Supporting teachers’ professional identity development empowers teachers and helps them stay in the field longer. Although teachers’ professional identity has been studied in subject areas in the OECD countries (Suarez & McGrath, 2022), less is known regarding professional identity development of student teachers of color (Rodrigues & Mogarro, 2019). Student teachers of color’s professional identity development especially needs researchers’ attention, because both in the EU and US contexts, policymakers have been focusing on diversifying the teaching profession by recruiting teachers of migrant and/or minority background, through integrating university coursework with extended practice (Klein et al., 2016) as in the urban teacher residency program in this study, offering a “third space” in teacher education (Zeichner, 2010).

The model of teacher residencies is based on the postgraduate training in medical schools (Authors, 2017a). While the naming of the student teachers as teaching residents proclaims their teacher identity as a professional (Author, 2012); other aspects pertinent to urban teaching residents’ professional identity development are less studied. Therefore, to better support minority teachers’ professional identity development (Cong-Lem, 2022; Lantolf & Swain, 2019), this study aims to investigate how participants, who are teachers of color, construct themselves as residents of urban teaching through the lens of perezhivanie.

Grounded in the cultural-historical understanding of emotion and identity, the study draws on the Vygotskyian concept of perezhivanie to illustrate how residents’ personal histories and experiences in and expectations of the urban teacher residency program influence their reflective practices, since these are pertinent to urban teaching residents’ professional identity development. For Vygotsky (1993), perezhivanie is used to describe a subject’s development, “because between the world and a human being stands his(sic) social environment, which refracts and guides everything proceeding from man(sic) to the world and from the world to man(sic)” (p. 77). The residents develop their emotions and identities through the interplay of social relations. Thus, the awareness of knowing, being, and becoming a resident of urban teaching who are also teachers of color is articulated through residents’ reflections and refraction of their teacher residencies, because they have worked out their own conflicts of motives from resolving the (social)environmental-individual dialectical tensions (Dang, 2013).

This study addresses the ECER 2023 conference theme and Network 10’s call to study the diversity of evidence-relations in teacher education. Although tensions and conflicts coexist with diversity, “the richness of who we are and who we are becoming becomes a source and resource for what we do and why we do it across the educational continuum”. European researchers have been using perezhivanie to examine the ways in which experiences such as discrimination, marginalization, and cultural identity shape individuals’ understanding and engagement with education (Christodoulakis et al., 2021; Léopoldoff-Martin & Gabathuler, 2021; Pompert & Dobber, 2018). Accordingly, the personal accounts from residents of color serve as evidence mobilized from marginalized communities to address the research-practice gap of teachers’ professional identity development.

We want to understand how residents in this study refract their (social)environmental-individual dialectical conflicts from working in the community through their perezhivanie. In the context of urban teaching residencies, we are looking at how residents of color refract themselves from their own resident identity development in their narratives. Moreover, this psychological refraction of the human mind is not to be projected in the same way as the refraction of the light. Rather, perezhivanie is a mental schema established through one’s consciousness of experience and experience of consciousness of the past, present, and future (Vygotsky, 1993). Drawing upon these, our research question is: How do preservice teachers who self-identify as teachers of color construct themselves as residents during the urban teaching residency program?

This study used phenomenography as a qualitative research method to investigate and describe the meaning of the collective experiences of the participants in the particular urban teacher residency program. Phenomenography aims to describe the different ways a group of people experience and understand a phenomenon (Marton, 1981). Specifically, we were interested in how participants constructed their own developing professional identities as residents and teachers, and the experiences that participants identified as relevant to that process. Recognizing that, “‘teacher identities’...often are crafted as unitary…universal, complete and non-contradictory” (Miller, 2005, p. 51), phenomenography and perezhivanie provide a lens for understanding the particularities and variations of the residents’ reflections and refractions of their identities throughout the teacher residency. The study took place within the context of a graduate-level urban teaching residency in the northeastern United States. Unlike traditional semester-long student teaching models, residents in this program spend a full year working with mentor teachers in secondary classrooms, beginning on the first day of in-service professional development at the start of the school year and ending on the last day of classes in June. They participate in “integrating seminars” each semester with their cohort to help them mobilize knowledge (Authors, 2017b) across their university classes and 7-12 teaching placements. Residents are expected to work for an additional three years in the residency district, so the program also encourages residents to make connections and develop ties to the local community through, e.g., community resource walks. We invited all 29 residents from across two cohorts of the residency to participate in the study; 21 consented and using criterion sampling (Patton, 1990), 6 met our criteria of having a complete data set (in program archives) and identifying as residents of color. Participants graduated from the program in 2017 and 2018, and obtained certification in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, Science, or Special Education. Data included autobiographical analyses submitted early in the program; interactive journals submitted biweekly throughout the residency year; and transcripts from individual interviews conducted near the end of the residency program. We selected these data sources because they provided opportunities for residents to reflect on their personal and professional identities at various stages of the program through narratives. We coded these data inductively and deductively (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007) according to our framework of perezhivanie, looking for examples of residents describing their personal and/or professional identities.

We found two themes regarding residents’ perezhivanie. First, participants are proactively enacting their professional identity. As Lana claimed, “When people are like, you’re a student teacher? I’m like, I’m a teaching resident. Dude, respect me.” Lana saw the distinction between being a student-teacher and a teaching resident; the word resident, for Lana, carries more weight in terms of perceived qualifications and professionalism. Second, participants are constantly refracting their (social)environmental-individual dialectical tensions from the urban teacher residency program. In the case of Lana, she was proactively cultivating her teacher-of-color self, because she understands her own very teacher presence makes a difference for her students. Lana disclosed, “When I was growing up, I didn’t have a teacher like me, and I want to be that teacher for others [...] Especially in [urban contexts], there’s such a huge population of [minoritized] students.” Unpacking the residents of color’s perezhivanie helps teacher educators better understand how to support teachers-of-color. This way, the voices of residents of color and their lived experiences in urban contexts become sources of supporting and developing teacher professional identity. The residents of color and their own agentic stories also fill in the research-practice gap as they refracted their dialectical tensions. The findings of the study will contribute to an understanding of how preservice teachers of color develop their professional identities and how programs like teaching residencies are uniquely placed and structured to support this development. Understanding the experiences and perspectives of teaching residents of color can also shed light on the challenges and opportunities inherent in initial teacher preparation, thereby informing efforts to improve the quality of education. Learning how teachers of color construct themselves as residents can help us understand how they participate in and contribute to their teaching communities and help guide future research of teacher professional identity development.

Bogdan, R. C., & Biklen, S. K. (2007). Qualitative research for education: An introduction to theory and methods. Pearson Education. Chase, S. E. (2005). Handbook of qualitative research. Sage Publications. Christodoulakis, N., Vidal Carulla, C., & Adbo, K. (2021). Perezhivanie and its application within early childhood science education research. Education Sciences, 11(12), 813. Cong-Lem, N. (2022). The relation between environment and psychological development: Unpacking Vygotsky’s influential concept of Perezhivanie. Human Arenas (online first), https://doi.org/10.1007/s42087-022-00314-6 Dang, T. (2013). Identity in activity: Examining teacher professional identity formation in the paired-placement of student teachers. Teaching and Teacher Education 30, 47–59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2012.10.006 Klein, E. J., Taylor, M., Onore, C., Strom, K., & Abrams, L. (2016). Exploring inquiry in the third space: Case studies of a year in an urban teacher-residency program. The New Educator, 12(3), 243-268. Lantolf, J., & Swain, M. (2019). Perezhivanie: The cognitive–emotional dialectic within the social situation of development. In A. Al-Hoorie & P. MacIntyre (Eds.), Contemporary language motivation theory: 60 years since Gardner and Lambert (1959) (pp. 80–106). Multilingual Matters. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781788925204-009 Léopoldoff-Martin, I., & Gabathuler, C. (2021). Vygotsky and the notion of perezhivanie: what does it contribute to the reading of literary texts?. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 28(4), 345–355. Marton, F. (1981). Phenomenography - Describing conceptions of the world around us. Instructional Science, 10, 177-200. Miller, J. L. (2005). Autobiography and the necessary incompleteness of teachers’ stories. In J. L. Miller (Ed.), Sounds of silence breaking: Women, autobiography, curriculum (pp. 45–56). Peter Lang Publishing. Patton, M. Q. 1990. Qualitative evaluation and research methods. Sage Publications, Inc. Pompert, B., & Dobber, M. (2018). Developmental education for young children in the Netherlands: Basic development. In the International handbook of early childhood education (pp. 1113–1137). Springer, Dordrecht. Rodrigues, F., & Mogarro, M. J. (2019). Student teachers’ professional identity: A review of research contributions. Educational Research Review, 28, 100286. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2019.100286 Suarez, V. & J. McGrath (2022). Teacher professional identity: How to develop and support it in times of change. OECD Education Working Papers, No. 267, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/b19f5af7-en. Vygotsky, L. S. (1993). The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky, Vol. 2. The fundamentals of defectology (abnormal psychology and learning disabilities). (R. W. Rieber & A. S. Carton, Eds.; J. E. Knox & C. B. Stevens, Trans.). Plenum Press. Zeichner, K. (2010). Rethinking the connections between campus courses and field experiences in college- and university-based teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 61(2), 89–99.