The pre-school educator as a soldier. A case study on teacher identity, gender and authority

Abstract

The principal goal of this document is to show the case of a kindergarten teacher −we will call her Consuelo−, who built her identity with her initial unemployment situation, later on with her experience in the countryside, and with the relationship she established with the authorities. This document is part of a bigger research work that was a qualitative one, with the methodology of case study and biographical narrative. The Consuelo case was selected because she’s a young kindergarten teacher, who is a quiet but also a critical educator that analyzed her professional decisions in the same way she analyzed educational events, coworkers and educational authorities. In her narrative, Consuelo describes events that were decisive in her teacher identity building process, such as the activities performed by her before she had a job in the Secretaría de Educación Pública ( SEP ), where she had a professional crisis. She was the only one of the five teachers participating in this study who had the experience of working in kindergartens in rural areas. She built her identity as a teacher with those experiences and based on her relationship with the educative authorities.