Conceptualization of ‘teacher identity’: How do teachers at different career phases define it?

Teacher identity (TI) is a concept that can be defined via negotiation (Beijaard, Meijer & Verloop, 2004) and extraction of patterns from everyday teacher experiences (Day, Kington, Stobart & Sammons, 2006). Therefore, this study assumes that pre-service (PST), novice and experience teachers may define teacher identity from different points of view because their everyday experiences and teaching contexts are also different (Kanno & Stuart, 2011; Izadinia, 2015). Adopting the phenomenological approach, semi-structured interviews were used to elicit teachers’ conceptualizations of teacher identity. The findings revealed that PST, novice and experienced teachers defined teacher identity drawing on different factors and positionings, which were mainly driven by their contextual peculiarities.