Identity as experience – an interactionist approach

Identity studies tend to draw on participatory frameworks. Some focus on identities on offer in professional development programmes or in general educational discourses; others relate identities to other social worlds and teachers’ biographies. I argue that neither pays sufficient attention to identities as they emerge in school and classroom contexts and that supplementary approaches are needed. In this theoretical essay, I present one such approach that defines professional identities as experiences and combines the definition with an interactionist framework, ­ Patterns-of-participation. I argue that this combination allows interpretations of short- and long-term relationships between identities and school and classroom processes.