Explorations of the moral socio-cultural contexts of the intentional action of physics teachers: case studies to inform practice and teacher education

© 2017 Dr. Hajah Hardimah Haji Mohd SaidThis study seeks to explore the intelligibility of physics teaching and the dynamics of the processes of personal professional identity formation processes. The teachers’ reflections in association with their vision, motivation, understanding and practice in their daily discursive practices have been carefully explored from multiple semi-structured conversational interviews and classroom observations. In this study I attend to the situational, cultural and social identities of ten physics teachers, at different stages of their careers; student teachers in training, early career and experienced teachers, in their autobiographical accounts, analysing their subject positions as classifications, participant roles, viewpoints and interactive positions in their schools and beyond. Positioning theory has been used to locate the agency of the teachers in their accounts of dynamic social episodes, and to deeply explore the complexity of the multiplicities of their social realities, evidenced in their discursive practices, that is in their alignment of both their “doings and sayings”. Pronoun Grammar Analysis (PGA) has been utilised to better locate the teacher as agent, in their own positioning in their own storylines and the social impact claimed for them. The use of PGA has assisted in illuminating and interpreting the teachers’ “technologies of the self”, against the local cover, secret and sacred stories. The teachers’ storylines seemed to be consistently impacted upon and influenced by the teachers’ institutional setting and also by past and present members of their school communities of practices. The teachers explained what they “do” and clearly described their understanding of their duties, as those that were imposed upon them in the concrete local social context of teaching in general, and of physics teaching specifically. They discussed how they had come to make practical sense of what physics teaching meant to them in their own classroom, but at the same time, also how their teaching had come to be adapted to how teaching was already being performed, and valued in their schools. There are many ways in which to approach and analyse the identities that emerge and unfold in research materials. In this study the teachers’ identities have been approached as historically, socially and culturally produced positions, as processes that are in permanent state of becoming. This study has found, and suggests that we need more complex ways to better understand the multiple “ways of being” that are required to be an effective teacher in school setting generally, and particularly as a physics teacher. The study has general implications not only for a richer study of identity formation of physics teachers but also the use of narrative accounts presented in the case studies in the study for pre-service programmes and faculty development