ABSTRACT
This chapter explores teachers’ professional identity, the factors which influence it and its importance in the transformation of education systems. It explores how belonging to a particular school, a wider school system and society can impact on teachers’ construction of their professional identities. It critiques governments’ attempts to raise levels of professionalism through regulatory mechanisms such as professional standards and performance management. It offers a pathway to a mode of ‘professionality’ in which pedagogy and moral purpose are central to enabling teachers to address social injustice issues, as agents of change.
