Using Blogging in Support of Teacher Professional Identity Development: A Case

This case study explores the affordances a weblog (blog) offered to “Ms. Frizzle, ” an urban middle school science teacher and exceptional blogger, to support her profes-sional identity development. The 316 posts she wrote over 1 school year were sys-tematically analyzed and triangulated with data from e-mail exchanges and inter-views with Ms. Frizzle and her colleagues. Ms. Frizzle used her blog to tell stories of herself and her classroom, reflect on her practice, work through dilemmas, solicit feedback, and display competence, among other things. By doing so, she was able to wrestle with many issues that are central to the practice of urban science teaching and be recognized by herself and others as a “reform-minded ” teacher committed to ex-cellence and equity in education. To realize these benefits, however, Ms. Frizzle in-vested significant time and energy into her blogging and made certain uses of blogging features. Thus, although this study empirically supports the potential of blogging for teachers ’ professional identity development, it also indicates that the way in which teachers use blogging will determine the extent of the benefits they can derive from this practice. A weblog (or “blog”) is a frequently updated personal online space (a type of Web page) where an author (“blogger”) publishes a series of “posts, ” engages others in discussions of his or her posts, and collects and shares resources. These posts are searchable by category and archived over a long period of time, usually in reverse chronological order (Nardi, Schiano, & Gumbrecht, 2004). Teachers are beginning to use blogs in a number of different ways. For example, a search for blogs tha