Christensen & Weissmann (2025) on using audio diaries for reflection on early career academic teacher identities

In the Introduction to Teaching and Learning course that I teach twice each year, we include a compulsory “individual reflection”, where participants pick an experience they have had in a higher education context, as student or teacher, and reflect on it in the context of the theory they learn during the course. While most participants choose to write a 2-page document, some also take the opportunity to explore other formats, including recording audio. In our case, this is a fairly scripted audio because it needs to fulfill the same criteria as a written paper (including, for example, literature references), but participants who chose that format still report that it makes it easier for them to express themselves themselves authentically. So in that context, I was very intrigued by Christensen & Weissmann (2025)’s article on “Exploring early career academic teacher identities: using the audio diary method for reflection and research.”

They ask participants of their study to keep an audio diary over 2 months using fairly general prompts on thoughts about your job and descriptions of the situations which triggered those thoughts, and how they view themselves as a teacher now and in the future. After two months, they bring everybody together in a focus group interview and discuss the process of using the audio diaries themselves (which they want to know for their research on whether this works as a tool), but then also about their teacher identity and their significant others in a teaching context.

The authors find that audio diaries help people reflect, are perceived as less work than it would have been to write, feel personal (since they know which of the authors they are addressing, so even though it is a one-way communication, it is still perceived as a conversation with that person, a proxy-colleague, especially important when there are no other colleagues to discuss teaching with). But they also stress that they are not good enough as a stand-alone reflection tool. While they definitely support reflection and make higher-level discussions in the focus group interview possible, they do need that element of discussion, too.

One sidenote that I found really interesting is how one participant describes that how they see themselves in the future (as guest lecturer rather than course responsible) is misaligned with what they would like to do (mentor students over a longer period of time). The authors interpret this as the framework of the institution creating boundaries and influencing the development of teacher identity, and I can relate to that to some extent. Except that in my own negotiations of my identity, my teacher identity won over my researcher identity, and I changed jobs to be able to live that. But who knows what the participant did after those two months ended…

I also find it interesting that the authors bring up how tools like these in academic development could be perceived as surveillance, and that participants were concerned about privacy (expressed in that they mostly recorded the messages at home, rather than in the office, or hoped that no colleague would come in while they were recording). But I wonder how much of that is about wanting to keep their teacher identity private, and how much is just that this is not a format they, and their colleagues, are used to, and that might therefore seem weird if someone “caught” them doing it?

But those concerns aside, wouldn’t it be interesting to combine audio diaries with a mentoring scheme for early career teachers, at least as one tool that they explore for their reflections, especially if they want to find a low-threshold, easy-to-implement-regularly one? Transcripts of diary entries could also be used as quotes in teaching portfolio to document development over time… Definitely an interesting idea to explore more in the future!

Christensen, M. K., & Weissmann, E. A. (2025). Exploring early career academic teacher identities: using the audio diary method for reflection and research. Teaching in Higher Education, 1-17.