Professional identity matters: Agency, emotions, and resilience

Abstract

Schools in many countries have been subject to a continuing series of externally-initiated reforms over the last two decades. These reforms are widely reported to have resulted in increased bureaucracy, scope and intensity of work, external surveillance, and changes in the nature of teachers’ professional orientation to work, which consequently challenged existing professional identities to comply with ‘performativity’ agendas. Given the challenges and pressure to respond to these increasingly functionalist expectations and demands, in this chapter, I examine associations between teachers’ agency, emotional wellbeing, working contexts, and resilience, as key components of their sense of professional identity, professionalism, and perceived effectiveness.