Designing a Framework to Explain the Professional Identity of Iranian Teachers Using a Power Relations Approach

Based on the grounds giving form to teachers' professional identity in Iran's educational system, the present study aims to provide a framework to portray, with a power-based approach, the various kinds of professional identity which can be perceived for Iranian teachers. For this purpose, narratives were collected and the discourses were analyzed, which led to different kinds of issues regarding teachers' professional identity, all of which pointed out the influence of power in the creation of identity. Then, in order to organize the findings in accordance with an established theory, Michel Foucault's views and his approach to critical discourse analysis were used. Using documentary analysis, an episteme-like two-dimensional matrix was devised as a framework to display the various possible identities for teachers in the context of Iranian education. One dimension represents the elements constituting the powers residing over teachers' professional performance, while the other dimension depicts the different reactions teachers showed to these elements of power. When these dimensions meet, possibilities arise, each of which can symbolize teachers' identity. Therefore, the different kinds of identity systematically placed in the matrix-like framework of "power like protection" can be regarded as the main findings of this study, which can prove useful when it comes to explaining the range of changes in teachers' identity based on changes in power relations.