Teacher Identity Discourse: Negotiating Personal And Profession Space Summary
Book Review
Rui Liang
“Teachers are, above all, people.” This sentence condenses the essence of this book—Teacher Identity Discourse: Negotiating Personal and Profession Space, by Janet Alsup. Teachers we know in class are usually professional and respectable. However, teachers are humans who have their own feelings and thoughts as well. One’s personal identity may not always works well with his or her professional identity as a teacher. In the book, Alsup indicates that the path one takes to become a teacher is a process crowded with tension, negotiation, and sometimes failures. Becoming a “heroical” teacher is not simply learning “a new set of rules for behavior”. Instead, one has to learn how to integrate his or her personal and professional …show more content…
Alsup claims more than once in the book that experience by itself is not inherently useful; it is helpful only if it is subject to critical reflection. Therefore, these reflections will affect new teachers’ developing teaching lives and future pedagogical decisions. Alsup thematically coded and analyzed these narratives with an effort to explore what effects these narratives have on the pre-service teachers’ current educational philosophies and pedagogical choices. At the same time, the central concept in this book—borderland discourses, which Alsup borrowed from Gee (1999) and Anzaldúa (1987), emerged. It can be understood as the “intersection of personal and professional identities”, reflecting the pre-service teachers’ attempts to bridge multiple subjectivities, including the intellectual, the corporeal and the affective aspects of human selfhood. It leads to “identity growth” by helping the pre-service teachers fill the gaps between multiple senses of selves. She takes those pre-service teachers who decided to become a teacher immediately after graduation as successfully form a teacher identity while those who didn’t as fail to make the transition. By comparing the amount of the borderland discourses the participants engaged in and their final development, Alsup made the conclusion that those who were able to negotiate the borderland were also able, with proper assistance, to construct a holistic professional identity, which is not confined within the rigid cultural model of teacher but will make decisions based on student
Rui Liang
“Teachers are, above all, people.” This sentence condenses the essence of this book—Teacher Identity Discourse: Negotiating Personal and Profession Space, by Janet Alsup. Teachers we know in class are usually professional and respectable. However, teachers are humans who have their own feelings and thoughts as well. One’s personal identity may not always works well with his or her professional identity as a teacher. In the book, Alsup indicates that the path one takes to become a teacher is a process crowded with tension, negotiation, and sometimes failures. Becoming a “heroical” teacher is not simply learning “a new set of rules for behavior”. Instead, one has to learn how to integrate his or her personal and professional …show more content…
Alsup claims more than once in the book that experience by itself is not inherently useful; it is helpful only if it is subject to critical reflection. Therefore, these reflections will affect new teachers’ developing teaching lives and future pedagogical decisions. Alsup thematically coded and analyzed these narratives with an effort to explore what effects these narratives have on the pre-service teachers’ current educational philosophies and pedagogical choices. At the same time, the central concept in this book—borderland discourses, which Alsup borrowed from Gee (1999) and Anzaldúa (1987), emerged. It can be understood as the “intersection of personal and professional identities”, reflecting the pre-service teachers’ attempts to bridge multiple subjectivities, including the intellectual, the corporeal and the affective aspects of human selfhood. It leads to “identity growth” by helping the pre-service teachers fill the gaps between multiple senses of selves. She takes those pre-service teachers who decided to become a teacher immediately after graduation as successfully form a teacher identity while those who didn’t as fail to make the transition. By comparing the amount of the borderland discourses the participants engaged in and their final development, Alsup made the conclusion that those who were able to negotiate the borderland were also able, with proper assistance, to construct a holistic professional identity, which is not confined within the rigid cultural model of teacher but will make decisions based on student