The Interaction between Professional and Social Identity of Greek Primary School Educators

Abstract

This article examines the interaction between Professional and Social Identity of Greek Primary School Educators. The composition of teacher population in Greek Primary Education is peculiar, as it mainly consists of primary teachers and a smaller number of specialty teachers, who teach foreign languages, physical education, music, visual arts and information technologies. A primary qualitative research was conducted by telephone interviews to 14 established, 8 new and 9 candidate school directors and 12 teachers from the 13 educational regions, while the validity and reliability of the research was ensured through theoretical triangulation and triangulation of data sources, as the participants' roles, specialties and age vary. According to the research findings, primary education consists of teachers’ subcategories with different Professional and Social Identity, which are structured mainly on the basis of specialty, seniority and hierarchy. These Identities are not equivalent, but hierarchical, resulting in the reproduction of intergroup discriminations, social stereotypes and social competition due to the existence of dominant and dominated subcategories. The innovation of this article lies in that it brings forth existing social correlations in the context of primary education, which inevitably affect the content of the Professional and Social Identity of educators.