Agency, shame, and identity: Digital stories of teaching

- The construction of agentive teacher identities is complicated by social class.
- Teachers' own classed backgrounds and hierarchical policy making silences teachers.
- Authoring digital stories of their work in low-income schools enables deep reflection.
- Reflection and exchange of stories among peers breaks silence grounded in class-based shame.
- Digital Storytelling is a step toward building agentive identities.

In the digital stories that teachers author, I explore the social class positioning of teachers in low-income schools in the U.S. and the tensions between professional agency and shame in emerging teacher identities. I consider traces of teachers' own classed backgrounds, the hierarchies of power and class within which their work is surveilled, and the social interactions of daily life within which subordinate class status become embodied. This project attests to the potential of multimedia authoring as a way of knowing about the contradictions of teaching in schools structured against teachers' and students' success.