Exploring the role of yoga in teachers' professional identity and pedagogical approaches

Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, this study examines how teachers who completed yoga teacher training made sense of its implications for professional identity and classroom practice. Consistent with an interpretivist and hermeneutic phenomenological approach, the study focuses on how participants interpreted and attributed meaning to lived experience, rather than treating identity or pedagogy as directly observable constructs. Teachers described yoga as a resource for stress management, resilience, agency, and renewed vocational purpose within performative educational cultures. Identity was articulated relationally, with participants blurring personal and professional boundaries and describing more collaborative classroom dynamics centred on shared regulation and attention to the whole child. Yet yoga remained marginalised, frequently coded as feminine, non-academic, and peripheral to subject pedagogy. The findings suggest that performativity constrains professional flourishing and indicate the need for embodied, reflective CPD, institutional recognition of wellbeing, and longitudinal research examining how such interventions reshape teacher identity over time.