EDU433 Highlighted Handouts

Lesson No. 23 (Topics 65,66,67) Topic: 065

Teachers’ Communities and Identities

The community and identity meaning and practice are key concepts to understand in Teachers professionalism.

• ‘Meaning’ refers to our ability to experience the world and our life as meaningful;
• ‘Practice’ to the shared frameworks and resources that support action;
• Community is the social configures in which enterprises are defined as worth pursuing , and
• Identity means to the way learning changes where teachers are within the context of their
• Teachers produce their identities through participation in practice, through membership of communities.

Social learning theory:

• The boundaries of communities of practice do not necessarily follow geographical or institutional boundaries.
• Social learning theory implies that learning is as much collective as individual.
• We all belong to several communities of practice at any given time, whether at home, work or school.

Disciplinary communities:

Disciplines may be understood in terms of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus: As an assumed system of principles which generate schemata for perceiving, thinking, valuing and acting, stemming from the social situation and practice of a group to which a given individual belongs (Harwood, 2018).

• The links between academic identity and discipline are strong disciplines are not fixed over time; their boundaries and orientations may change, as they develop new methodologies or splinter into new specialism.
• “Teacher professional identity provides a framework for teachers to construct their own ideas of ‘how to be’, ‘how to act’ and ‘how to understand’
• their work and their place in society.”(Sachs, 2005)
• They may vary from one institution to another, from one country to another. New disciplines may emerge; old ones may fade.
• The teachers act and negotiate their teachers’ identities contribute to changes in the communities of practice to which they belong.

What shapes teacher identity?

i. Self-concept – belief about who you are as a person. ii. Beliefs, values and assumptions about the profession of teaching. iii. Emotion and reflection on practice. iv. Professional influences. v. Teachers’ stories and discussions with others. Awareness of the teachers’ identity give them confidence to influence change in their profession.

Collaboration

• Inherent in a social theory of learning is the idea that learning is not only individual but also collective.
• Interact with each other and with the worlds and we tune our relations with each other and with the world accordingly.
• This a collective learning results in practices that belongs to the community hence the term ‘communities of practice’.
• Teacher identity can thus be seen as a collective accomplishment that derives from a continual engagement with the community of practice.
• The huge diversity of cultures and identities in the post-school world of teaching makes collective action and common purpose unlikely.

Conclusion

• The professional identities and communities of teachers are various and complex.
• Most professional groups fall into ‘segments’ or sub-groups, but in the case of the teachers the divisions may well be deeper and there may seem to be little common ground.

Topic:066

Understanding Learning to Improve Teaching Practices

• A central foundation for improving teaching is an understanding of learning.
• The body of evidence on how children learn has grown greatly over the past years.
• Research shows that teachers, like most people, interpret new ideas through their past experiences and their established beliefs about learning and teaching.
• As a result, innovative ideas are often simply absorbed into traditional classroom practices.
• Most of teachers endorse the application of the constructivist view of teaching in 21st century classrooms.