The Influence of Educational Reform on Teachers' Professional Identities: an Exploratory Study of Five Junior High School Teachers

New educational reform initiatives emerge very often. While the professional autonomy and development of teachers are advocated and emphasized, the question of how teachers understand their profession has rarely been raised. This study aims to inquire into how educational reform influences teachers' professional identities. Based on talks with five junior high school teachers with 10 or more years of service, this study found that teachers constantly shape, deconstruct and reconstruct their professional identities in part because educational reforms repeatedly redefine the teaching profession, including its content, form and "audience." This finding concurs with the contemporary view of identity, which sees identity as not a combination of individual characteristics but as an on-going process of social construction. It is noteworthy, however, that identity has consistency in addition to mobility, complexity and even self-contradictoriness. Many researchers have pointed out that people strive throughout their life for consistent characters, and teachers prove to be no exception. Based on the research results, the author further discusses the subjects and the method ology of this study, and makes some suggestions for the improvement of educational practice and for future research.