Vocational teachers in the face of major educational reform: Individual ways of negotiating professional identities.

Abstract

This paper examines how vocational teachers negotiate their professional identity in the context of a major externally imposed curriculum reform. The focus is on the teachers' orientations towards the reform in its initial stage. Sixteen Finnish vocational teachers were interviewed using open-ended narrative interviews. The data were analysed in accordance with data-driven qualitative analysis methods. From the teachers' accounts, three main orientations towards the reform were identified: a resistant orientation, an inconsistent orientation and an approving orientation, each based on the teachers' individual self-positioning towards the reform. Each orientation is illustrated using two narratives. The findings demonstrated that the teachers' orientations were shaped by their individual backgrounds, including their actual sense of their professional selves, their prior working experiences and their expectations of their professional future. In addition, the teachers' orientations were shaped by their social affordances, and first and foremost by the practices and traditions of the vocational study programmes.