Abstract:

The quality of education and with it the quality of teacher education are high on the policy agenda in many countries. The qualification requirements grow; teacher education becomes regulated by policy. As the teaching profession, at its essence, is lifelong learning, it is important to give a lot of attention to teacher education and the professional development of teachers. In other words – it is an urgent need to articulate a clear understanding who is a teacher, whom we need, and to support such identity formation in teachers, because the identity of a teacher has been recognized as crucial to the practice and development of teachers. Although the identity itself is one of the most extensively studied constructs in the social sciences, especially psychology (e.g., narrative, social identity theory), there are still many questions to be answered by research. Particularly teacher identity research can be considered as relatively new, as it began in the eighth decade of the last century. It is agreed that identity is not a fixed attribute of a person, but a relational phenomenon which develops as a continuum, what makes it more difficult to investigate.

The majority of pre-eminent research available gives just a fragmented overview of the content of the teacher identity concept. There is a shortage of a more complex theoretical analysis, which would reveal the content of the teacher identity. This article attempts to examine prominent and recent research on the subject of teacher identity, as the aim of the article is to reveal the complexity of the topic of a teacher’s professional identity by analyzing scientific literature.

In this research, the method that was employed was a review of the literature. The method has been chosen in order to convey what knowledge and ideas have been established on a topic – teacher identity. The literature review is defined by guiding concepts: the research aim, and the problem the author discusses, the methodology and conclusions. The steps that were performed for the review of the literature were as follows:
(1) organizing the literature selection and review by relating it directly to the aim of the research
(2) synthesizing results into a summary of what is and is not known;
(3) identifying areas of controversy;
(4) raising questions for further research.

Even though teacher identity is not a new phenomenon, the definition and the research approach of different authors varies probably because of the multidisciplinary essence of the term, so it still remains an issue in academic studies. The understanding of teacher identity, acknowledging its importance and investigating the variety of factors what highly effect the formation of it might result in finding the new means of how to improve teacher retention at different levels of a teacher’s career. It can be claimed from this perspective that the phenomena of teacher identity is still an area which lacks significant exploration.

Keywords:

Teacher, identity, professional identity, theoretical exploration.