Despite extensive research about the value and features of dialogic teaching and learning (Vrikki et al., 2019), predominantly monologic interactions continue to persist in primary classrooms in the UK. The complexities of dialogic approaches are well-documented, from the difficulties of the fluid and transient nature of spoken language (Bearne and Reedy, 2018) to the shifts in power dynamics that such an approach demands (Thompson, 2007). However, the role of dialogue seems to be benefiting from a renewed focus, with current educational policy instructing pre-service teachers to both support effective dialogue within the classroom and engage in reflective dialogic learning themselves (DfE, 2013; 2019). With limited progress in this area of practice and professional development (Vrikki et al., 2019), teaching practices seem to resist fundamental and shifts towards dialogic teaching; this study asks why this might be.

In the context of dialogic education, prior research has often focused on dialogic interactions as a pedagogical approach. However, research which has moved beyond an interactional form in considering classroom dialogue suggests that teachers’ dialogic stance, identity, and sociocultural and socio-historical expectations of professional identity may offer insight for understanding why monologic patterns persist (Sherry et al., 2019). Furthermore, whilst attitudes and beliefs are seen as highly influential in the development of dialogic approaches, understanding how personal and professional dialogic experiences relate to pre-service teachers’ professional identities, learning, and practice is a significantly under-researched area (Groschner et al., 2020). Although research has considered the role of teacher identity in relation to reading and writing, there is a gap in research seeking to understand how teachers’ identities might either constrain or enable dialogic practices within the classroom. Indeed, Hofmann (2020) highlights the need for research which understands professional development as a sociocultural process and the role of teachers’ own learning experiences within this, in order to consider the range of complex challenges inherent in realising the benefits of a dialogic approach.

Whilst there has been a significant increase in interest in teacher identity within educational research and teacher education, there is a continuing lack of clarity around what we mean by this (Solari and Ortega, 2022) which presents a key challenge in understanding its influence on teachers’ learning and professional roles. Teachers’ professional identity can be seen as shaped by their past experiences and as a key motivating and orienting factor in their actions and beliefs about practice; yet there is a lack of knowledge about the dynamics of identity construction within teacher education (Henry, 2019). Hsieh (2015) usefully articulates these dynamics as “how teachers’ orientations in relation to the intersection of multiple competing discourse (internal and external) play out in their establishment of identities as professionals and in their professional practices” (p.179). By applying a dialogic lens to pre-service teachers’ professional identity construction, this study seeks to recognise this ongoing, dynamic interplay as distinct from the functions and procedures of the professional role. Furthermore, it is not simply a process of change and adaptation but is wrought with potential conflicts and tensions (Henry and Mollstedt, 2022), one in which core beliefs continue to be shaped and changed through experience (Wyk, 2011). Through this lens, the study aims to explore how past dialogic experiences and the ways in which pre-service teachers position themselves in relation to dialogue, influence their navigation of dialogic spaces and possibilities within their teaching practices and professional roles.

This emerging doctoral study conceptualises teacher identity as dialogic in that it is: multi-voiced; engaged in an ongoing, dynamic process of dialogic negotiation, internally between I-positions and externally in relationships with others; socially, culturally and historically situated; and constructed over time in different places and spaces. This conceptualisation suggests that navigating the dialogic possibilities of teaching is a complex and intersectional negotiation of personal and professional discourse and experience; an ongoing ‘journey’ where dialogic identities shape and are shaped by a dynamic negotiation between self and other within the dialogic spaces of professional roles. These sites of negotiation require teachers to navigate not only the multiplicity of voices within their own dialogic identities, but the historically, socially, and culturally shaped contexts within which they teach. In seeking to understand the landscapes where pre-service teachers’ identity construction takes place, this study aims to take a creative methodological approach. Within the temporal limits of the doctorate, a longitudinal case study design offers the opportunity to combine different methods and a “kaleidoscopic approach” (Solari and Ortega, 2022, p.645) to analysis through a range of discursive forms - or a multiplicity of voices. Inspired by Swaaij and Klare’s The Atlas of Experience, a visual mapping approach is proposed as a rich and illuminating way to visualise and explore the potential tensions, conflicts and congruences which may arise. Autobiographical narratives are the starting point for the visual mapping, reflecting the storytelling and performance metaphors which - like that of landscapes - feature significantly in literature concerning dialogic conceptualisations of identity. Reflective autobiographical narratives offer possibilities for understanding experiences of conflict between voiced positions, the internal dialogue of identity construction, and the identity shifts which are revealed through this dialogue (Henry and Mollstedt, 2022). Framed by both the past and the present, entwined with our relationships with others and other voices within our sense of self (Rosen, 2017), autobiographical narratives are seen as articulations of the teacher self in the past, present, and future (Henry, 2019). The study also seeks to centralise pre-service teachers’ voices, recognise different contexts of negotiated meaning-making, and provide collaborative opportunities to co-construct local models of identity. Consequently, socially situated, dialogic spaces for pre-service teachers’ narration of their own stories and experiences will be provided through interviews and participatory focus groups.

Whilst the concept of dialogic identity within research on teachers’ identity construction is a relatively new area, the principles of the self as a multiplicity of voices, situated and relational in nature, and engaged in an ongoing, dynamic process of change, offer rich possibilities for understanding the complex and often challenging experience of “becoming someone who teaches” (Henry, 2019, p.269). This study seeks to challenge the apparent narrow focus and conceptualisation of dialogic teaching and dialogic interactions as a pedagogical approach. Applying a dialogic lens suggests that classroom dialogic interactions are fundamentally linked with pupils’ and teachers’ identities. Thus, dialogue mediates both the construction of self and wider culture of society (Alexander, 2008), and identity is socially co-constructed through classroom discourse which both shapes and is shaped by teachers’ personal and professional conceptions of self (Sherry et al., 2019). Conceptualising pre-service teachers’ identities as dialogic and the landscapes of their identity construction as sites of negotiated meanings, suggests that whilst their beliefs about the value and possibilities of dialogue may initially shape their pedagogical approaches, these beliefs will themselves be shaped by the dialogic – or indeed, monologic – practices they experience. It provides a clear link between identity and pedagogy, but also conceptualises teachers as agentic within the process of identity construction: they are not passively responding to discourse but are active in their navigation of them. Autobiographical narratives and visual mapping are proposed as a means by which to understand the situated and relational nature of teachers’ identity construction. In this way, personal and professional dialogic experiences are situated in a broader understanding of the multiple layers of personal and professional discourse; identity is seen not as a ‘finished product’ but as an ongoing process of construction situated within this landscape.

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