Education Commons^™

Exploring Identity-Based Challenges To English Teachers’ Professional Growth, Heather C. Camp

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This study explores identity-based challenges that can hinder secondary English teachers enrolled in Master’s degree programs from experiencing professional growth. It illustrates how identity conflicts can prevent teachers from integrating a disciplinary identity into their professional sense-of-self, thereby limiting the benefits they might gain from graduate coursework. In particular, the study suggests that dissonance between discourse norms and values, concerns about community allegiances, and assumptions about language, difficulty, and power can impede teachers from appropriating disciplinary discourse and hinder them from combining it with more familiar discourses that circulate in schools and shape teachers’ identities.