Key features of teacher identity: a systematic meta-review study with special focus on teachers of science or science-related subjects

ABSTRACT

Since 2010, a remarkable number of literature reviews on teacher identity has been published. These literature reviews address a wide range of different foci, e.g., school teachers’ identity, higher education teachers’ identity, or the identity of teachers teaching a specific subject such as science. So far, these literature reviews have not been systematically compared for similarities and differences to gain a deeper understanding of what key features characterise teachers’ identities in general and what key features are specific for the identity of teachers teaching science or science-related subjects. To address this research gap, we conducted a meta-review of 24 literature reviews on teacher identity, which we identified in ERIC and the Web of Science databases. From the 24 reviews we extracted 30 key features of teacher identity. In addition, several of these key features are notably prevalent in literature reviews addressing the identity of teachers teaching science or science-related subjects, while others are less prevalent. Above all, these results strongly indicate that the identity of science teachers significantly differs from the identity of teachers of other subjects or of generalist teachers. Implications of this finding for future research in science education are outlined at the end of this paper.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher identity
• science teacher
• systematic meta-review
• science education
• literature review

Acknowledgments

We thank Lucy Avraamidou for her feedback on earlier drafts of this article. We also thank the project ProfaLe of the Universität Hamburg for supporting the publication of this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. At an early stage of this review study, we intended to distinguish teachers teaching different subjects more fine-grained as science teachers, music teachers, etc. However, during our analysis, we needed to merge different literature reviews on teacher identity more coarse-grained (see Method) and therefore also adjusted our research questions accordingly.

2. We have chosen this way of structuring the frameworks of personal, social, collective, positional and narrative identity to ensure reader-friendliness of the Theoretical background. As such, this way of structuring should not be interpreted as a ranking or hierarchy of different identity frameworks.

3. It should be noted that the term ‘cultural identity’ is heavily debated in political science, especially due to its misuse by far-right politicians (Bizeul, 2020). Therefore, as authors of this paper, we explicitly distance ourselves from any misuse of the term ‘cultural identity’ by far-right political movements.

4. One of the literature reviews (Rushton & Reiss, 2021) was published as an online first article in 2020, which is why it was included in our analysis despite its official date of publication.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Markus Sebastian Feser

Markus Sebastian Feser works as a postdoc at the Department of Education of the Universität Hamburg in Germany. Before working at the Universität Hamburg, he studied education sciences, physics and mathematics at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg in Germany. He is a member of the Working Group on Physics Education at the Universität Hamburg and is involved in the ProfaLe project funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (www.profale.uni-hamburg.de/en). In 2019, he completed his PhD in education studies with his thesis on the role of language in physics teachers’ everyday assessment practice. His main research focus is the professional development of (pre-service) science teachers. Among other topics, his current research focuses on the sense of belonging of students and student teachers to science, the conceptions of secondary school students of the viscous behaviour of fluids, and the role of language in teaching and learning physics.

Inka Haak

Inka Haak works as a postdoc at the Department of Physics at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) in Germany. Before working at MLU, she studied physics, mathematics and educational sciences in a teacher training programme at Paderborn University in Germany. In 2017, she completed her PhD in physics education studies with her thesis on the research-based design of the university learning centre for physics freshmen at Paderborn University. In 2018, she successfully completed her teacher training with her completion of the Second State Exam. From 2018 to 2019, she worked as a postdoc in higher mathematics education. Her main research focus is the professional development of (pre-service) science teachers and physicists. On the one hand, she has a strong focus on the introductory phase of studies; and on the other hand, on the identity development of physics students (in teacher training). She is also a researcher on astronomy education.