The role of teachers in the process of identity formation among youth in locked residential facilities: a qualitative study

Locked residential facilities educate adolescents placed under involuntary confinement due to acute risk or criminal involvement. While education is widely regarded as central to rehabilitation, less is known about how teachers understand their role in students’ identity development within coercive institutional contexts. This qualitative phenomenological study examines how teachers conceptualize identity-related change through educational engagement in juvenile detention settings. Seventeen teachers from four locked residential facilities participated in semi-structured interviews. Data was analyzed using Reflexive Thematic Analysis. Findings indicate that teachers perceive classroom experiences as facilitating identity transformation through structured academic mastery, exposure to normative expectations, and relational mentoring. Students are described as arriving with histories of academic failure and fragmented self-concepts. Within the institutional school context, achievement experiences and consistent behavioral frameworks are seen as enabling competence, self-efficacy, and alternative identity narratives oriented toward conventional futures. Teachers position themselves not only as instructors but as relational anchors who model prosocial identities and mediate access to normative social roles By foregrounding identity processes within detention-based education, this study contributes to identity-change and desistance literature by conceptualizing schooling as a site of cognitive and narrative transformation. The findings underscore the importance of identity-focused pedagogy in teacher training and inform policy efforts to integrate rehabilitative educational practices within juvenile justice systems.