Despite the growing body of research on teachers' activities on Instagram, little is known about how Iranian teacher-bloggers, educated within the bureaucratic structure of Iran's schooling system, construct their digital identities on this platform. Drawing on a virtual ethnography grounded in interpretivist traditions, the study engaged 23 teacher-bloggers through open-ended questions, narrative frames, semi-structured interviews, and year-long digital observation. The analysis revealed five interrelated dimensions of digital identity: Showcased Self, Professionally Represented Self, Narrative and Hybrid Self, Professional Brand, and Self-Censorship, that together form a depth-progressive semantic network. This network theorizes teachers' digital identity as a layered continuum negotiated simultaneously across the individual, social/professional, and structural/political levels. Theoretically, the study advances a depth-progressive model of constrained digital identity that extends existing frameworks by explaining teachers' fluid and context-sensitive shifts across layers.
