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.