Where are they from? Pre-service educators’ views on place and professional identity

ABSTRACT

Australian pre-service teachers (PSTs) increasingly find themselves in classrooms where students have a diversity of backgrounds, which can lead to questions about the PST’s own place identity and how much of this identity they should disclose to students. This article explores how seven PSTs engage with their own sense of place identity when responding to the prompt: “What do you say when people ask you where you are from?” The findings bring to the fore absences of critical reflection from PSTs about the importance of their own place identity, a reluctance to talk about PST place identity in school contexts, and tensions created by a mismatch between PST place identity and professional identity. The cases presented in this article provide a starting point for opening discussions about the intersections between place identity and professional identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Diversity in classrooms
• recognizing difference
• pre-service teachers
• place identity
• teacher identity
• where are you from

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Such documents work together with other prescribed sets of Australian standards (Allard et al., 2014; AITSL, 2018) to create discourses of “control”.

2. One of the reviewers of this paper reported that their PSTs tell them that students sometimes phrase the question as “whats your nash, miss?” (nationality).

3. Although recent data suggests that the teaching profession is becoming more diverse, even in culturally diverse cities such as Sydney, only around one third of total undergraduate cohort of the Teacher Education department of a Sydney university reported being multilingual (Moloney, 2018).

4. While the people (including the students) who asked “where are you from” may have had a range of potential reasons for asking this question, this paper only considers the student responses. For insights into the range of responses to how students would answer this question and their reasons for their answers, see Starks and Taylor-Leech (2018, online).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dorothy Smith

Dorothy Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Policy at La Trobe University, Australia. Her research interest is on the co-production of science and society, with particular focus on the consequences of naïve views of science for education policy and practice. Publications include articles in Research in Science Education and the Journal of Educational Administration and History. Dorothy was lead investigator on Articulate Science, an Australian Research Council funded research project.

Jacolyn Weller

Jacolyn Weller is a Senior Lecturer in STEM in Initial Teacher Education at La Trobe University. She is a mid-career researcher with more than 20 years secondary school teaching experience. Her discipline repertoire includes science, chemistry, mathematics and information technology teaching. A strong philosophy of a practical approach frames her advocacy of experiential teaching. Her research focus is based on the sustainability of teachers in the teaching profession and extends into innovative teaching and assessment, professional development and partnerships.

Donna Starks

Donna Starks is an Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics in the School of Education at La Trobe University, Australia. Research interests focus on issues related to multilingualism and the ways semiotic resources come together in the representation of multilingual identities.  Publications include journal articles in Applied Linguistics Review, Language Policy and Social Semiotics.

Martha Kamara

Martha Kamara is a Lecturer in the School of Education at La Trobe University, Melbourne, and was previously Lecturer at Batchelor Institute, and a Research Fellow at Charles Darwin University, Northern Territory.  In a career spanning over 20 years as a teacher, adult educator, and researcher, she has made a significant contribution to education through teaching, scholarship and leadership nationally and internationally. Her current research focuses on Indigenous and intercultural education, social inclusion and diversity in education.