Education Commons^™

Diffractively Thinking About Teacher Identity In Body Mapping As Performance, Intersectional Positionality, And Material-Discursive Enactment, Jihea Maddamsetti

The Qualitative Report

Teacher identity is integral for teachers' professional growth and shapes how they address persistent educational disparities and inequities. Teachers' embodied relationships with self, others, and the world play a vital role in the ways teachers (co-)construct and (re)negotiate their identities as professionals. Still, little is known about how the relations among teachers' bodies, material, and power may affect teacher identity. This study adopted a diffractive methodology to examine how elementary teacher candidates' (TCs) engagement in body maps—that is, arts-informed tools and processes of (re)presenting one's lived experiences and identities—may contribute to their embodied aspects of identity work. A diffractive methodology …