Becoming a #realteacher: Making Pre-Service Teacher Identity Development Visible through Twitter
Abstract: Teacher education has long been concerned with prospective teachers’ dispositions of social justice and teaching to students who reside in context different from their own (Avery & Walker, 1993; Gomez, 1994; Paine, 1989), or what Gomez (1994) calls “teaching other people’s children” (p 319) Since teacher education programs need to thoughtfully and consciously support developing teachers in this transformative work” (Luehmann, 2007, p 828), this study considers teacher identity development through the communal use Twitter using a common hashtag Teacher professional identity is the core of the teaching profession: This study seeks to examine how microblogging with Twitter helps pre-service teachers develop a teacher identity This study can potentially inform teacher educators in new ways to foster the shaping of teacher identities with PSTs By understanding how teacher identities can be made visible, teacher educators can better understand the important work of providing necessary supports as PSTs navigate a teacher education program The author collected 1529 tweets across the 2016-2017 school year from 27 participants Participants are pre-service teachers enrolled in a university’s secondary English Language Arts methods course The author is submitting the work from this study as a work-in-progress