Being and becoming a mentor: school-based teacher educators and teacher educator identity

Drawing on Gee's (Social linguistics and literacies: ideology in discourses, RoutledgeFalmer, New York, 1996) categories of "ways" to view identity, a case study is constructed of a secondary school teacher's struggle to move beyond her identity as a teacher to assume a mentor's identity in her year-long work with two English-teaching interns. Data of various kinds were gathered: from the interns, weekly e-mails and a paired peer interview, and from the teacher, interview, a peer interview, a mentoring log, and transcripts of a mentoring seminar. Based on these data, the author argues for the importance of attending to identity in teacher education and mentoring and describes conditions that would facilitate mentor identity formation. (c) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.