Teacher identity in science education – Results of an empirical study on first- and third-person narratives

Abstract

Abstract We discuss the term teacher identity and its significance for teacher education and teachers’ professional development. From the literature, we derive a definition of the term that associates teacher identity with first- and third-person narratives. In this way, the construct teacher identity becomes operationalizable in empirical studies: Therefore, we conducted a first exploratory study with N = 89 science and non-science teachers at five German secondary schools. This study’s results indicate that the approach of identifying the construct teacher identity with first- and third-person narratives could be fruitful for future empirical research in this field.