Teacher identities as a production of teaching

Abstract

The work discusses how teachers have been seen and situated, in particular by the educational discourses of the last decades, analyzing how their occupational and professional situations have been defined from the viewpoint of the studies in the educational field. The issue of identity is discussed in its relation with the position of subject that is attributed to teachers in performing their roles within concrete labor contexts, and also in its relation to the set of representations circulated by the discourses about the manners of being and acting of teachers in the exercise of their functions. The text explores the arguments around models of professionalism that circulate as more or less adequate, and it debates possible implications of such models to the construction of teacher identities. It also seeks to show how the educational restructuring of the last decades, by stimulating certain models of professionalism, bring forth teacher identities more or less articulated with the ultimate goals of the reforms, and in doing so the text tries to reveal contradictions, steps forward, limits and possibilities in each one of the models. Lastly, the article discusses some theoretical-methodological aspects in the study of teacher identities, indicating that one of the productive paths for the research in this field can be the search for differences, for discontinuities, for divisions in this professional category, emphasizing teachers' discourses about themselves and about their work contexts.