Some academics see teaching as an important, fun and stimulating task, perhaps even a calling, and consequently, “academic teacher” will be a positive and defining part of their identity. Others experience teaching as something which fits uncomfortably with the perception of their identity. In this case, these academics may see “teacher” as something at odds with their true academic identity and endeavour. Regardless of how strongly you identify with teacher when you think of your overall academic identity, if you’re engaged in teaching, you are - at least sometimes - a teacher.

In this video we’ll look at what some scholars - Schulman, Boyer, Åkerlind, Kugel and Fox - say about the process of developing as an academic teacher. You can also read more about Boyer here.

Transcript for Your Academic Teacher Identity
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Not everyone within academia will consider “teacher” as an integral or defining part of their academic identity. But regardless of how strongly you identify with teacher when you think of your overall academic identity, if you’re engaged in teaching, you are - at least sometimes - a teacher. Nurturing this part of your professional persona is therefore an important part of being professional within your job as a whole.

Lee S. Shulman, an American educational psychologist, distinguished between three different categories of knowledge that teachers need to have:

- subject matter content knowledge
- pedagogical content knowledge
- curricular knowledge

In order for good teaching to happen, these three categories of knowledge in you, the teacher, are prerequisites for one another and they need to be as integrated as possible.

Ernest L. Boyer, a well-known American educator, has stressed the importance of recognizing what he calls the full “mosaic of talents” required of an academic. He recognizes four dimensions of academic scholarship:

- the scholarship of discovery
- the scholarship of integration
- the scholarship of application
- the scholarship of teaching

While recognizing and acknowledging the varieties amongst the scholars who together make up the mosaics of faculty talents, the full academic potential, Boyer says, is achieved only when all these dimensions of academic scholarship are tied intimately and inseparably together - and when we as academics succeed in being scholarly in all of them.

Gerlese Åkerlind has also looked at academic teachers’ development. She suggests that the more limited an academic’s conception of what growing and developing as a teacher can mean, the more limited his or her ways of approaching their own teaching development.
Correspondingly, she’s found that “increasingly sophisticated or complete understandings of developing as an academic holistically tend to be associated with increasingly sophisticated or complete understandings of developing as a university teacher”.

Peter Kugel, an American computer scientist, describes a common path of development:

- As a beginner teacher, you might tend to focus on yourself.
- At a certain point, though, you’ll be able to shift your focus away from yourself and to your subject.
- As you develop further, you will probably be increasingly aware of the students that you teach.

Dennis Fox, a British scholar within education studies, suggests another way to understand how you develop as an academic teacher, which mirrors teachers’ different theories of student learning, but also, though the teaching roles consequently formed, closely connects to aspects of identity.

Fox asked a number of teachers “What do you mean by teaching?” and in their answers he discerned four different teacher role categories and forms of teacher-student relationships. Using metaphors, he calls them

- the transfer theory
- the shaping theory
- the travelling theory
- and the growing theory

Fox suggests that the foci of the theories differs, in that the transfer and the travelling theories are more focused on the disciplinary subject, whereas the shaping and the growing theories are more focused on the student as a person. Although recognizing that circumstances might favour one or the other of these theories, Fox refers to the first two of these theories as simple and the last two as developed theories of teaching.

Kugel, Åkerlind and Fox, seem to recognize a potential development from a focus on the ego, via a focus on the subject, towards a focus on the students’ learning, and shifting from a perspective where the teacher herself play the most important part for students’ learning, towards one where the students themselves play the principal role as self-regulated learners.

In relation to your academic identity, your approach to your development as a teacher, tend to matter significantly for if and not least how you integrate “teacher” in your academic teacher identity.