Identity Development and Mentoring in Doctoral Education

In this essay, Leigh Hall and Leslie Burns use theories of identity to understand mentoring relationships between faculty members and doctoral students who are being prepared as educational researchers. They suggest that becoming a professional researcher requires students to negotiate new identities and reconceptualize themselves both as people and professionals in addition to learning specific skills; however, the success or marginalization that students experience may depend on the extent to which they attempt to enact identities that are valued by their mentors. For this reason, Hall and Burns argue that faculty mentors must learn about and consider identity formation in order to successfully socialize more diverse groups of researchers, and they believe that formal curriculum designs can be used more intentionally to help students and faculty understand the roles identity plays in professional development and to make doctoral education more equitable.

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Leigh A. Hall is an assistant professor of literacy studies in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on understanding how identities are developed and enacted in educational settings and how educators can better understand and respond to them through instruction. Hall recently served as coeditor for a special-themed issue on literacy for the Middle Grades Research Journal. Her forthcoming manuscript, “The Negative Consequences of Becoming a Good Reader: Identity Theory as a Lens for Understanding Struggling Readers, Teachers, and Reading Instruction,” will appear in Teachers College Record. Other recent publications include “Struggling Reader, Struggling Teacher: An Examination of Student-Teacher Transactions with Reading Instruction and Texts in Social Studies,” in Research in the Teaching of English (2009).

Leslie David Burns is an assistant professor of literacy in curriculum and instruction at the University of Kentucky. His research interests include curriculum and policy in both preservice and doctoral teacher education, relevance in K−12 language arts and literacy curricula, and teacher identity. His work has appeared in English Education, English Journal, English Leadership Quarterly, and Middle Grades Research Journal. In 2008 Burns received honorable mentions for both the Janet Emig Award and the Edwin M. Hopkins Award from the National Council of Teachers of English for his work on curriculum, policy, accreditation, and political action in teaching and teacher education.