Conference Agenda

The post-truth condition, marked by the erosion of shared epistemic norms and the destabilisation of institutional trust (McIntyre, 2018), is changing the foundations of the teaching profession. By reshuffling social arrangements, post-truth threatens to undermine the logic which sustained longstanding endeavours to professionalise teaching, yet it also opens new opportunities to reimagine teacher professionalism. Realising that post-truth is more than a passing phase and that it’s deeply rooted in social struggles, bolstered by novel and continually developing technologies, means we must learn to cope with its influence.

Indeed, in recent years, educational research has been evolving to explore the implications of post-truth for children, classrooms, teaching, and learning. Such studies offer invaluable insights into designing pedagogy and curriculum better suited to meeting the new challenges (Barzilai & Chinn, 2020). Nevertheless, the literature rarely examines the intersection of teacher professionalism and post-truth, potentially overlooking crucial processes that significantly shape teachers’ work and their daily experiences as professionals. This paper seeks to address this gap by drawing on the sociology of professions and scholarship on teacher professionalism, as well as on the emerging post-truth phenomenon, to probe the possible dangers and opportunities for teachers and teaching as a profession. Finally, it proposes an agenda for future research to advance our understanding of the intersection between post-truth and teacher professionalism.

Teacher Professionalism

The sociological foundations of professionalism of both classical and critical theories (Abbott, 1988; Freidson, 2001; Parsons, 1939) offer three core tenets for examining teacher professionalism: specialised knowledge, public trust, and professional authority. These domains have historically underpinned the growing “movement to professionalize teaching” (Labaree, 1992), which aimed to elevate the profession by establishing distinguishing teachers’ knowledge (Shulman, 1986), affirming their practice-based expertise (Eraut, 2000), securing professional discretion (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012), and cultivating public trust through moral-relational commitments to students and society (Becher, 2024). Crucially, this project relies on a social contract where the public grants teachers autonomy in exchange for their commitment to transcendent ideals like truth and student well-being. However, post-truth unravels the logic that sustains this contract.

Post-truth Disruptions

Post-truth is a complex sociocultural condition in which epistemic uncertainty and power struggles are deeply intertwined. Far from being synonymous with simple deception, it describes a condition in which the distinction between truth and falsehood is rendered irrelevant (Kalpokas, 2019; McIntyre, 2018). Viewed through a sociological lens, this condition manifests as class tension; resistance to truth claims is interpreted as a rejection of the “epistemic domination” exercised by knowledge workers, including teachers, whose prescriptive authority is viewed with increasing suspicion by the wider public (Porpora, 2024). However, distinct from historical scepticism, the current crisis is driven by specific technological conditions—such as algorithmic personalisation (Jürgens & Stark, 2022) and echo chambers (Nguyen, 2020)—that have fundamentally reshaped how information is generated and evaluated. These technologies decentralise authority and weaken collective filters for reliability.

In the educational context, post-truth results in a landscape characterised by five key trends, including the proliferation of misinformation, the rejection of verified claims, and the prioritisation of belief over evidence (Barzilai & Chinn, 2020). This environment creates profound disorientation, eroding established systems for validating knowledge. Consequently, professional expertise is increasingly conflated with mere opinion, leaving educators to navigate a crisis of institutional trust where all perspectives appear equally valid. The current analysis considers the implications of these unfolding developments.

Courses to teach children to connect with their ‘natural passion for learning’ (Macmillan Education 2026), self-help books to learn how to learn (Oakley et al. 2018), European emphasis on critical thinking as a ‘life-skill in the digital era’ (European School Education Platform 2024), and PISA’s focus on students growth mindset (OECD 2025) and on adaptable competences such as problem-solving (OECD 2017). An underlying emphasis in contemporary Western education, as addressed in the 21^st century skills (OECD 2021), is to qualify students through teaching divergent thinking skills. This seemingly progressive emphasis is presented in the meticulously planned educational system, meaning that the divergent thinking preferably should lead to preplanned results (Kubik 2018).

The focus on divergent thinking skills as a self-governance to obtain predefined results can be understood as the surprising marriage between progressive pedagogies and neoliberal mass-education (Sharma et al. 2023; Bradbury 2019). On the one hand, reflexivity, critical thinking and problem solving are emphasized with progressive pedagogies, such as problem-based learning and inquiry based teaching, originating in Deweyian ideals of democratic education (Dewey 2024). On the other hand, neoliberal mass-education implies a focus on individual responsibility, institutionalized curricula and lesson-level learning goals, which the progressive pedagogies has to adhere to (De Lissovoy 2018; Sharma et al. 2023).

With a basis in my PhD, this paper focuses on how the individual student is made centre for pre-planned teaching activities in a large-scale teaching initiative based on inquiry-based teaching. Here, I am particularly interested in how the students are made centrum for the already-planned activity and what that requires the students to do in order to take part. This emphasis places the project in relation to concerns about the responsibilization of students in critical pedagogical informed teaching in a neoliberal structure (De Lissovoy 2018). It is also connected to critiques of open learning spaces, such as learning centres and museums, having a too narrow idea of their users which thereby limits who can participate and how (Archer et al. 2016). Furthermore, it relates to the practical difficulties of adopting teaching student-centred teaching and staying with students’ concerns (Elkin Postila 2022). As argued by Simons and Masschelein, many pedagogies with roots in the 1960s seek to put the student in centrum for education, but the ‘individual’ is contemporarily translated into personhood and personalization (Simons and Masschelein 2021).

The above critiques have offered incisive insights into the individualized organization of education, the production of certain legitimate positions based on capital and habitus, and the issues in the meeting of progressive teaching ideals and constraints on everyday teaching. In this paper, I seek to widen the discussion of progressive teaching ideals in contemporary teaching through investigating the practice of placing the students’ concerns in the centre of pre-planned teaching. I do so by asking: What concerns and ways to take part emerge for adolescents in inquiry-based teaching at a science centre, and what does it take to qualify them to the discipline through the disciplinary content and the planned activities?

Departing from French pragmatic sociology as a way to conceptualize the interrelationship between concerns (doubts and inquietudes), engagement, and the disposition (Hansen 2023; Thévenot 2006), I seek to understand how this relates to the materiality (mattering) of the educational subject (Vlieghe and Zamojsky 2019). I generated data by following adolescents visiting a science centre building on a progressive educational framework (Madsen et al. 2020).

This study presents a qualitative meta-synthesis of literature reviews and synthesis studies on teacher identity, with the aim of examining and integrating existing conceptualisations of the concept. By systematically analysing how teacher identity has been theorised across review studies, the article identifies conceptual overlaps, tensions, and inconsistencies that characterise the field. Through this process, the study seeks to generate key theoretical insights that may serve as a foundation for refinement and, potentially, reconceptualization of prevailing theories of teacher identity. Adopting a conceptual review approach, the synthesis moves beyond summarising prior research to derive higher-order theoretical constructs that cut across interests, disciplines, and analytical frameworks (cf. Hulland, 2020).

Teacher identity is widely recognised as a productive study phenomena and/or analytical lens for understanding teachers’ professional lives, practices, and development (Vähäsantanen, 2022). Over the past decades, a substantial and diverse body of research has explored teacher identity, reflecting its centrality within educational research (Zhang & Wang, 2022). This research encompasses a broad range of perspectives, including studies of personal and collective teacher identity (e.g. Spicksley et al., 2021), professional and personal dimensions of identity (e.g. Carpenter et al., 2019), as well as investigations into the contextual, relational, emotional, and structural conditions that shape and transform teacher identity over time (e.g. Dağtaş & Zaimoğlu, 2025). Consequently, teacher identity has been approached through multiple theoretical traditions and analytical frameworks, including sociocultural, psychological, narrative, and critical perspectives.

Against the backdrop of an expanding and theoretically diverse literature, several review and synthesis studies have sought to organise and systematise research on teacher (professional) identity. However, existing synthesis efforts often focus on specific subfields, research traditions, or educational contexts, such as subject-specific teacher identity, pre-service teachers, or particular theoretical approaches. While these studies provide valuable insights, they tend to address segmented areas of the research landscape rather than offering an integrative, cross-disciplinary conceptualization of teacher identity. As a result, research on teacher identity tends to develop along parallel lines, with limited integration across domains and theoretical traditions.

This fragmentation contributes to the continued portrayal of teacher identity as a broad, multifaceted, and dynamic construct (Flores & Day, 2006). Although such complexity is widely acknowledged as intrinsic to the concept, it also presents enduring challenges. Notably, teacher identity has repeatedly been described as difficult to define and delimit in theoretically coherent ways. The absence of shared conceptual ground risks conceptual ambiguity, theoretical redundancy, and limited cumulative knowledge-building across studies.

Against this backdrop, the present study synthesises how teacher identity has been conceptualised within earlier review and synthesis studies. By focusing on second-order analyses rather than primary empirical research, the study provides a meta-level perspective on how the field has sought to define, structure, and theorize teacher identity over time. The qualitative meta-synthesis employs an interpretive approach, enabling conceptual integration across diverse theoretical positions while remaining attentive to paradigmatic differences and underlying assumptions. The overall aim is to identify how is teacher identity conceptualized in previous review studies on teacher identity questioning what dimensions, characteristics, and/or domains of teacher (professional) identity are identified across these studies? By addressing this question, the study further aims to contribute to theoretical clarity and coherence in teacher identity research. The synthesis offers an integrative framework that highlights both converging and diverging conceptualizations, thereby supporting future theoretical development and providing a foundation for more cumulative and dialogical research in the field.

Interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education is rapidly increasing due to its critical role in developing 21st-century skills. At the same time, STEM education is an established field of research that increases students' career interest and awareness of professions (Portillo-Blanco et al., 2024). This growing interest highlights the need to comprehensively document the current state of STEM education research to guide future work (Li et al., 2020). Identity, which has recently become a central focus in education (Li, 2024), is examined in terms of how individuals position themselves and are perceived in different contexts (Gee, 2000). Teacher identity is also a widespread and growing theme in this context (Zhang & Wang, 2022). Teacher identity is defined as a cognitive and emotional structure that is dynamically shaped by an educator's professional role, experiences, and is influenced by individual and social interactions (Beijaard et al., 2004). A deep understanding of this identity provides important insights into teaching practices and professional development processes (Bukor, 2015). While most identity studies in STEM focus on student identity (Dou et al., 2019), studies on teacher identity are relatively scarce. Although teachers play a central role in student identity development, existing research is often limited to a specific discipline or level of education (Maphosa et al., 2020). This highlights the need to examine STEM teacher identity from a holistic and interdisciplinary perspective. However, there is no systematic review in the existing literature on which teacher groups are most frequently studied, which methods and findings stand out, or which aspects of identity are overlooked. To fill this gap, this systematic literature review aims to analyze research trends on STEM teacher identity in empirical studies indexed in the WoS database, ranging from elementary to high school. Thus, the main research question addressed in this systematic literature review is: What are the research trends and characteristics of empirical studies focusing on STEM teachers' identities?