Professional identity in classroom interaction

This data set contains data coming from a research project focused on understanding relationships among identities, emerging classroom practices, and social constellations beyond the immediate situation.
We build on a Patterns-of-Participation framework that combines social practice theory with symbolic interactionism.
This is a case study of a teacher, Julia, who works at an underprivileged elementary school in Brazil. The data material includes classroom observations, interviews, and documents, all analyzed using open coding procedures to focus on the social constitution of Julia’s identities and on how they relate to her contributions to classroom practices.
Julia draws especially on the reform discourse, the traditions at the school, and her general commitment to the students in classroom interaction. In spite of tensions between these discourses and practices, they all fuel Julia’s experiences of being qualified and of belonging to a reformist educational community.
Contribution: We document how immediate interaction and prior and present practices beyond the current situation contribute to teachers’ professional experiences as well as some possible relationships between these experiences and teachers’ contributions to classroom interaction. More formally, we show the potential of dynamic, interactionist perspectives to supplement other approaches to researching professional identities.