Section archive - Theories & Approaches

The current article explores how an EFL teacher negotiates her identity to adapt to the ‘new work order’ in an English education department at a university in China. From a narrative inquiry perspective, the research illuminates the complexity of teacher identity in educational reforms. The findings show that teachers need to shift their identities to survive change.

This study investigates the role of the literary arts in fostering teachers' dispositions in one socio-multicultural foundations course. The author examined a class project that offered preservice teachers the opportunity to learn about the schooling live and learning of diverse students through reading and analyzing a common text. The author concludes that the literary arts in teacher education may have the potential to foster dispositions—especially, the disposition to observe students more closely.

This article offers a theoretical confirmation to the multiple, discontinuous and social nature of teacher identity claimed by others. This paper simultaneously nuances this view by emphasizing the unitary, continuous and individual nature of teacher identity. The paper stresses that teacher development takes place in the form of self-dialogues between different parts of self.

This historical study traces the influence of John Dewey on the discourse of civic and social education during the formative years of the progressive education movement by focusing on the received Dewey. The author focuses qualitatively on the various ways in which Dewey was cited and used by leading and lesser-known civic and social educators during the formative years of the American curriculum, with particular focus on uses of Dewey to support social efficiency and social justice. In the tradition of historiography, the findings are reported in a chronological narrative.