Jiang Anne Li
School of Foreign Languages, Northeast Normal University, Changchun, China.
Front Psychol. 2022 Jan 10;12:774759. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.774759. eCollection 2021.
Curriculum reform urges teachers to constantly reflect on existing identities and develop probably whole new identities. Yet, in the wake of the poststructuralist view of identity as a complex matter of the social and the individual, of discourse and practice, and of agency and structure, teacher identity is a process of arguing for themselves and hence ethical and political in nature. Drawing on Foucault's notion of ethical self-formation and its adoption by Clarke (2009a) "Diagram for Doing Identity Work" in teacher education research, this 2-year-long case study explores how two Chinese English-as-foreign-language (EFL) teachers engaged in identity work in a changing curricular landscape. The analysis of narrative frames and semistructured interviews reveals the relations between the relative stable and the evolving elements of teachers' identity work, and the essential role of teachers' ethical agency based on reflective and critical responsiveness to the contextual reality and the dynamic power relations during the reform. The findings argue for the importance of nourishing teachers' reflective identity work and ethical agency during the turbulence of educational change.
课程改革促使教师不断反思现有的身份认同,并可能发展出全新的身份认同。然而,在后结构主义将身份认同视为社会与个体、话语与实践、能动性与结构的复杂问题的观点之后,教师身份认同是一个为自己辩护的过程,因此本质上是伦理和政治的。借鉴福柯的伦理自我形成概念及其在克拉克(2009a)的“身份认同工作图”在教师教育研究中的应用,这个为期两年的案例研究探讨了两位中国外语(EFL)教师如何在不断变化的课程环境中进行身份认同工作。对叙事框架和半结构化访谈的分析揭示了教师身份认同工作中相对稳定和不断演变的要素之间的关系,以及教师基于对背景现实和改革过程中动态权力关系的反思性和批判性回应的伦理能动性的重要作用。研究结果表明,在教育变革的动荡时期,培养教师反思性身份认同工作和伦理能动性非常重要。