Examining teachers’ navigation of their professional identities in flexible learning spaces

Whilst teachers’ work is always complex, ongoing global change has generated new educational challenges related to perceptions about contemporary learners’ needs. Prominent in current discourse is the push for classrooms as flexible learning spaces. Professional Identity theory offers scope to understand the ways teachers respond to internal and external influences that shape and define their beliefs about these dynamic and socially constructed spaces and the teaching and learning that should happen within them. Through a sociocultural lens, this paper examines teachers’ perspectives on their classroom spaces, their teaching within established institutional constructs of ‘school’, the discourse through which they position themselves, and are in turn positioned as ‘teacher’. Experiences of two Australian primary school teachers from a larger study are shared as an empirical case focused on their navigation of classrooms redesigned as flexible learning spaces. Analysis of their dialogue and observed classroom practices revealed a complex relationship between current and historical versions of ‘teacher’, and their own professional identities. The new knowledge presented in this paper challenges the perpetuation of existing institutional norms that position teachers in ways that constrain their substantial and informed beliefs about teaching and limit the agency through which teachers can bring about pedagogic change.