Getting Down to Identities to Trace a New Career Path: Understanding Novice Teacher Educator Identities in Multicultural Education Teaching

Abstract

With the increasingly cultural and linguistic diversity in education, teaching multicultural education for pre-service teachers becomes an important part of teacher education. In this collaborative self-study study, we examine how we construct our identities and how social interactions of multicultural education classrooms shape our identities. Our study draws on Lave and Wenger’s (1991) “identity as learners” concept, Akkerman and Bakker’s (2011) “boundary crossing learning” theory, Harré & Lagenhove’s (1999) positioning theory, and positionality concept. We found three themes that describe our identities and they reflect our embodiment of our positionality, our positions, our challenge confrontation, and our teaching improvement. We argue for the need of tracing the professional trajectories of multicultural education novice teacher educators and the important roles that our positionality plays in our identity formation. Our study has implications for professional support for multicultural education novice teacher educators and offers suggestions for further self-study research about multicultural education novice teacher educator identity formation.

Citation

Dao, V., Farver, S. and Jackson, D. (2018), "Getting Down to Identities to Trace a New Career Path: Understanding Novice Teacher Educator Identities in Multicultural Education Teaching", Self-Study of Language and Literacy Teacher Education Practices (Advances in Research on Teaching, Vol. 30), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 55-72. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-368720180000030004