Towards a multifaceted, multidimensional framework for understanding teacher identity

This chapter analyzes the understandings of teacher identity, arguing that there is a need for empirical research that reflects the multifaceted and multilevel nature of teacher's identity work. It explores an essential step toward a comprehensive understanding of how teachers construct professional identities. Recognizing teacher identity as multifaceted, maintain that a comprehensive exploration of identity requires attention to identity-in-discourse and identity-in-practice. Identity-in-practice describes an action-orientated approach to understanding identity, underlining the need to investigate identity formation as a social matter, which is operationalized through concrete practices and tasks. The chapter describes the theoretical framework which, it is argued and sensitive to the ways in which teachers construct their professional identities in discourse, practice and acknowledges the agency role and structure within the identity. The analytical value of this framework is illustrated through a description of the challenges faced by one group of native-speaking English language teachers as they sought to construct identities as professional language teachers in Hong Kong. Copyright © 2015 Yin Ling Cheung, Selim Ben Said and Kwanghyun Park.