Analyzing Burkean Rhetoric in Pre-service Teachers’ Identity Narratives

This chapter makes a methodological contribution to research on teacher identity by employing the notions stemming from Kenneth Burke’s theories of rhetoric and highlighting how the analysis of rhetoric can shed light on the process of identity development. Narrative approaches have been used extensively in studies on teacher identity, however, these studies rarely focus on examining rhetoric, and studies with a methodological focus on how to use rhetorical analysis are even rarer. Rhetoric, arguably, complements and has the potential to add value to the analysis of identity narratives in the teacher education context. In this chapter, we return to two pre-service teachers’ identity narratives, Vesa’s and Leila’s, to reanalyse them considering the rhetorical means and linguistic features and the types of identity rhetoric that appear in them. We conclude by discussing the meaning of analyzing rhetoric in studies on pre-service teachers’ identity development and the implications for teacher education.