Abstract
Teacher identity is a complex and non-linear evolution involving knowledge, skill, formation, transformation, and scrutiny of what one is doing and who one can become. This phenomenological investigation studied the views of 12 early career instrumental music teachers working professionally in Melbourne, Australia. Utilising possible selves theory, interpretative phenomenological analysis revealed anxieties and stresses of novice teacher experiences, the measuring up and barrier breaking of professional models and relations, and evolving possible selves from past and present experiential encounters. Current identity perceptions shaped future goals that were crafted through an agentic reality in which music teachers reconciled their training, and apriori experiences with their existential positioning in the field. Participants oscillated between knowledge, values, attitudes, and learning experiences, reflecting on past and current experiential episodes and events and how these shape trajectories and provide a future vision of professional role and status. Findings suggest teacher identity as a dynamic, holistic interaction mediated across facets including prior experiences, schooling, ones’ teacher education experience, professional experience and current teaching contexts, and career plans and imagined trajectories. Implications are proposed for music teacher education, quality collaborations between school and employment destinations and teacher training that prepares for the complex secondary education field.
The development of instrumental music teacher identity remains a complex evolutionary process that incorporates aspects of learning, experience, and context. Teacher identity continues to provide a focal point to much theoretical and empirical investigation in teacher education that involves the legitimating, sustaining, and understanding the self as teacher through growth and reflection (Hargreaves et al., 2017; Southcott & de Bruin, 2022; Trent, 2010). Teacher identity manifests through evolving knowledge, skill, and professional stature involving ‘formation and transformation, scrutiny of what one is doing and who one can become’ (Britzman, 2003, p. 31). Identity can forge new ways forward or reify old ones, with Southcott and de Bruin (2022, p. 2) positing that ‘the embodied instrument-learning self can be a site of multiple ways of engaging, including growth, resistance, and subterfuge’ in the evolving teacher.
Identity can be understood as the ‘attributes, values, motives and experiences in terms of which people define themselves in a professional role’ (Ibarra, 1999, p. 764). This study utilises the transforming implication of this definition, involving ‘self, thought of as the meaning maker, and identity as the meaning made, even as the self and identity evolve and transform over time’ (Lauriala & Kukkonen, 2005, p. 200). As a concept, identity combines the personal world with social relations and cultural forms, and the psycho-historical formations that develop in training over the lifespan (Bourdieu, 1991; Heidegger, 1927/1997; Vygotsky, 1978). This involves meaning-making through social relations and concomitant self-direction within these relations of power and potentialities for liberation from such forces as they ‘spread over the material and social environment’ (Holland et al., 1998, p. 4).
Identity research has applied a range of investigations involving general musician contexts (Burland et al., 2022), personality (MacDonald & Saarikallio, 2022), young musicians (O’Neill, 2002), the digital musician (Partti, 2014), primary school children (Goopy, 2023), studio singing teachers (Forbes et al., 2024) as well as the occupational precarity of classical musicians (López-Íñiguez et al., 2022). Research has explored tensions between musician and teacher identity (Pellegrino, 2009; Triantafyllaki, 2010), leadership of professional musicians (Rowley et al., 2016), and positivity garnered from identity formation and capacity to affect positive change upon others (Parkes & Jones, 2011). Acknowledging the composite capacity of careers in music, much has been said about musicians’ portfolio or protean careers (Bartleet et al., 2012) and the transitions across boundaries and borders in performance-oriented music careers (Canham, 2023). Aspects of music performer to music teacher identity change reveals competing and complex challenges concerning the occupational role of professional identity (Roberts, 2007; Teachout & McKoy, 2009), the impress of collective socialisation from peers (Austin et al., 2012), senses of membership (Froehlich, 2007), community (Wenger, 1998), and socialisation within the teaching fraternity (Evans & McPherson, 2015). From an instrumental/studio music teaching perspective, these facets can be very different to other teaching domains (de Bruin, 2023a).
Identity evolution involves cognitive engagements that highlight the multidimensional and elemental forces of embodiment, embeddedness, interaction, and enactment (Newen et al., 2018). This phenomenological investigation is concerned with the evolving and developmental thoughts of early career instrumental music teachers with three or less years professional experience and how they mediate their training, peers, teaching environments, and self-expectations in professional practice. Understanding is attentive to and reflective of the world around the participant (Munhall, 2007). The study considers the early career self-actualisation of becoming, as teachers reflected on their development and evolving possible selves as teacher. At a time of increasing marginalisation of this workforce, teacher experiences and perceptions of their future hold significant interest.
Approaches to understanding teacher identity
Literature on teacher identity has investigated numerous connections and measurements across variables such as personality, workplaces, and social structures, utilising constructs such as self-efficacy, job commitment, satisfaction, motivation, and change (Bandura, 2006; Day & Gu, 2007; Huberman, 1993; Russell, 2012). Approaches include social psychology (Marcia, 2002), self-determination theory (Evans & McPherson, 2015), attribution theory (Asmus, 1994), identity measurement scales (Wagoner, 2015), life span modelling and psycho-social development (Erikson, 1950), and fixed competency and incremental self-belief and adaptivity (Dweck, 2006) that may operate within fixed exosystems (Bronfenbrenner, 1993). However, McPherson et al. (2012) emphasise a provisionality, highlighting complexities of transitions and pathways, and the ways these may be described and experienced as trajectories.
Recent musician identity formation (Beech, 2022; Musgrave, 2023) involves the dynamic, performed, and embodied senses of identity, and the personal experiences that shape how we relate to the world of instrumental music teaching and education more widely (Baker & MacDonald, 2017). This may consider people as products of their social histories and through applying socio-cultural phenomenological underpinnings allows for investigation beyond dominant culturalist approaches to understand peoples’ actions and possibilities.
Assembled from stored details such as particular locations, persons, and events (Schacter & Addis, 2007), reflection on ones’ identity orientation can give rise to vivid subjective memories and perceptions. Accompanied by cognitive feelings that Tulving (2005) terms as autonoetic consciousness, such psychological phenomena can produce episodic possibility thinking of a future self. Situated and experiential encounters move us from one subjectivity to the next, continually adjusting facets and emergent self-understandings of our identity. Possible-self research has investigated perceptions of ones’ future; that is, ‘selves that we would very much like to become’, ‘selves we could become’, and ‘selves we are afraid of becoming’ (Markus & Nurius, 1986, p. 954). Musical possible selves are performative and social (MacDonald et al., 2017) and resonate from the collective and interactive self-stories of our past, present, and future musical identities (Freer, 2010; Powell, 2017). Engaging a dynamic self-system possible-self theory identifies a future-oriented representation of the self that relies on a context for interpreting, evaluating, and acting on current and past selves. Implications point towards motivation, self-regulation, planning, in the moment monitoring, and reflection on actions (McPherson, 2022) that can facilitate self-enhancement through behavioural strategies and sustainable actions. Of significance is the intuitive relevance of comparing past to present self (Oyserman, Destin & Novin, 2015), the reasoning between selves revealed through vividness of current self-perception and future self (Landau, 2017), and the actual volition to committing to a pathway approach to improvement (Landau et al., 2014).
Initial teacher education and novice teachers
Students come to initial formal teacher education with a wealth of personal and experiential knowledge about teachers, storing experiences of teacher models as they shape their own approach to teaching practice (Dolloff, 2007). Creech et al. (2020) discuss various contexts in which musical selves may emerge, with Knowles (1992) suggesting that beginning teachers develop as experiences become an internalised ‘teacher role identity’ (p. 131) involving socialisation and apprenticeship within the profession (Lortie, 1975). Apprenticeship extends beyond a sustained arrangement of learning an art or trade, with de Bruin (2018a) acknowledging a cognitive, experientially relational and sustained crafting of real-world skills, thinking, and pedagogic strategising (de Bruin, 2018b, 2018c). Relationships underpinning teacher identity and student learning have also been linked across the elements of self-awareness, connection to students, connection to subject matter, pedagogical knowledge (de Bruin, 2018d; Rodgers & Raider-Roth, 2006), and senses of professional mission (Meijer, 2017) that for the novice teacher initiate concepts of career aims, goals, and desires.
Transformative change trajectories can be initiated through initial teacher education (ITE) experiences. This can involve the formulating and expressing of personal identity politics (Hess, 2018), and a propensity to evolve from past experiences (Taylor & Cranton, 2013). Ballantyne and Retell (2020) assert that mid-career and more experienced music teachers seem to maintain similar levels of self-efficacy, whereas early career teachers suffer a praxis shock of discrepancy between expectation and realities of professional life. The elusive notion of flourishing by Ballantyne and Zhukov (2017) points to the aligning of engagement, relationships, meaning, achievements, and the generative, positive emotions that influence evolving teacher identity development. This study asserts that identity involves personal trajectories with peers, supervisors, and teachers, that connect past, present, and imagined future experiences as the beginning teacher derives meaning and senses of professional person, purpose, and presentation of self to others (Berzonski, 2011).
Beginning career teachers struggle moving from theory to practice (Cleaver & Ballantyne, 2014; de Bruin, 2023b) with some valuing music skills over teaching (Sogin & Wang, 2002). Others rank teaching skills over musical skills, and rate personality characteristics highly (Teachout, 1997). A significant affordance to novice teacher identity lays in those practices and approaches absorbed from their own teachers (Cranston-Gingras et al., 2019). A further pressure is one of expectation from the very school communities in which novice teachers first begin their professional involvement (Marco-Bujosa et al., 2020). Teacher traits and values may be modelled early (Erikson, 1950), as novice teachers navigate a cognitive and embodied structuring that serves as a personal frame of reference to interpreting and owning that experience (Saarikallio, 2017), developing self-concept (McClellan, 2014), and belonging through professional friendships (Selfhout et al., 2009) and peer affiliations (Guyer et al., 2016). Cognitive structuring of this kind implicates our meaning-making as a systemic property of mind referencing our inferential and imaginative meaning-making over embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended experiential formations (Rowlands, 2010).
Approach to the study
A major proportion of research captures snapshot evidence of where teachers are ‘now’. What is under-researched are perceptions and reflections on growth, development, and evolution as a becoming teacher. This threads the reconciling of formative learning experiences of students that influence their concepts of self as teacher as they train and then enter the workforce. This includes developing attributes of teacher work, socialisation, enculturation (Feiman-Nemser, 2003), balancing the micropolitics of music education (Conway & Hibbard, 2018), relationships with mentors (Flynn et al., 2022), and the influence of interactions with wider environmental and professional operating contexts.
This study accounts for the cognitive, bodily, and environmental factors of interaction marking not just who we are but the transformative dimensions of who we are becoming. Utilising phenomenological data gathering techniques such as exploring sensory-perceptual qualities and cognitive feelings can reveal personal thoughts and lifeworld experiences of identity in teaching, as well as ones’ episodic future thoughts (D’Argembeau & Van der Linden, 2012).
Olsen’s (2016) teacher identity theory offers an appropriate lens to utilising interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to exploring teacher identity. This involves ‘the active process of using personal and professional, past and present influences to enact one’s teaching and teacher learning’ (Olsen, 2016, p. 33). It also approaches teacher identity as a dynamic, holistic interaction that is mediated across numerous facets that include prior experiences and schooling, reasons to become a teacher, ones’ teacher education experience, professional experience, the current teaching context of practice, and career plans and imagined trajectories. Considering this range of teacher perspectives, practices, and future self-concepts, and how these relate to self-motivation for present and future actions, can inform of deeply reflective judgements on behaviours that shape and regulate target outcomes and motivations (Erikson, 2007).
The study explored reflections of learning and teaching experiences, and the meaning-making and identity formation of early career instrumental music educators. The research questions guiding this examination are:
How did participants describe their identity as a music teacher?
What music educator qualities and values do participants hope to develop?
What practical, social, and environmental experiences most greatly affect senses of identity as an instrumental music teacher?
Phenomenologically, the study seeks to capture adaptive responses that organise participants’ cognitive, judgemental, experiential, and behavioural reactions to their being in the profession. Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 449) refers to this apperception as an existential ‘grip’ on reality – their evolving and adjusting teacher ‘grip on the world’. This term envisions the body as the fabric through which events are woven, that acts in flow and manifestation of how participants understand and engage with their musically informed reality and sense-making. Our hold on awareness is constantly releasing and re-grasping with our newfound senses of understanding of self, profession, and our place in it.
Methodology
IPA gives researchers the best opportunity to understand the innermost deliberation of the ‘lived experiences’ of research participants. It offers an ‘examination of how people make sense of their major life experiences’ (Smith et al., 2009/2022, p. 1). This involves a hermeneutic rendering on the part of the researcher as they bracket assumptions and distil themes to essences of experience (Husserl, 1931). Bracketing in the analysis process is the ‘setting aside [of] our prejudgments, biases, and preconceived ideas about things’ (Moustakas, 1994, p. 85). Working in tandem with the epoché involves the cognitive oscillation between understanding, comprehending, interpreting, but not presuming subjective experience throughout the entire research process (de Bruin, 2021).
Participants
A purposeful sampling strategy was used where all participants had completed a specialist instrumental/vocal ITE training Master’s degree programme in Victoria, Australia. All 11 participants had previously completed a Bachelor of Music degree in performance and had completed 24 days specialist pre-service placements with three mentor instrumental teachers. ITE offered diverse performance, pedagogic knowledge, and practicum teaching experiences to the participants who are now teaching professionally as instrumental music teachers in secondary schools in Melbourne, Australia. Pseudonyms are used throughout.
Ethical approval was gained and participants engaged in semi-formal interviews, which were audio recorded and transcribed (see Table 1 for participant manifest). This involved questioning (1) educative teacher experiences, (2) current context of teaching work, (3) prior professional experience, (4) prior learning experiences, and (5) career orientations as a means of gathering experiential ‘accounts of the participants past, present, and future’ (Olsen, 2008, p. 240). Interviews commenced with initial research questions, the discussion tailored to each participant’s experience to allow for self-reflection focusing on description and explanation of the phenomenon. The interview protocol focused on uncovering professional histories, teacher education experiences, past and current work in instrumental music education, perspectives to teaching and their school culture, and future career plans. This inductive approach also asked participants to reflect on various learning and teaching artefacts and documents including teaching philosophies they may have crafted in their teacher education programme.
Participants’ Primary Instruments and Teaching Experience.
Analysis
A five-step approach (Creswell, 2013/2014) to analysis was utilised as follows: (1) Reading and journaling of information to develop a sense of the data. (2) The establishment of themes and categorisations to participant responses. (3) The grouping of emerging themes together into general dimensions and placed into a ‘consensus chart’ revealing distinctive categories. The significant representative themes, events, and feelings that collectively describe, illustrate, and illuminate expressed ideas and maintain the essence of the phenomenon for the individual were extracted and gathered into meaning units or statements that relate to ‘core essence’ (Graneheim and Lundman, 2004). (4) The further extrapolating the core essence in a few tangible words. (5) The reduction and representation of these in three major themes. A strategy of focusing on inductive rather than inductively interpreted data maintained a rigorous approach to identifying bias and bracketing (epoché) in the findings (de Bruin, 2021). IPA research mechanisms (trustworthiness, member-checking, triangulation, and auditing) were utilised in addition to the analysis process with an independent researcher who also coded the transcripts independently to maintain rigour and trustworthiness. Participants reflected on formative learning and teaching experiences, mentor teachers, earlier placement experiences, the current professional environment and emerging relations within the music department, music ecologies, and social politic within the school.
Findings
Three overarching themes emerged from the data analysis and these were used as the deductive basis for providing a structure for reporting the findings. These three themes are; anxieties of theory–practice application, professional models and relations, and possible selves as music teacher. These span the participants’ teacher identity development, the application of pedagogic knowledge, perception of self, professional perspectives, and career goal orientations.
Anxieties of theory–practice application
Early career teachers traverse through diverse roles of both active performer and burgeoning career teacher. Some raised aspects of conflict between their own experiences as a learner and what they had assumed was effective teaching, and what was raised in teacher training programmes. Participants discussed thoughts and reflections on wanting to be ‘good’ ‘effective’, ‘efficient’, meeting the standards of an expert demonstrator of knowledge, as the mental ideal they perceived in their minds. This included dilemmas of teacher- (didactic) and student-centred (more relational) approaches, assessment, and control of the learning direction in the lesson. The majority of participants were able to describe a teacher-oriented perspective of self from a self-critical and negative perception of self:
I feel anxious and down on myself more than any positive thoughts. It’s like the negative talk I had in my first year is back and haunting my teaching.
I feel quite frustrated in not being able to explain what I mean in a way that a 12-year-old can take on – I struggle to find the words I need in the moment.
I still get bogged down in the minutiae of technical advice – It’s something my teacher did too, I seem to copy that fixation with technique and drill, at the expense of engagement – I need to be more holistic in my approach.
My pacing of lessons and achieving what I plan to do in the lesson still needs developing . . . having the clarity of explanations and being convincing; at times I feel like a fraud.
Some found teaching a cathartic experience and a turning point in life that contributed to music teacher identity by being now able to refute the teacher-centred, ‘authoritarian’ approach she experienced:
I had horrible teachers at school, that really modelled things I don’t ever want to do or condone with students. I’m so glad I can teach in ways that can positively influence students and make the studio a happy place to be in.
I feel like I’m trying and failing, but I’m optimistic I will come through this a better teacher. Each week I see a better version of myself emerging and that galvanises my spirit.
ITE provides the tools from which to continue to reflect on practice and develop from experience. These initial forays into teaching highlighted the distance between theory and practice, and working at the coalface in authentic teaching encounters. Teaching brought about an existential realisation of the goal-oriented perception of self and what they hope to be, balanced against the reality of their current shortcomings. These beginning teachers’ professional perspectives underline how training is an important but constituent aspect in shaping the teacher. The participants grappled with feelings of disappointment and frustration, navigating from initial experiences of motivation and desire to get better, and their ultimate concept of self. Part of this is perhaps a sense of novice teacher naivete as they find their stride and teacher personality or ‘face’, mediating authoritarian and controlling approaches, and more empathic, student-centred and relational approaches.
Professional models and relations
Whilst the emphasis on role modelling and experiential learning can be linked to the apprenticeship model of instrumental studio instruction, students critically evaluate that what may work for an experienced teacher may not work for them. Solemnly delivered, sage advice from a veteran teacher may well be lost in translation emanating from a 20-something novice teacher. Identifying traits, skills, and approaches from expert teachers need to be moderated with novice teachers’ sense of self and how they see themselves as teacher in their mind (Bruner, 1995). The relationship between instrumental teaching models and the development of early-career professional approaches and identity-forming experiences are complex. They also present at times confronting issues of personal approaches, strengths, and challenges as they reconcile the culture of more senior teachers and colleagues and the music department, with their own teaching philosophy. These participants reflected on experiences:
I was initially told what to teach, and how to teach it. I felt my training and skills totally undermined. It wasn’t until word got back that some of the more ‘difficult’ students flourished in my lessons that I was given ‘license’ to be adaptive – but that’s how I’ve been trained. I think the Head (of Music) is happy with me.
The other teachers approached voice teaching one specific way with a rather dogmatic and narrow approach to repertoire. I’ve sometimes got to be careful about what I say to other teachers about my approaches
The older teachers seem to be resistant to allowing others to watch their work. It seemed very hidden and cloaked. They were happy to discuss, but not display it by allowing observation.
School placements provide students with opportunity of putting theory into practice, but many novice teachers remain avid learners of this specialised craft and context, seeking expertise and wisdom from thoughtful elders.
My model for teaching is my teacher who acknowledged and taught to my differences. I’m the only instrumental teacher in school on my day, but I have a network of friends and teachers. I gather advice from many – it takes a village to raise a music teacher!
As is the case with Kim, what may bring people to the profession may be due to the strong learning relationship that they had with their secondary school teachers. As Kate implies, this may be far removed from what they experience in their current employment environment. Professional music teacher identity is shaped by socialisation within the professional community, the institutions that shape their practice during their careers, and the music teachers that taught them (McCarthy, 2007). Professional relations also cultivate a sense of belonging within a community and contribute to teacher identity development and growth. Kim described the influence of her learning experiences and teacher influence, but also her adaptation to an isolated workplace, seeking advice from more experienced professionals. Yuga’s reflection on leadership feedback reflects an ecological dynamic and the role positive and negative feeling from experiences affect self-confidence. It highlights how, if strategically applied, peer and student feedback such as praise and happiness can propel ones’ trajectory.
Initial teaching experiences within a veteran enclave may be daunting and complicated. A strong ‘self’ can create positive energies and beliefs taken forward. This may occur between colleagues in a music department or with mentors. Hallam (2002) suggests that social approval from those that we admire and respect motivates our setting of goals that determine our behaviour with others, and the enhancement of our self-esteem. The novice music teacher undergoes a cognitive oscillation as their expectation of themselves is tallied up against the professional norms and expectations they expect to deliver.
Possible selves as music teacher
Both positive and negative forces play upon ones’ perception of self now, the distance travelled from previous concepts of self, and the clarity of future perceptions of self. Various situational circumstances afford such changes ranging from encouragement to disillusionment propelled by contextual cultural attitudes, teacher agency, and autonomy in the workplace. Participants revealed the mediating propensity of conceiving self, where they have come from, and what they may become, and that this journey was perceived through feelings of confidence, ambition, and circumstance.
I want to care about learners, and my teaching and mentoring experiences give me confidence to fulfill this. – I know how music changed my life and I want to facilitate that for others. It’s a core of who I am. I feel confident in my teaching and what I will pass onto my students.
My teacher training made me confront the overbearing teacher that taught me. I revert to things that were inflicted on me and I’m trying to be a better teacher, I’m resisting those kinds of reflexes and being more empathic and connected.
I’m travelling three days to different schools, I feel unsupported and used, in schools that don’t care, it’s an uphill battle – it’s not what I imagined, I might move to something else.
I felt humiliated as a young student and had to do everything that was instructed without question. My teaching environment and circumstance has allowed me to wash that experience off me – I see myself as a teacher that can bring joy to others.
I initially wanted to be like my high school teacher. She was wonderful, wise, and generous. I feel empowered to do that. I realise my own ambitions, I see myself as a head of department, as a coordinator. Music seems to be at the behest of other peoples’ decision-making, and I’m motivated to want to be at the centre of that process at this school.
I’ve transitioned from performer to now being the best teacher I can be. I love performance but it’s layered in a hopelessness of waiting for performing opportunities. The social and interactive qualities of teaching are immediately fulfilling. It’s a life choice I’m glad I made.
Each of the six cases remarked on here offers characteristics asserting a place in the teaching profession, and how a sense of self, trajectory from past experiences, and impact of experiences and circumstance influences perceived constructs and capabilities of their future selves. We can phenomenologically deduce that when the future self shares similarities with the present self, there is a positivity and attributional impetus to becoming that future self. Furthermore, as in the case of Pam and Martina, when self-concept is viewed in positive, vivid, and realistic terms, young teachers are willing to make choices today that may benefit this impetus towards their future self in the years to come. For Sonny, the change in self-perception from performer to teacher was both emancipatory and revelatory.
It can be understood that there is a reciprocal nature in the relationship between participants’ construal level of present self, and the perceived psychological distance to future self. It follows that self-view associates with temporal perspectives, in that more abstract representations of a future event or behaviour elicit more temporally distant constructs of a possible desired future self. The study raises further questions of how circumstance and opportunity to work in supportive ‘trajectory laden’ workplaces may apply positive influence on present and then future selves, and the intertemporal choices that are affected by self-continuity towards reification of possible future self. Positive, affirming circumstances can further influence the rate at which mental time can influence the way they view themselves.
Discussion
Asking participants to consider the teacher they will become provides powerful phenomenological insights to teachers’ senses of self and the impact of influences on professional aspirations. It involves mediating between their training, current employment circumstances, and what they are doing to crystalise future goals. Participant responses actualised their concept of self as they constructed and distinguished the characteristics of the music teacher they hoped to become. A by-product of the questioning process was a revealing of personal goal orientations and a rising to the surface of the difference between the participants’ actual and ideal self-concept (Dolloff, 2007). Goal and career orientation for some participants reflects an existential rationalising of how their teaching represents an active, dynamic, embodied, and situated concept of self.
Participants revealed glimpses of an imagined future to be attained in which teaching goals were realised, their career plans met, their sense of professionalism in the workforce improving, and their teaching relationships with students and colleagues fulfilling. At the same time, they may fail to focus motivational attention on any one of these possible future identities. Perhaps positive future selves are motivating only when brought to mind, implying that interactions/interventions that increase salience of a positive future self will increase motivation and hence action. This is supported by social cognitive theories that assert the social, self-evaluative, and physical nature of outcome expectancies on self-efficacy, goal orientation, and behaviours towards those goals (Bandura, 2001). Some novice professionals hold a self-view in which future events are more abstract and conceived in decontextualised terms, whereas those with a more accessible and interdependent self-view tend to think of future events in more detailed, context-specific terms. Individuals whose independent self-view is dominant and have more concrete representations of future events perceive these events as happening in the more proximal future (Spassova & Lee, 2013).
The data presented offer candid insights into the thoughts music teachers consider as they analyse and reflect on their training, peers, teaching environments, and self-expectations in teaching practice. This study sought to investigate the practical, social, and environmental factors that play upon novice teachers’ sense of identity. Concurring with Trent (2010), participants experienced a legitimating, sustaining, and understanding of self as teacher through growth and experience. However, this activity is dynamic and offers competing and complex challenges of role identity (Teachout & McKoy, 2009) involving the pressures from teaching peers, music department cultures, and ones’ membership and fraternity within them (Austin et al., 2012; Froehlich, 2007). Rather than fixed identities, the study highlights the multiplicity of ways one shapes identity formation. This involves autonomy, motivation, and environment from a self-determination perspective (Evans & McPherson, 2015), but also the external and socially shared aspects that nuance growth, our experiential being in the world, and the ‘agental realism’ we construct from this (Barad, 2007, p. 132).
Music teacher identity oscillation is far more complex than a teacher/performer construct, a simplistic assimilation into the profession, and the maintaining of professional standards. Identity is professionally challenged and epistemologically intertwined in mutually constitutive ways. Even within teaching, there is a fluidity of being and becoming as we move with and against, become malleable or resistant to peers, school contexts, and cultures (Southcott & de Bruin, 2022). These factors all affect how embedded, enacted, and extended experiences and processes become embodiments actioned through our lived teaching and learning encounters.
This study revealed that early career teachers learn to identify and adjust identity conflicts as they reconcile expectations with current teaching realities, and merge understandings with their developing professional identities. The first years of music teaching may be demanding, isolating, and emotionally draining identity work that may often be negotiated with little or no help. Although the experience of conflict between goal-oriented cognitive structures can be highly motivating, positive and negative perceptions require a balance and self-regulation of these self-construction processes as they mediate the consequences of their future possible selves (Pathak & Kharshiing, 2023).
The implications for teacher education then, is to assist beginning teachers with strategies and formalised approaches to communities in supporting their life in the profession. Such initiatives may include:
Conversations about dilemmas within the contemporary landscape and the varied cultures that exist in approaches to excellence, equity, and teacher–student rapport.
Better formal collaboration between ITE providers and schools, which offer more holistic dimensions to beginning teacher enculturation within schools beyond the technical and workload-oriented accommodations, as well as with music teacher and music education support organisations.
Helping novice teachers navigate their expectations, needs, and future goals within the educational landscape that exists in their city/context. This includes the preparation for job applications, interviews with schools, and the aspirations they may have now and possibilities for the future, improving professional satisfaction and teacher retention.
Maintaining a focus on identity at the pre-service and in-service levels that allows teacher education and beginning teachers to consider self-understandings beyond protean careers, embedding development as career teachers, and the challenges associated with learning to teach, informing early career teachers that they are not alone in their experiences of identity evolution.
Conclusion
This study contributes to the literature discussing the identity development of new teachers. Participants reflected on their past and present selves to cast an idea of how they saw themselves in the future. Teacher self-concept construction, validation and development, through the experiential and situated aspect of music education adds to the complexity in which we understand the notion of ‘the nature-culture continuum or nature-cultural’ transversal of identity (Braidotti, 2019, p. 31). Focusing on the notion of identity of the recently turned professional music teacher, this study has outlined particular conceptual ideas that can operate to create progressive, informative, and cogent understandings of transformation in music teacher identity.
This study resonates with the view of practice by Clandinin and Connelly (1995) as ‘personal practical knowledge at work’ (p. 7). The participants’ readiness and ability to articulate a future vision of themselves professionally offers implications to the oeuvre of instrumental music teaching. That is, identity formation is constructed not just through teaching who we are (Palmer, 1997), but through the act of teaching as who we want to become. ITE plays a key role in aligning early career ambition with long-term self-actualisation and calibration of planned careers in music education. The application of phenomenology to consider possible selves (D’Argembeau & Van der Linden, 2012) can help research in many professions in transcending immediate circumstances. It assists in envisioning possible futures, offering insights into how motivation, self-efficacy, determination, resilience, and ambition shape identity formation.
This study has limitations, with this small sample only a singular investigation of early career music teachers within an Australian context. Future studies may investigate longitudinal aspects of teacher convictions, and how and why they may strengthen or erode, and what factors within specific contexts affect them. Social relations offer a critical role in establishing and reinforcing relationships, and how they play in our learning experiences, which may lend transformative effects to the identity work of both novice (mentee) and expert (mentor) music teachers. As positive professional identity may well be the critical predictor of a rewarding lifetime engagement with music, music educators should be supported in various ways throughout their life span. Ideation and support for music teacher identity has great value to the music education profession, informing enhanced professional development, music teacher retention, aspiration, and practice. This study may serve to ground future research on the complex dimensions of music teacher identity and the preparation and long-term sustainability of the instrumental music teaching profession.
