sources of teacher identity change: towards a cross-cultural understanding of professional identity dynamics

The present study was an attempt to find the sources of teachers’ professional identity change. the incentives were to explain the dynamicity of teacher identity in response to major discursive elements of the teaching profession. for this purpose, the identity perception of 15 efl teachers working in iran was compared to the identity conceptions of 15 efl teachers working in the netherlands. narrative inquiries, semi-structured interviews and researchers’ observations were used for the data collection. an inductive-deductive paradigmatic approach was employed to find the themes of identity change, then matrix representations were used to depict the sources of identity change for each context. the results showed that, for the teachers in iran, a valued cultural definition of the teacher creates a standard for identity construction and informs the fluctuations of teacher identity. however, in the context of efl teaching in the netherlands, the source of change is the teachers’ personal and professional experience with the act of teaching. the implication was that contextually valued self-images and goals orient the trajectory of identity formation; although identities are dynamic by nature, it is the context of practice that sets the direction of change.