Nineteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to understand how teachers’ self-identify as artists or scientists. According to Walkington (2005) teacher identity rests on a foundation of personal theories about teaching and being a teacher. A living educational theory is then formed and reformed through experience (Freeman & Johnson, 1998). A total of 75 participants took part in the study by participating in regular or online sections of a second language acquisition (SLA) theory course over four semesters. I drew on Fairclough’s (2003) method of discourse analysis to understand the positions the teachers used within the discourse context of the SLA class. Fairclough’s work focused on the commitments that teachers make in discourse as markers of identity. After reading the assigned, neutrally written academic articles, the students were asked to articulate their teacher identity preference as being artists, scientists, or a combination of both. The results revealed that preservice teachers (77%) and practicing teachers (79%) both saw themselves as primarily artists whereas only a limited percentage of the preservice teachers (12%) and practicing teachers (13%) identified themselves as a combination of both. The remaining small number of teachers in each category saw themselves mostly as scientists. The qualitative results generally supported, but also augmented the quantitative data.