What does it mean to be a teacher in the government school system in Delhi? How do teachers and their belief systems shape their professional identity and associated behaviours within the classroom? How does the school ecosystem, in turn, construct these identities and what influence does this have on teachers’ motivation and their response to the classroom? Teachers are at the heart of the education system and no discussion on the organisational norms of the education system is complete without engaging with belief systems, attitudes, and professional norms that shape teacher behaviour.
The importance of the concept of professional identity lies in the link between professional identity and professional action. Who we think we are influences what we do. In education research, this is an important area of inquiry. In unpacking the construction of professional identity, this research provides a useful framework for understanding how teachers construct their ideas of “how to be” and “how to act”. These understandings shape teachers’ dispositions, how they prioritise “effort” and where they place it, as well as what obligations they see as intrinsic to their role. Crucially, teacher beliefs, framed partly by their own understanding, their cultural context, and associated belief systems related to caste, gender, and poverty, shape their understanding of children’s learning abilities.
The literature highlights that a teacher’s professional identity is shaped through interactions between a teacher’s self-efficacy, degrees of job satisfaction, occupational commitment, and levels of motivation. Crucially, the social and organisational context within which teachers function, their interaction with and perception of this context, play a significant role in the construction of a teacher’s identity. In a study of 5,575 Dutch teachers, it was found that the extent to which teachers are satisfied with their colleagues, the support they receive, and the degree to which they feel competent in dealing with school administrators significantly influences the shaping of their professional identities.
In this chapter, we unpack the construction of teachers’ professional identity in legalistic organisational cultures like the one we encountered in Delhi. Our explorations highlight the extent to which legalistic norms construct teachers’ ideas of “how to be” and “how to act” and how this, in turn, shapes teachers’ perceptions and behaviour within the classroom. Beyond just the organisational context, professional identities are also shaped by social context and expectations. What is “regarded” as good practice within professions gains legitimacy from the broader societal consensus and associated expectations. In unpacking teacher identities, we thus also focus on how their own belief systems and perceptions towards the classroom, coupled with the professional expectations of parents and society at large, shape their identities and, in turn, influence behaviour within the classroom.
Consistent with the literature on teacher identity, we recognise the complex and reflexive nature of identity construction. In this chapter, we seek to capture the dynamics that shape teacher identity primarily through the narratives that teachers create about themselves and their roles as teachers in the government school system. These narratives help locate how teachers understand the classroom and shape notions of performance and accountability.
Frankly, I have lost my identity as a teacher … we are more into clerical jobs.
— Interview with teacher (2017)
My observation is that as soon as a teacher is newly recruited, he says, “I can do anything”. [Teachers] enter the system with lots of energy and determination, with dreams of overhauling everything. However, after two or three months, the environment, the system, the people all break that attitude and they feel jaded.
— Interview with head of school (2018)
In the summer of 2018, our researchers conducted a survey of 200 government school teachers across Delhi. The objective of the survey was to understand teachers’ perspectives of their jobs, specifically their intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to enter the profession and the extent to which their lived experience as teachers had shaped their identity. The survey included a questionnaire that captured the way teachers used their time (self-reported) to better understand how they allocated and managed their time to fulfil their various roles and responsibilities.
The survey began by asking teachers what motivated them to join the profession. Intrinsic motivation dominated. For sixty-three per cent of the surveyed teachers, the love of teaching, spending time with children, the social prestige associated with being a teacher, and contributing to society were the primary forms of motivation. This is best summarised in one interviewee’s statement: “I became a teacher because teaching will help students become something in life”.
Being a teacher was a matter of pride and status. Teachers said they loved to teach and interact with children – this is what sustained them. Despite the trials and tribulations of being a teacher, this love of teaching remains central to their identities throughout their careers. “In our hearts, we are still teachers”, said one teacher who had climbed up the administrative ladder.
Even as teachers identify themselves with children and the professional goals of teaching, they also seek the status of a government job. Being a government employee is critical to shaping their professional identity. Many respondents spoke of the security of a government job as an important factor (in addition to their interest in teaching) that made being a schoolteacher an attractive career proposition. A useful statistic to understand the importance of the “government job” in shaping teachers’ identity is that 38 per cent of the teachers interviewed had been private school teachers before taking on government jobs. They made the switch for reasons such as job security, higher income, and social prestige. In the words of one interviewee: ‘Only those who have run out of options have to go for private sector options’.
None of this is unique to Delhi. Government teaching jobs are prized jobs within the bureaucratic and social hierarchy in India. The power that government school teachers exude within India’s political economy landscape is a well-documented fact. Teachers are located in a complex network of political interests and governmental hierarchy that places them in a unique position of power and status, particularly in rural India. This is best evidenced in the fact that regular government teacher salaries are twenty times higher than what private school teachers earn, even as absenteeism and poor learning quality are rife. Being a government schoolteacher is thus as much about being a teacher as it is about being a prestigious, powerful, and well-paid “government” employee. This combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations shaping choices to become teachers is very typical of developing countries. Several studies in developing countries highlight that salary, job security, and career status were valued as important in shaping motivations to join the teaching profession in countries as diverse as Brunei, Zimbabwe, and Slovenia.
Once in service, the lived experience of being a teacher within a particular organisational context plays a role in shaping identity and associated motivation. India’s school system has long struggled with the challenge of balancing administrative functions for teachers with their teaching tasks. In the legalistic accounting-based culture of the Indian bureaucracy, inevitably, administrative functions have taken precedence.
Government teachers have a range of administrative duties assigned to them. These include election duties, census data collection, school-level administration such as the provision of midday meals, ensuring compliance with government directives to maintain audit norms, and responding to right to information (RTI) applications. Recognition of this reality resulted in the insertion of an important clause in the Right to Education Act (RTE) passed by the Indian parliament in 2010, which explicitly exempted teachers from performing routine administrative functions except for election duty and census enumeration. However, the stated goal of the RTE has never been achieved. A 2014 time-on-task study amongst teachers conducted by the World Bank in three states of India – Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh – found that actual teaching time takes up only 81 to 87 per cent of school-calendar days. The balance is spent on non-teaching and non-school tasks. Non-teaching administrative tasks include organising events, managing midday meals, construction, collecting and maintaining data on students, facilitating visits of officials, and other administrative support demanded by the hierarchy.
Delhi schools followed this pattern. The everyday experience of being a teacher involves performing a large set of administrative tasks. But more than the tasks themselves, it is the grammar through which tasks are assigned that plays an important role in shaping teacher narratives. In fact, as we found in our survey the actual time spent on administrative tasks is not as high as is perceived, yet this formed the fulcrum of teacher complaints. It is that they were treated as administrators being ordered to perform lowly tasks that took them away from the classroom. Much like the education bureaucrats described in the previous chapter, in sharp contrast to the power, status, and political patronage that attract teachers to the job, teachers’ narratives of their experiences within the education system are a repeated tale of disempowerment and being reduced to “post officers” pushing paper. Teachers refer to themselves as no less than clerks in the system, being made to perform lowly administrative tasks that they believe are not central to their role as teachers or high-status government employees.
Excerpted with permission from Lessons in State Capacity from Delhi’s Schools, Yamini Aiyar, Oxford University Press.
