Inquiring into Preservice Teachers' Identity Awareness and Development: A Collaborative Multi-Case Study

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Teachers' identities act as a cognitive lens that informs how they perceive and interact with their students. If unexamined, teachers remain unconscious of the internal influences shaping how they teach. The purpose of this multi-case study was to inquire into the ways preservice teachers describe their identities and how teacher educators might contribute to facilitating their early professional identity development, with priority given to studying their understanding of race and their anti-racist identity development. Findings suggest that preservice teachers developed a sense of consciousness regarding the impact of their identities on teaching while also building a greater understanding of their teacher agency and their abilities to advocate for students. These findings indicate that identity development is a continuum of awareness, facilitated through a continual process of reflecting on experiences and self-perception.