Timeless bonds amidst change: exploring teacher identity formation across various eras in South Korea
摘要
This study investigates how teacher identity has been shaped within distinct socio-historical contexts across different eras, identifying relationship-building as a crucial mediating factor. Three teachers who began their careers in the 1960s, 1980s, and 2010s in South Korea—a society that has undergone rapid socio-political transformation since the 1960s—participated in this study. The findings demonstrate how patterns of relationality, shaped by socio-culturally conditioned contexts and individual dispositions, varied across historical periods and played a central role in the formation of teacher identity. Drawing on Archer’s morphogenetic approach as an analytical framework, this study discusses how the process of “being a teacher” unfolded differently across historical eras and how the absence of a “We-relation” led to the disintegration of teacher identity by hindering the formation of the social self.