A Data-Driven Conceptualization of Language Teacher Identity (original) (raw)
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Research on teacher identity construction has been widely conducted. The results yielded common theoretical underpinnings that teacher identity is a complex construct. In spite of its significance in teacher education programs, little attention has been on preservice teachers’ construction of teacher identity from their past learning experiences. It is for that reason that the present study was enacted. Employing a narrative inquiry approach, this study documented one male preservice teacher’s accounts of his past learning experiences and how he shaped the teacher identity for his future teaching profession. The results of this study uncovered that pedagogical decision was effectively made by the participant after reflecting on his past learning experiences. It, additionally, helped reshape his complex identity as a future teacher in engaging students to learn. This paper ends with proposals for future research in preservice teacher education programs.
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Language teacher identity (LTI) has recently become a prominent theme in the second language teacher education (SLTE) research because teacher identities play a major role in teachers' learning-to-teach processes and instructional practices. Teacher identity refers to teachers' dynamic self-conception and imagination of themselves as teachers, which shifts as they participate in varying communities, interact with other individuals, and position themselves (and are positioned by others) in social contexts. Therefore, it casts an influence upon a wide array of matters, ranging from how language teachers learn to perform their profession, how they practice theory and theorize their practice, how they educate their students, and how they interact and collaborate with their colleagues in their social setting. This paper offers a conceptual framework for LTI that explicates the interrelationships between teacher identity and these core constructs: teacher learning, teacher cognition, teachers' participation in communities of practice, contextual factors, teacher biographies, and teacher emotions.
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Recent literature in teacher education addresses the issue of identity as students learn to become teachers and undergo a changing sense of who they are as professionals (Freese, 2006; Hoban, 2007; Olsen, 2008). Teacher identity, a complex and dynamic phenomenon with links to the self and agency, combines both a personal and professional dimension, involving notions not only of Who am I? but also of Who am I as a teacher? and What does this identity mean in terms of the way I teach? Although student teachers may have a developing notion of who they are as teachers as they move through teacher education programs, the shift from the protected environment of such programs into initial practice in schools can be destabilizing and is a period of identity change worthy of investigation (Riopel, 2006). The influence of a school context has an effect on the often fragile identity of a newly formed teacher (Day, Kington, Stobart, & Sammons, 2006). Moving from a university community of student teachers to the community of a school as a new teacher implies multiple tensions as adaptations and adjustments to identity are necessitated or provoked. We understand this period as an intense identity experience, a time when the new school context causes a beginning teacher to question and perhaps reframe her developing identity. We are interested in the identity shifts in the boundary space represented by the period between learning to be a teacher and reaching the end of several months of initial practice; in other words, our focus is on the first months of initial practice. The study reported in this paper recognizes the importance of this shift into initial practice for the identity of teachers and
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Scholarship on second language (L2) teacher identity from poststructural approaches (Rudolph, Selvi, & Yazan, 2015) has problematized the essentialized notions of professional L2 teacher identity, showing that regardless of “nativeness”, pre- and in-service L2 teachers engage in an ongoing complex process of identity negotiations (Aneja, 2016; Kanno & Stuart, 2011; Reis, 2011). A smaller body of literature focused on more experienced L2 teachers in applied linguistics graduate programs and looked at how they navigate through multiple professional communities (Cho, 2013; Herath & Valencia, 2015; Morita, 2004; Ortaçtepe, 2015). This narrative inquiry contributes to both lines of research and examines professional identity trajectories and negotiations of Zeynep across multiple professional communities over her four and a half year career as a “non-native” English language teacher in Turkey and as a graduate teaching assistant in the United States. The study features a one-year longitudinal design incorporating in-depth semi-structured interviews. Data were analyzed according to trajectories of learning in Communities of Practice (Wenger, 1998). Findings highlighted that unlike a traditional trajectory of participation in a community of practice from periphery towards center, Zeynep’s identity trajectories demonstrated a complex pattern, reconciling multiple identities into one nexus. The findings raised concerns regarding Wenger’s framework, namely concepts of learning through participation, marginality, and the role of power. This chapter provides an analysis of Zeynep’s professional identity trajectories and re-examines above-mentioned concepts. It concludes by recommending an alternative complementary framework, Individual Network of Practice (Zappa-Hollman & Duff, 2015), to investigate professional identity in academic socialization.
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