Chapter 7: Preparing Educational Psychology Instructors To Teach Online: The Role of Identity Development

Higher education instructors, including those teaching educational psychology courses, are increasingly expected to teach online, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic experiences. How can we prepare them to do so most effectively? This chapter will address this question by highlighting the key role played in online courses by the instructor’s professional identity—defined in this case as “the kind of online teacher one aspires to be” (Gee, 2001; Luehmann, 2007)—as well as by providing some concrete ideas about how the development of online teacher identity can be supported.

There is considerable support in the literature that teacher identity has important implications for teaching (e.g., Beauchamp & Thomas, 2009; Beijaard, 2019, Miles & Mikulec, 2008, Richardson & Alsup, 2015). While online teacher identity has been less studied, some research on this topic has started to emerge in recognition that the quality of online courses (whether fully online or blended) will greatly depend on how teachers are able to transition to the somewhat different roles they are asked to play in online versus traditional classroom teaching (e.g., Comas-Quinn, 2011; also see Hafsa, 2019, for a review of this literature prior to the pandemic). The COVID-19 pandemic spurred even more interest in learning to teach online, leading to additional studies about the development of online teacher identity in response to the need to adapt to emergency remote teaching (e.g., El-Soussi, 2022; Yuan & Liu, 2021).