Professional academic identity development

Abstract

I locate my discussion in discourses on academic development (AD)1 theorising lecturers’ (faculty’s) participation in professional development2 initiatives and the formation of their professional identities as teachers in higher education. As a vignette, my discussion reports on a snapshot of the data from a more extensive qualitative case study exploring the interplay of the structural, cultural and agential conditioning mechanisms (see below for a detailed explanation) in the emergence of lecturers’ professional academic identity. This vignette explores one lecturer’s (Mike’s)3 mediation of prevalent social contexts to account for the formation of his professional academic identity. For consistency, I use the term professional academic identity to refer to lecturers’ identities as teachers in higher education.