Methods for conceptualizing and investigating teachers’ professional identity in literature reviews

Abstract

Several studies that reviewed the national and international literature on the identity of students and teachers have been conducted over the last five years to analyze how researchers in the field of mathematics education have used such a concept. This article has made a systematic meta-synthesis review of the five most relevant literature reviews on this topic published in the last two decades inside and outside Brazil. Its objective is to understand and discuss multiple perspectives and conceptualizations of teachers’ professional identity, along with its implications for research in this area of investigation. The reviewing process of systematic reviews occurred by recording and interpreting each study to eventually discuss and elaborate an integrative synthesis of the final interpretative syntheses. The results reveal that identity conceptualizations have developed in a pendulum movement that oscillates between the dimensions of the subject and its social context, moving towards an interrelation. Research on the area identified theoretical-methodological problems, which still represent a challenge to formulate more operational conceptualizations. Furthermore, in terms of assumed perspectives and the methodologies of developing analysis, defining the concept of identity consistently and operationally is a path under construction and a challenge to be faced by the professional identity field of study. The study of multiple ways of conceptualizing and investigating identity, besides problematizing an important epistemological issue, provides relevant theoretical lenses or tools to analyze and understand the complexity of who and how teachers that work at schools are, particularly in the field of mathematics.