Identity education: A conceptual framework for educational researchers and practitioners

This article presents the concept of identity education (IdEd) referring to the purposeful involvement of educators with students' identity-related processes or contents.We discuss why educators may consider identity important to the realization of educational goals and choose to target aspects of students' identity in their pedagogical practice.We offer a broad theoretical framework that organizes and focuses the extensive yet scattered discourse on identity and education. Because IdEd is a concept that accommodates diverse educational perspectives and concerns, we outline several parameters that can assist educators in making sense of this diversity and provide a conceptual basis for pedagogical and curricular decision making. These parameters also provide researchers from different scholarly traditions a common framework for constructive dialogue and can serve as a basis for generating focused and productive research directions.