Browsing by Subject "Teacher identity"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Issues of Identity and Equity in STEM Education STEM Teachers Identity and Gender Equity in STEM
    (2018-12) El Nagdi, Mohamed
    Abstract This three-paper dissertation addresses issues of equity and identity in STEM education through three studies conducted with teachers in two emerging STEM schools in the Midwest United States (U.S.), graduates of a girls STEM school in Egypt, and the teachers of a STEM school in Egypt. The studies comprising this dissertation utilized case study as a research design to explore the issues of equity and identity in STEM education. Participants in each study were selected using criterion purposeful sampling. Though these studies were not intended to be comparative, the results of the three studies reveal context-based results with several global assumptions regarding nature of STEM education and the pertinent issues of equity and identity. In the three studies STEM education is viewed as having a transformative power for both teachers as providing an opportunity for change at the professional level; and for female students providing an equitable learning environment for girls aspiring to pursue STEM fields. The evolving nature of the STEM teacher identity was evident across all cases. The American teachers conceptualize STEM as providing valuable tool for better learning opportunities for students based on integrated curriculum and with emphasis on equity and inclusion. Egyptian teachers viewed STEM from two lenses: as a pedagogical tool to facilitate learning complex concepts, and a system level reform initiative to reform the existing failing education system in the country and prepare students for the labor market. Characteristics of STEM teachers were uniform across the three studies; flexibility, collaboration and open to change. The challenges for teachers’ identity development in the Egyptian experience are mostly related to lack of resources and bureaucracy while in the U.S. case they are more connected with professional development and time needed for more practice. While the studies making up this dissertation denote the centrality of the context regarding STEM design and implementation, they still have implications for STEM education as a global reform initiative.
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    Tale of two teachers: Chinese immigrant teachers’ professional identity in US foreign language classrooms.
    (2010-06) Gao, Yunli
    This study looks at Chinese immigrant teachers' identity through the theoretical framework of the figured worlds, aiming to explore how the Chinese immigrant teachers navigate the cultural and educational practices and negotiate their professional identities in the figured world of foreign language classes in the US public schools, and how the two competing storylines of "Chinese" and "American" teacher interplay in the teachers' identity. Two Chinese immigrant teachers were interviewed and observed in their classrooms over a period of four months. The findings revealed the uncertainty and figuring involved in the inscribed acts and meaning regarding the "American" and "Chinese" pedagogical storylines of teaching, and the situated processes of the figuring, positioning, and choices made by the immigrant teachers. The teachers' professional identities are complex and highly contextualized, reflecting positioning in multiple memberships and orchestration of various discourses in the "space of authoring" in the cultural worlds of the schools. The study contributed to immigrant teacher research at the age of global migration.
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    Wrestling with Whiteness: Complexities and Contexts of White Educator Identities
    (2022-05) Deutschman , Megan
    This study utilizes life history methodology to understand how White teachers develop racial awareness, and in turn, how this contributes to the makings of a White identity. Critical Whiteness Studies frames this work, and demands a nuanced, contextual, and intersectional understanding of how Whiteness functions both individually and systemically. This research advances scholarly understandings of enactments of Whiteness in a critical empirical way that deeply considers the complexities and tensions that White educators feel as they attempt to understand their role in a society that is marked by racism and structural oppression. This study begins by exploring the moments in childhood that delineated racial boundaries for the participants, and I offer insights into how White children begin to conceptualize race. As adults, the participants in this study chose the profession of education, thus exposing themselves to races, languages, cultures, and religions that were different from those in the insulated White world in which they grew up and built a life. For many of these educators, teaching was the first time they had been “exposed to difference.” This exposure complicated their prior notions of race, leading to conflicting and ambivalent feelings as they began to examine their own ideological considerations. After grounding this study in the development of White racial awareness, I illuminate how situated and selective this awareness is. The educators in this study often made attempts to enact their racial awareness at school, but upon leaving school they either could not or would not enact that same awareness in their everyday lives. Here is where this study becomes especially critical to the field of Comparative and International Development Education (CIDE), as the themes of transracial adoption, sex tourism, immigration, and international volunteer-tourism surface as educators share stories pertaining to their understandings of race, racism, and Whiteness. These narratives demonstrate how local issues have a global resonance, and furthers recent arguments that an examination of Whiteness and its historical legacies of power, colonization, and domination are critical for the field of CIDE. Finally, the teacher participants in this study share stories of the real and/or perceived social and emotional costs for their understandings of racism and their attempted solidarity with people of Color. As such, this dissertation advances current debates on the cost of racialized awareness to White people. This is an under-researched topic in Critical Whiteness Studies, but it is vitally important as it speaks to the reasons why White people are thwarted in their anti-racist attempts. This also speaks to the costs that are expounded on White people, both by individuals and society at large.