Rewriting Our Academic Identities from School Teachers to Higher Education Teachers

We are teacher educators who began constructing our professional identities as primary school teachers before transitioning to higher education. We—Ntokozo, an early career academic, and Lungile, a mid-career academic—wanted to explore how we might have drawn on various aspects of our schoolteacher identities in (re)positioning ourselves as teacher educators. Hence, we asked ourselves: “What might be made visible by rewriting our academic identities through letter writing and poetic inquiry?” Letter writing and poetic inquiry, which draw from literary arts-based educational research (ABER) methods, facilitated our scholarly conversation about reflective narrative accounts of our transitioning identities. Thus we could recognise ourselves and consider how our classroom teacher identities helped us find meaning in our new professional settings. This chapter offers an example of academics adopting arts-based methods to collaboratively reflect on their higher education identities. We hope our ABER inquiry may inspire new ways of thinking about and looking into academic identities.