CONSTRUCTING A CURRICULAR DIMENSION OF TEACHER PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY: FROM SITUATED NEEDS TO CURRICULUM LEADERSHIP

Curriculum leadership is often conceptualized through the practices of leading, coordinating, implementing, or making curricular decisions. Such formulations, however, may obscure a deeper process through which teachers come to understand curriculum as part of who they are as professionals. This qualitative study offers a theoretically informed re-analysis of an existing dataset of 46 teacher leaders in elementary and secondary schools. Drawing on a conceptual framework that brings curriculum theory, leadership theory, and teacher professional identity into dialogue, the study asks how teachers construct a curricular dimension of their professional identity as they move from recognizing needs in their educational context to shaping collective educational practice. The analysis retains four enduring dimensions of curriculum work—purpose, learning experiences, organization, and evaluation—not as sequential stages but as interconnected sites of meaning-making, professional judgment, collective action, and renewal. Findings indicate that teachers’ emerging curriculum-leader identities are constructed through four mutually related processes: (1) curricular purpose-making, through which teachers interpret contextual and learner needs and articulate what education should accomplish; (2) curricular mediation, through which they translate purposes and contextual knowledge into responsive learning experiences; (3) collective curriculum orchestration, through which they mobilize, connect, and integrate colleagues’ knowledge; and (4) curricular inquiry and renewal, through which professional knowledge is examined, challenged, generalized, and revised. Across these processes, curricular ownership emerges as a cross-cutting form of professional positioning. The findings suggest that curriculum leadership is not simply a specialized form of teacher leadership directed toward curriculum. Rather, it is an identity-forming process through which teachers increasingly understand themselves as legitimate professional actors responsible for interpreting educational needs, shaping curricular meaning, coordinating collective curriculum work, and participating in its ongoing renewal.