Learning and teaching are not only about acquiring a pedagogical knowledge base but are also context-bound, socially-mediated processes of identity construction. How students and educators position themselves as learners and teachers in a diversity of educational contexts affects what and how they learn and teach. The research about positioning and agency in learners and teachers accounts for the inherent tension between innovation and stability, as well as the ways in which their identities are embedded within larger ideological structures and circulating contemporary educational discourses. However, despite recent theoretical and empirical attempts to integrate the construction of the self as learners and teachers and their agency in educational research, the question of to what extent the two concepts interact with each other has seldom been explicitly addressed. In this regard, this special issue aims to extend the studies previously published in JSED (Monereo et al., 2013; Prados et al., 2014; Solari, 2017; Ventura, 2017) by addressing these relatively under-researched aspects of the self as learner and teacher in a variety of educational contexts.
Potential submissions could strive to answer (but are not limited to) the following questions:
- What role does agency play in the construction of identity in learners and teachers?
- How might young learners’ selves and agency develop in different educational levels?
- How do learners construct their identity? How do their interactions with mentors, teachers, supervisors and peers influence learners' identity construction?
- How might new educators’ selves and agency be shaped and reshaped during their transition from ‘students’ to ‘teachers’?
- How can teachers promote dialogical and agentive educational settings?
- What factors and/or voices are significant in the transformation of the repertoires of the different positions of the self of learners and teachers?
