Teachers’ Professional Identities in an Era of Testing Accountability in Japan: The Case of Teachers in Low-Performing Schools

Abstract

This paper presents tentative findings and discussions arising from an ongoing study on whether and how Japanese teachers’ professional identities have shifted in the context of heightened testing accountability. After a brief description of policy development that led to the introduction of national testing in 2007, previous studies of teacher identity are reviewed. Having explored some ambiguity in the existent theories regarding the trajectories and consequences of identity work, the paper goes on to report and to analyse the cases of six teachers from three low-performing elementary schools in a northern Japanese administrative region. With the limited size and scope of the sample, the present research cannot claim generalisability, but it can still raise a number of theoretical issues for further investigation, such as the precariousness of teachers’ strategies for sustaining their professional identities and the need for locating teachers’ identity work in the micropolitics of schools.