Teachers' conceptions of their roles in adolescents' identity formation

Abstract

This empirical research was set out with the purpose of describing teachers’ conceptions of adolescents’ identity formation and their role as they interact with adolescents in the classroom context. The study focused on the emerging meanings teachers give to their experience of identity formation in adolescent students. The area of study in education is identity with focus on identity formation agents.

The subjects were teachers in lower and upper secondary school in Finland. Data were collected from four subjects and all the subjects were teachers of grade nine students. The subjects all agreed to the ethical ground of non-disclosure of their identity in term of name or the use of descriptions that will make them identifiable. Two subjects were only subject teachers while the other two have had the opportunity of additional responsibility of being mentors in the last one year prior to this study.

The approach chosen for this qualitative study was phenomenography. This approach has been used for decades in the field of education and it is to describe the meanings that subjects give their experience in relation to a phenomenon. The data collection tool used to elicit relevant narratives from subjects in other to describe their conceptions of adolescent students’ identity formation and their role in the process was a semi-structured interview. This interview was designed using the main research questions to create nine-item open-ended questions.

Consequently, the research findings indicated that all the subjects’ meanings for identity formation are into three different facets which are adaptive, existentiality and subjective conception. Adaptive conception means identity formation is a process of developing the capacity to respond to the social environment in a tangible sense. Existentiality conception means making sense of self and fitting self into the world through the process of identity formation. Subjective conception means that identity formation is about feeling cozy with self.

Additionally, the result indicated that all the subjects played an agentic role in the identity formation of their adolescent students. However, the descriptions of their experience in relation to the phenomenon created two types of role conceptions. The first group’s conception of their role did not transcend beyond subject matter and the curriculum. The pivot of their role as subject teachers is on the subject matter and adolescents’ academic competencies only. The second group’s conception of their role is as identity agents which is operationalized intentionally; through their subject matters and daily interaction with adolescent students. They specifically, mentioned that giving adolescent students the opportunity to independently make academic choices is beneficial for identity formation.

Conclusively, the result indicated that all the subjects acted as identity agents although some were unaware and unintentionally acting as identity formation agents. Identity formation is a necessity for every adolescent and the emergence of coherent identity is not a given. Therefore, the need for identity and identity formation to be a core course of study for all student teachers and part of a continuous professional development program for on the job teachers is essential. Thus, well-informed teachers will play their role reflectively and effectively as identity formation agents.