Abstract:

This paper examines a teacher identity course for Honors students, focusing on the challenge of supporting students in developing a cohesive sense of professional identity amid the complexities of modern education. Teacher identity is widely recognized as essential to effective practice, yet it can be challenging for students to reconcile their diverse personal histories, educational beliefs, and evolving professional roles. To address this issue, the course employed art-based techniques and reflective practices to help students navigate and articulate their changing identities.

Students began with a pre-interview about their backgrounds, followed by weekly creative activities like clay modelling, magazine collages, and role play, which facilitated introspection and symbolic representation. Each week, they also engaged with scholarly articles and wrote reflections on how these theories intersected with their experiences, capturing shifts in self-perception and enhancing their awareness of who they were becoming as educators.

This study uses Akkerman and Meijer’s (2011) dialogical self-theory as both a theoretical and analytical framework, conceptualizing teacher identity as a dynamic, relational, and multifaceted construct. By engaging students in dialogues with external texts and internal reflections, this framework positions identity as a negotiation between multiple “I-positions” that develop through social context, experience, and self-reflection. This approach fosters a more comprehensive understanding of identity as both stable and fluid, constructed through continuous internal and external dialogues. Consequently, students' creative expressions and reflections become sites for complex professional identity formation as they reconcile new perspectives from the course with established beliefs.

Findings suggest that integrating art-based practices, theoretical readings, and reflective writing supports a holistic engagement with teacher identity, allowing students to navigate conflicts and growth areas in their identity development actively. This study contributes to teacher education by demonstrating the value of dialogical and art-based approaches in fostering self-reflexivity and professional agency. Ultimately, the paper advocates for identity-centered pedagogies in teacher education, encouraging learners to engage in nuanced, multidimensional explorations of their evolving teaching roles.

Keywords:

Teacher identity, Art-based approaches, Reflective practices, Professional development, Dialogical self theory.