Chapter 3: The Identity of the Teacher in Compulsory Education

This chapter focuses on research into teacher identity in compulsory education to detail the existing research and includes recent contributions based on the Dialogical Self Theory (DST). Here we develop the main theory’s core concepts (I-position, We-position, core position, boundary experience, among others) and how they have been used in specific studies of the teacher’s identity in compulsory education. In the first section, we will analyze the current perspectives on studying the teacher’s identity in childhood, primary and secondary education. Next, we will describe the DST application to conceptualize the teacher’s identity in compulsory education. We will end this chapter with some remarks about future research, teacher identity development and educational innovation in compulsory education. Finally, it deals with the dialogical process’s topic to change teacher identity and some practical implications for achieving it.