Teacher Identity

Project introduction and background information

A recent, global study undertaken by Ruth Graham, has provided invaluable insights into the implementation and recognition of teaching as a central pillar of academic life (Graham 2025). One of the key challenges of rewarding and recognizing teaching fairly has to do with evidencing teaching progress. Graham notes this as one of the most pertinent challenges towards a more teaching inclusive academic culture: “How to evaluate impact in university teaching in ways that are robust, transparent and applicable across disciplines, academic profiles, and career stages? The majority of interviewees pointed to weaknesses in how university teaching was defined and/or evaluated at their institutions, often suggesting that these issues have contributed to ‘a devaluing of teaching in the whole tenure and promotion process’. Feedback focused on three stages of this process: a) how standards in university teaching are defined. […]  b) how impact and achievement are demonstrated. Interviewees pointed to an overreliance on crude or proxy measures of impact, like student surveys, which undermine and devalue career progression on the basis of university teaching. […] c) how universities assess candidates during appointment and promotion.” (Graham 2025, p. 9).

This begs the question: How can supervisors judge the growth or progression of a university teacher so as to warrant promotion in the first place to take the next steps in an academic career? Since the equivalent of published articles and receiving funding is largely absent (or at least the opportunities diminished) for those who focus their careers on teaching and learning in higher education, how can they monitor and display the growth they have made in their respective roles/positions as a university teacher? Based on current 4TU policies (see TUD/WUR/UT/TUe Academic Career Track policies), teaching focused tenure tracker promotions are usually translated into growing responsibilities in terms of management and coordination of programs and courses with each promotional step – but also growing educational skills: While Assistant Professors (UD1 and UD2) and Lecturers (2, 3, and 4) teach classes, give lecture and hold tutorials, Associate and Full Professors and Lecturers 1 are put in charge of Bachelor and Master Programs and other leadership positions.

Instead, Graham suggests that teachers need to practice “to present […] evidence in a way that best helps them to build a coherent narrative about their distinctive interests, activities, and impact in university teaching.” (Graham p. 23) In line with this suggestion, and as argued in more detail in a recent publication (Kusters, Sand, Rietdijk 2024), the concept of “teacher identity” might provide the conceptual basis to answer some of the aforementioned questions (van Lankveld, Schoonenboom, Kusurkar, et al., 2016; van Lankveld et al., 2017; van Lankveld, Schoonenboom, Volman, et al., 2016). As Beauchamp and Thomas put it, teacher identities are “[...] the narratives that teachers create to explain themselves and their teaching lives”. These narratives change over time – they contain and refer to the varying levels of confidence in one’s capabilities, insights into one’s strength and weaknesses as a teacher and the social embeddedness within one’s institution. Taken together, the identity narrative represents a level or degree of reflexivity through which, prima facie, one could assume that growths and progression as a university teacher would manifest itself. Even more so, insights into one’s teacher identity could help teachers making more informed decisions about their trajectory, their preferences as teachers, which skills or traits to improve and which to maintain. In this way, teacher identities can become “an important organizing element in teacher’s lives to legitimize and justify oneself” (Beauchamp & Thomas, 2009). Moreover, those narratives might also enable supervisors and external assessors to better evaluate and monitor their development – and take these into account in promotion decisions.

Objective and expected outcomes

The present project is directed at educators. It aims to:

- Develop a workshop format that gives space and guidance for educators to create an identity narrative that can be displayed and shown in R&O meetings or on funding applications.

- Pilot several of those workshops at TU Delft with educators and educational managers.

- Collect some feedback on the quality of such interventions and their need.

- Develop a network of scholars interested in the concept "teacher identity" and the prospect of practical intervention to improve the professionalization of education in academia