreases in foreign language enrollments and threats to programs the in U.S. in recent decades have also connected emotion labor to other professional discourses of relevance to language educators, namely those related to recruitment and retention. What has been called “teaching-as-caring” is thus central to language teachers’ work (e.g., Miller & Gkonou, 2018 & 2021).  The collective and aggregate crises of the COVID pandemic provide a complex context for studying questions of how professional imperatives to enact these forms of emotion labor are experienced by teachers of languages other than English. This interview-based study thus examines the experiences of university language instructors during the early months of the COVID-19 outbreak. The participants were 19 educators of various languages at institutions of higher education across the U.S. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and analyzed qualitatively. Findings reveal the salience of three interconnected feeling rules. The participants routinely enacted and navigated emotion labor as institutionalized and internalized expectations for maintaining personal contact with students, creating a sense of community, and regulating student feelings in ways that emerged from and extended beyond practices directly related to language teaching. The article concludes with implications for expanding the scope of research on emotion labor in language teaching and for the kinds of professional support offered to both pre- and in-service educators.

Embodied teacher identity: a qualitative study on 'practical sense' as a basic pedagogical condition in times of Covid-19.

Worldwide, the Covid-19 pandemic has transformed teaching contexts rapidly. Studies on the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic have largely focused on students' learning and well-being. In contrast, little is known about how emergency online teaching affects teachers. The aim of this study was to examine how disrupted teaching contexts during the Covid-19 pandemic affected academic teacher identities in health science education. Interviews were conducted with 19 experienced lecturers in health science education from two universities. Interview data were analysed using systematic text condensation. The established codes were compared across interviews to identify common themes and subsequently synthesized into descriptions of the emerging phenomena. Findings indicated that a form of embodied teacher identity, i.e. internalized teaching practices turned into dispositions, constituted a basic pedagogical condition and a resource for the teachers, and that the sudden change in the teaching context caused a loss of teacher identity. This identity loss was related to an incorporated understanding and use of the teacher's sense of the classroom (subtheme 1), non-verbal feedback from students (subtheme 2) and reciprocal visual contact (subtheme 3). Data also indicated that teachers' ability to adapt their teaching to students' needs while teaching and teachers' motivation and job satisfaction may have suffered. Universities should carefully consider how to cultivate sustainable and adaptive teacher identities compatible with the increasing digitalization of learning environments. Teaching is an embodied affair, and teacher identities are sensitive to structural changes in teaching contexts.

The Way We Teach Now: Exploring Resilience and Teacher Identity in School Teachers During COVID-19

With the sudden onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers across the globe felt the need to respond overnight to unprecedented adversity. Rapid adaptation to unfamiliar modes of teaching was required, leading teachers to face overwhelm on two fronts-adapting to a global pandemic, and teaching in the absence of resources and infrastructure. The lack of a physical classroom and face-to-face interaction also impacted a teachers' sense of purpose and identity. Shifts in teacher identity affect their motivation, commitment, job satisfaction, and self-image, which collectively influences their resilience. By focusing on the impact of COVID-19 on their teaching experience, this study attempted to understand the resilience of the teaching community while exploring the social and emotional factors that helped them adapt. Using the Life Story Interview method, 20 school teachers in the Delhi National Capital Region were asked to reflect on their teaching experiences during the lockdown to explore their resilience in adapting to a new reality. Reflexive thematic analysis revealed adjustment to change and loss, disengagement, and recognising small victories as themes.

An Exploratory Study of a Korean EFL Teacher‟s Identity Shift during the Pandemic

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, language teachers have been asked to rapidly react and adapt to constantly changing teaching environments in order to understand their students‟ needs in L2 learning and make judgments in conditions of uncertainty. The COVID-19 outbreak has highlighted the need to understand how teachers‟ identities evolve during such difficult times and situations. In response to this need, this study reports the findings from my qualitative case study on a Korean English teacher‟s identity shift. Drawing upon Foucault‟s (1983) notion of ethical self-formation, I examined how the Korean English teacher negotiated and developed her identity to adjust to drastically changing working environments as she weighted the benefits and challenges of online and offline education, particularly for novice Korean EFL learners. Data were collected through various sources from an experienced Korean English teacher, called Anna, at a regional foreign language center in South Korea over the course of two years. Due to the pandemic, she had to make the transition from offline to online teaching. Further, her center closed one year after the outbreak of the pandemic, and she was reassigned as a travelling teacher in a multi-school program for underachieving English students. The findings reveal that Anna became more agentive in searching for and utilizing multiple resources for teaching, showing her reflective and action-oriented practices to involve in ethical, practiced, and productive identity work (Miller, Morgan, & Medina, 2017). The findings contribute to expanding our understanding of the transformative potentials of language teachers‟ identity. Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s)

The problem of non-face-to-face teaching of design

This essay intends to provoke reflection on the pedagogical dimensions of design, moved by non-face-to-face teaching, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This situation has fully reached design teachers, a discipline taught to date mostly in face-to-face format. The flexible adaptation of teachers in aspects such as methodologies, skills and learning outcomes, affective and cognitive, interaction and evaluation in virtual format, in relation with the face-to-face teaching, is subject of reflection. © 2022 Prague University of Economics and Business. All Rights Reserved.

"It is what the situation demands." How Communities of Practice Create Value for CS Teachers in the Time of Covid

The recent pandemic has resulted in challenges to the prioritization of CS curriculum and strained the structures that support and grow the professional development and identity building of the teachers who implement it. In this poster we examine how local chapters of a national CS teacher advocacy organization (the CSTA) support their members during a time of transition and change. Using focus group data collected from an ongoing multi-year longitudinal research project, we tried to better understand the challenges that these entities faced as their normal structures of communication and outreach were closed off, and how such challenges might affect the perceptions of the role that local chapters play in supporting the continued development of their members, including their identity as CS teachers. © 2022 Owner/Author.

TEACHING WORK IN FRONT OF DISCENT COGNITIVE AND SOCIOAFFECTIVE DEVELOPMENT

This essay brings reflections on teaching work based on the main theoretical approaches to teacher professionalism, highlighting its cognitive and socioaffective dimensions. The cognitive dimension refers to the acquisition of content knowledge based on curriculum programs and the socio-affective dimension refers to the identification of socio-affective aspects that interfere in student relationships and learning. Based on this differentiation, we analyse the daily work developed by teachers in the classroom, emphasizing the interdisciplinary character of each function as complementary aspects of teaching practices, the complexities of teaching and new challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

NEW SCENARIO OLD PROBLEMS: DE-CHARACTERIZATION OF PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY AND TEACHING WORK IN TIMES OF COVID'S-19 PANDEMIC

Basic Education schools suspended their classroom activities due to the new coronavirus, responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic, end therefore some institutions took the remote classes as their aegis. In this context, the objective of this research is to analyze the impacts of the new educational scenario on the professional identity and educational work of teachers from the assumptions of dialectical historical materialism, and the principles of Cultural-Historical Theory and Historical-Critical Pedagogy. Based on the results presented, it is concluded that the new world scenario maximizes old structural problems of the Brazilian educational system, evidenced by an Education project anchored in reformist matrices and managerial principles that envision the privatization of public education and the adoption of new technologies such as solution for education. Furthermore, the new competences mentioned to the teacher directly impact the de-characterization of their professional identity and their educational work.

Teachers as media creators and prosumers: exploring the reasons & values behind their YouTube pedagogical activity

Due to the COVID pandemic, school teachers – like many other educators –needed to become vastly more digitally capable almost overnight. The results have ranged from the modest to the extraordinary. Teachers turned to content production at previously unseen levels. While recent years has seen increasing interest in the engagement of teachers with social media as a pedagogical tool and how it can advance their personal and professional capability, little attention has been paid to why and how they invest in creating and distributing pedagogical content via YouTube. This paper explores that question. First, we put forward a theoretical framework to allow better understanding of the issue. This draws from several lines of literature to set out a comprehensive framework to interrogate and contextualize the reasons teachers invest in creating and distributing YouTube content. The second part of our paper presents findings from an ongoing study of 115 teacher-produced YouTube video channels. Initial analysis suggests that the participants place strong value on gifting their knowledge and believe that sharing, contributing and creating new understandings are hallmarks of a more professional digital pedagogy. But the reasons they do so are not heterogeneous. Rather they are complex and in some ways surprising.

Early Childhood Educators as COVID Warriors: Adaptations and Responsiveness to the Pandemic Across Five Countries.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has seriously impacted countries across the globe. The pandemic has created a completely new teaching-learning environment of interaction for early childhood educators. In many countries, face-to-face teaching has been replaced by remote teaching, while in others, there have been intermittent lockdowns and limited interruptions to regular teaching norms. Given the play-based nature of preschool teaching-learning activities in most countries, educators are required to reimagine the sociocultural relationships to their pedagogical practices in their everyday teaching-learning contexts. This paper sheds light on educators' experiences and the dramatic shift in their indoor-outdoor teaching-learning environment due to the evolving health measures. The study draws on notions of teachers' identities and Vygotsky's cultural-historical concept of social situation of development (Vygotsky, 1994) to capture the new forms of relationships that early childhood educators experienced with their pedagogical environments across different countries during the pandemic. Data were collected from preschool teachers across five countries-Australia, Bangladesh, Norway, Singapore and India using online surveys which included open- and close-ended questions. Findings reveal the on-ground realities and teachers' adaptations to new pedagogies emerging across the five countries. The new digital environments provided an equally new dimension for change. These changes were seen in interactions, relationships within the everyday pedagogical contexts, as well as the shifting physical and social environment of early years educators.

La pandémie actuelle de COVID-19 a gravement touché les pays du monde entier. La pandémie a créé un tout nouvel environnement d'interaction enseignement-apprentissage pour les éducateurs de la petite enfance. Dans de nombreux pays, l'enseignement en face à face a été remplacé par l'enseignement à distance, tandis que dans d'autres, il y a eu des blocages intermittents et des interruptions limitées des normes d'enseignement régulières. Étant donné la nature ludique des activités d'enseignement-apprentissage préscolaires dans la plupart des pays, les éducateurs sont tenus de réimaginer les relations socioculturelles avec leurs pratiques pédagogiques dans leurs contextes d'enseignement-apprentissage quotidiens. Cet article met en lumière les expériences des éducateurs et le changement radical de leur environnement d'enseignement-apprentissage intérieur-extérieur en raison de l'évolution des mesures de santé. L'étude s'appuie sur les notions d'identité des enseignants et le concept culturel et historique de Vygotsky de situation sociale de développement (Vygotsky, 1994) pour saisir les nouvelles formes de relations que les éducateurs de la petite enfance ont vécues avec leurs environnements pédagogiques dans différents pays pendant la pandémie. Les données ont été recueillies auprès d'enseignants du préscolaire dans cinq pays­Australie, Bangladesh, Norvège, Singapour et Inde à l'aide d'enquêtes en ligne comprenant des questions ouvertes et fermées. Les résultats révèlent les réalités sur le terrain et les adaptations des enseignants aux nouvelles pédagogies émergentes dans les cinq pays. Les nouveaux environnements numériques ont fourni une dimension tout aussi nouvelle pour le changement. Ces changements ont été observés dans les interactions, les relations au sein des contextes pédagogiques quotidiens, ainsi que dans l'environnement physique et social changeant des éducateurs de la petite enfance.

La pandemia de COVID-19 en curso ha afectado gravemente a países de todo el mundo. La pandemia ha creado un entorno de interacción de enseñanza-aprendizaje completamente nuevo para los educadores de la primera infancia. En muchos países, la enseñanza presencial ha sido reemplazada por la enseñanza a distancia, mientras que en otros, ha habido bloqueos intermitentes e interrupciones limitadas de las normas de enseñanza regulares. Dada la naturaleza basada en el juego de las actividades de enseñanza-aprendizaje preescolar en la mayoría de los países, los educadores deben reinventar las relaciones socioculturales con sus prácticas pedagógicas en sus contextos cotidianos de enseñanza-aprendizaje. Este documento arroja luz sobre las experiencias de los educadores y el cambio dramático en su entorno de enseñanza-aprendizaje interior y exterior debido a la evolución de las medidas de salud. El estudio se basa en las nociones de las identidades de los maestros y el concepto histórico-cultural de Vygotsky sobre la situación social del desarrollo (Vygotsky, 1994) para capturar las nuevas formas de relaciones que los educadores de la primera infancia experimentaron con sus entornos pedagógicos en diferentes países durante la pandemia. Se recopilaron datos de maestros de preescolar en cinco países: Australia, Bangladesh, Noruega, Singapur e India mediante encuestas en línea que incluían preguntas abiertas y cerradas. Los hallazgos revelan las realidades sobre el terreno y las adaptaciones de los profesores a las nuevas pedagogías que surgen en los cinco países. Los nuevos entornos digitales proporcionaron una dimensión igualmente nueva para el cambio. Estos cambios se observaron en las interacciones, las relaciones dentro de los contextos pedagógicos cotidianos, así como en el entorno físico y social cambiante de los educadores de la primera infancia.

Teacher identity in the context of assessments in a pandemic period

This essay presents a critical analysis of teachers' professional identity within the context of assessments in the period marked by the COVID-19 pandemic. Considerations were made regarding the evaluation of students during the specific dynamics of a process marked by sensitive changes in the universe of Brazilian education in 2020 and 2021. The reinvention of teaching practice was highly needed, which sparks off a debate surrounding the teacher's role in the changes of assessment practices. In this sense, the fine line between teaching and learning is questioned, changing the aforementioned "formula" for the conduction of activities and the reception of answers, in view of an unbridled search for attendance, and not for systemic learning. The considerations point to a necessary dialogue about the relationship between the teaching profession and assessment.