Socio-cultural contexts of the musician-teacher’s professional identity development

Abstract

The interrelation between professional identity, instructional conceptions and socio-cultural contexts in teachers’ lives is explored. Harmonic correspondence between teachers’ professional identity and her working and professional activity in music education is necessary in order to develop good educational practices. This relation is affected by different kinds of socio-cultural contexts, as family, school, initial professional education, and the entrance into the professional and working field. Construction of conceptions on their own teaching action develops in relation to those contexts, and they configure at the same time the way how the teacher tells her narrative on herself as a professional in music education, that is, her professional identity. This research bases on the complexity paradigm, and assumes a qualitative methodology involving 16 biographical in-depth interviews. The selected sample is intentionally heterogeneous in terms of contexts, identities and conceptions. Results show that contexts introduce differences in teachers’ instructional conceptions corresponding to nuances in the types of identity; but they are not relevant and do not transform professional identity, which appears to be the own re-elaboration of each teacher, some times going with and some others against the context teachers are experiencing.