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| "I love that my middle school yearbooks now appear as search results when people Google my name," said no sane person, ever. |
During my second year at my current job, I was explaining the concept of professionalism to my eighth grade students. I emphasized that one of the primary lessons the school teaches students is how to compartmentalize their personal and more "professional" personas, which is why there are certain rules and expectations regarding language, dress codes, and mannerisms that students are expected to follow at school but not necessarily at home. I went on to state that, I, as a teacher, have to act professional in my classroom in front of my students, otherwise I might be in danger of losing my job. Of course, as I was pointing this out, one of my eighth graders questioned the professionalism part when she pointed out that some of my classroom decorations included a row of clementines on which students had drawn faces, a twig in a metallic pail, drawings of a hybrid cabbage-unicorn creature called a cabbicorn, and a canvas with a winking cow drawn in the center - and I kept a pair of bear paw slippers under my desk. Perhaps she had a point; however, I will argue that there is a distinction between silliness and professionalism: It's possible to be silly while still being professional.
It is very easy for me to cultivate my "professional" identity at work: I have direct control my work ethic, choice of clothes and language, and my daily actions in front of my students. However, regardless of how I feel about it, my identity as a teacher is also cultivated in cyberspace - a place in which I do not always have control: Although I share my first and last name with hundreds of people in the US, the correct combination of search terms for my name will bring up a number of results over which I have no control: my page on ratemyteachers.com (the website recently took down all of the old ratings and comments, but for quite a while, anonymous ratings from former students were out in the public eye), my middle school yearbooks (courtesy of my hometown's historical society), records of my address and former addresses as well as the names of all of my relatives. I am not overly excited that any of these items exist publicly online for anybody, including my students, to access them, but, like many others (Solove, 2011), I have come to accept the fact that one cannot expect privacy in this digital age.
Lowenthal et al. (2016) emphasized the importance of professionals maintaining a personally-controlled website, as such a website "...gives professionals that is under their control to ensure consistency and reliability over time; the professionals determine how they are presented professionally online, and when work and ideas are publicly shared" (p. 323). Last semester in our Instructional Design class, my cohort members and I were required to create an online portfolio for our assignments. I opted to create a professional website that showcased my work for the class as well as my teaching philosophy, educational history, and photos of me "in action" in my classroom and extra-curricular activities. This website is public and is therefore accessible to anybody who might want to learn more about me. According to Lowethal et al. (2016), I should update my professional website at least once every six months to keep the information on the site current for any professional who may come across my site.
To further build my professional identity, I should invest more time in maintaining an active Twitter account. My Twitter account was created for a class during my master's program, and in the ten years since that program ended, I have followed hundreds of educational professionals - most of whom are complete strangers with whom I have connected via EdChats. With this very large professional learning network, I have ample opportunities to take advantage of the knowledge base and professional expertise of this group, but I am just not logging in. If I spend more time tweeting - even if I just logged in once or twice per week - and overall maintaining a more active account, I could further build my professional identity and strengthen my connections within my PLN.
I currently believe that my professional identity is primarily cultivated through my reputation in my immediate community. I have been at my current place of employment (a small, PK-8 Catholic school) for over seven years and, in that time, have build connections with my colleagues, students, and families. They know how I run my classes, they know how hard I will work for their student and their family, and they put a lot of trust in me. I am also an active parishioner at the church affiliated with the school, and I am recognized by parishoners for my involvement in the music ministry and young adult group. There really is not much of my professional identity that is made online, as I rarely tweet or network with anybody. I had a few very positive reviews on ratemyteachers.com before the website removed all of the old reviews, which would have positively impacted my professional identity for anybody who wanted to do a background check on me.
Like many other professionals in academia (Hinton, n.d.), my biggest challenge to my digital ecology for my identity as a teacher lies in my use of Facebook, specifically in keeping my public and private life in balance on social media. The community in which I teach is very close, and it is not uncommon for several parents, who have become close friends of mine, to become Facebook friends with the teachers, as we are all one large church and school community. I almost always accept friend requests from the parents, as most other teachers at my school do, which is very unique to my community; however, this does impact the content that I will choose to post on my Facebook page. I rarely post anything that is political in nature, as I do not want to alienate any part of my community. I do have filters for my posts, and I have all the parents/former students in one group that is sometimes filtered from my posts if I believe certain posts of mine will be considered too political, but, for the most part, the fact that parents and former students are my Facebook friends has not really impacted my posting habits, as a) I do not post very much, and b) when I do post, many times I share posts from my school's social media page, as most of my life centers around my job.
As for my identity as a doctoral student, I do not really think I have much of an identity just yet. Obviously, I have not published any research as of yet, and my identity as a doctoral student is completely separated from my identity as a teacher, save for a few instances in which I had an assignment that impacted something I did or made at work. In some ways, I feel like I would have more of an identity as a doctoral student if I lived on campus - or had ever even been to the UF campus before - but, since I am completing my coursework through a hybrid program and COVID prevented all of my cohort's in-person sessions so far from happening, thus meaning that, two years into the program, I have never met my cohort members or professors in person before, I just do not feel that my identity as a doctoral student exists, outside of a reference to my degree on my LinkedIn profile or on my teacher profile posted to my school's website. I look forward to progressing in my program and, perhaps, building this part of my identity. Perhaps I will be able to integrate a little bit of silliness into this identity, as I do in my identity as a teacher.
References
Hinton, A. (n.d.). YouTube / "Context collapse" the. SlideShare. Retrieved February 5, 2022, from https://www.slideshare.net/andrewhinton/beyond-findability-context/44-YouTube_Context_Collapse_The_problem
Lowenthal, P. R., Dunlap, J. C., & Stilton, P. (2016). Creating an intentional web presence: Strategies for every educational technology professional. TechTrends, 60(4), 320-329. https://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1141&context=edtech_facpubs
Solove, D. J. (2011). Why privacy matters even if you have 'nothing to hide', Chronicle of Higher Education.
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