Transforming Identities through Research-led Professional Learning

How can schools foster more authentic and meaningful professional learning for their teachers? How do expert and veteran teachers respond to professional development activities? How do teachers’ personal and professional identities affect their commitment, career progression and impact in their classrooms? Drawing on narrative research carried out with working teachers, this book explores how engaging with critical intellectual research can be a site of transformation. It draws out powerful stories that highlight the complexities and challenges of reforming the personal, professional and political dimensions of teachers’ identities, and how they engage with professional learning. Through school-university partnerships and new approaches to postgraduate pedagogy, Transforming Identities through Research-led Professional Learning reconceptualises the university as an ontological site. It is key reading for teachers, teacher educators, policy makers and researchers with an interest in teachers’ professional learning, underscoring the potential of critical, intellectual knowledge and research work as transformational for veteran teachers.