Reflections on Language Teacher Identity Research

Gary Barkhuizen, Gary Barkhuizen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317286080
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Reflections on Language Teacher Identity Research is the first book to present understandings of language teacher identity (LTI) from a broad range of research fields. Drawing on their personal research experience, 41 contributors locate LTI within their area of expertise by considering their conceptual understanding of LTI and the methodological approaches used to investigate it. The chapters are narrative in nature and take the form of guided reflections within a common chapter structure, with authors embedding their discussions within biographical accounts of their professional lives and research work. Authors weave discussions of LTI into their own research biographies, employing a personal reflective style. This book also looks to future directions in LTI research, with suggestions for research topics and methodological approaches. This is an ideal resource for students and researchers interested in language teacher identity as well as language teaching and research more generally.

1
LANGUAGE TEACHER IDENTITY RESEARCH

An introduction

Gary Barkhuizen

UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND

I have been grappling with the idea of identity for many years in my research—research with language teachers and language learners, study-abroad sojourners, immigrants, prisoners, and military personnel. I have theorized the concept in different ways and used various methodological approaches to explore identity. I have asked my research participants questions about their identity and to tell me identity stories. I have tried to figure out their identities from what they say in interviews and what they write in journals and surveys, and I have reported findings that describe and interrogate identity. I use the word “identity” a lot in my publications. But with all this activity I have never felt absolutely comfortable with what it means. Different theoretical perspectives inform different understandings and uses of identity—poststructuralism, sociocultural and dialogical theories, communities of practice, social identity theory—some more fashionable than others at different paradigmatic moments in time. But I am concerned with what it means to me. And since I have been an English teacher at college and high school levels and have been involved in teacher education for many years, I am interested in teacher identity, specifically language teacher identity (LTI).

We hear over and over again that LTI is hard to define, or that many definitions exist, or that we shouldn’t even try to define it. Every time a definition pops up in the literature there are both those who critique it and those who agree with it and use it to frame their own research work. When my graduate research students embark on an identity-related research project, for instance, they often begin to panic when confronted with the challenge of finding an appropriate theoretical framework to inform the conceptualization and design of their study. What is clear, is that they want to focus on the topic of identity—they see it as important and useful in their professional lives, and they find the idea of delving into people’s identities intriguing. But once they start to explore the theoretical and empirical literature, things become a bit murky and choices are hard to make.

The aim of this book is to make things less murky. I like to think of it as LTI unplugged—a sort of stripping back of the sometimes complex rhetoric surrounding discussions of LTI. To achieve this I asked a number of experienced researchers in the fields of applied linguistics and TESOL to reflect on LTI within their areas of expertise—41 accepted the invitation! The aim of the book is thus to collectively explore and present understandings of LTI grounded in a range of relevant research fields from the perspective of experienced scholars and researchers. Drawing on their personal research experience, each contributor locates LTI within their respective area of expertise and research activity by considering their conceptual understanding or definition of LTI and the methodological approaches used to investigate LTI. The chapters are narrative in nature, with authors embedding their discussions within biographical accounts of their professional lives and research work. The chapters therefore include a limited number of references, to decrease the murkiness even further, and they take the form of guided reflections within a common chapter structure.

In sum, the book attempts to take stock of current thinking and research on LTI from the perspective of experienced researchers. It also looks forward—to future directions in LTI research, which includes making concrete suggestions for research topics and methodological approaches. When constructing their chapters the authors were asked to answer the following questions:

1. What do I see as the place of language teacher identity in my field of expertise/research?
2. What is my definition/conception of language teacher identity?
3. What future developments do I see for language teacher identity research in my field?

Each chapter starts with a brief biographical statement, outlining the authors’ professional experiences and positioning themselves within their area of expertise/research. Three sections follow covering the questions above. Along the way authors weave into their answers their own research biographies, employing a personal reflective style. The chapters are short, focused, personal, and readable. All end with suggestions for research topics and related methodologies.

Theorizing LTI

Overall, then, the chapters offer a broad coverage of current thinking about LTI in a range of language education subdisciplines. In 2005, Varghese, Morgan, Johnston, and Johnson, in a highly cited article, said that “Language teacher identity is an emerging subject of interest in research on language teacher education and teacher development. Yet relatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which teacher identity is theorized” (p. 21). Firstly, they are right in that LTI is currently gaining a lot of attention from researchers; at almost any conference nowadays one can find presentations and symposia on the topic, edited books and monographs are appearing, graduate researchers are writing dissertations and theses on LTI-related topics, and I know of at least two top-tier journals publishing special issues on aspects of LTI (e.g., TESOL Quarterly, 2016; Modern Language Journal, 2017). Secondly, Varghese and colleagues point out that there has been little attention paid to theorizing LTI. That may have been the case a decade ago, but more and more, as I have pointed out above, we see attempts to make sense of LTI by drawing on various theoretical perspectives, particularly those borrowed from psychology, (socio)linguistics, general education, and even philosophy. This book contributes to these endeavors by theorizing LTI from the ground up; to start with the experiences and mostly unplugged reflections of the scholars and researchers who contributed chapters.

I realize that producing any single definition of LTI is improbable, exclusionary, and possibly counterproductive. However, in this chapter I am going to give it a try. Below, I present a definition of LTI that encapsulates the many ideas about LTI generated in the reflections of the authors in this book. To produce this definition, or more accurately a composite conceptualization of LTI, I conducted a content analysis of each chapter searching for the main themes that relate to theoretical ideas about LTI. I have tried to be as inclusive as possible, so that the many ideas in the chapters will to some extent be “visible” in the reduced definition. I acknowledge the danger of too much inclusiveness and too much reduction, to the point that the definition may become almost meaningless! However, I do believe that the exercise has produced a definition which provides a statement, tentative as it may be, about current thinking in a wide range of areas in which language teachers work, and in this book these include: language teacher education and professional development, second language writing, multilingual education, teacher reflection and research, (critical) pedagogy, teacher autonomy, distance teaching, materials development, and study abroad.

A definition, of course, is not a theory. What I propose is that my definition be interpreted variously from different theoretical perspectives as well as from different contextual realities (e.g., spaces where teacher education and language teaching are practiced), and possibly prompt alternative ways of thinking about LTI. From one particular theoretical perspective or set of contextual realities certain facets of the definition may be more or less relevant, and from other perspectives and realities other facets may be. Different arrangements of the facets—their interconnections and salience—would also reflect different theoretical perspectives and contextual realities. The definition, therefore, does not propose a grand narrative of LTI or claim ideological neutrality (Varghese, et al., 2005). Instead it invites relative, situated reflection, interpretation, development, and use by teachers and researchers. The definition, or composite conceptualization, is as follows:

Language teacher identities (LTIs) are cognitive, social, emotional, ideological, and historical—they are both inside the teacher and outside in the social, material and technological world. LTIs are being and doing, feeling and imagining, and storying. They are struggle and harmony: they are contested and resisted, by self and others, and they are also accepted, acknowledged and valued, by self and others. They are core and peripheral, personal and professional, they are dynamic, multiple, and hybrid, and they are foregrounded and backgrounded. And LTIs change, short-term and over time—discursively in social interaction with teacher educators, learners, teachers, administrators, and the wider community, and in material interaction with spaces, places and objects in classrooms, institutions, and online.

The definition explained

In this section, I consider the various facets of the LTI definition in turn. In doing so, I include excerpts from all the chapters in the book. They are not representative of the entire chapter from which they come—they are selected merely to serve an illustrative and supportive purpose for the particular facet under discussion.

1. Language teacher identities (LTIs) are cognitive, social, emotional, ideological, and historical …
   LTIs are cognitive in that language teachers constantly strive to make sense of themselves; reflexively, they work towards understanding who they are and who they desire or fear to be. LTIs are also cognitive because they concern teachers’ beliefs, theories, and philosophies about language teaching, and they relate to both content and pedagogical knowledge. LTIs are also obviously social. They are enacted, constructed, negotiated, and projected with others—language learners, teacher colleagues, administrators, and policy makers—within both local (e.g., in the classroom) and more global contexts (e.g., the language teaching profession). Therefore, language teacher identity indexes both social structure and human agency, which shift over historical time and social context. Also important are the language teacher’s hopes and desires for the future, and their imagined identities (Norton).
   Norton’s excerpt makes reference to the social and the individual, and also to emotion—the hopes and desires of teachers. Barcelos links emotion to cognitions: The more central a belief and more connected to their emotions, the more influential it is to their identities. Norton further references the historical dimension of LTI, as does Menard-Warwick: I tell my students that we author our identities in discourse by drawing upon historically available resources—the resources that our lives have made available to us. These resources include teachers’ language learning experiences. Kalaja, for example, points to the contrast between the desired teaching practices of the student-teachers she works with and the way they learned languages: When envisioning entering the profession of teaching, the students would emphasize the social nature of learning English in contrast to their past experiences as learners of the language.
   Because LTIs are social, they are always negotiated, and thus ideological. Those involved in language education have different views about what is right and wrong, what is good and bad practice, and what should and what should not happen in classrooms, schools, and the profession as a whole, and some people have more power than others to make decisions regarding the outcome of these dilemmas. In critical pedagogy, for instance, Kubota says that teacher identity is often located in a site where teachers and students struggle to negotiate their ideological difference. In sum, considering the complexity of LTI, Clarke’s remark is apt: I am fascinated by its paradoxical nature, as something that is at once individual and social, symbolic and material, familiar but alien, impossible yet also indispensable.
2. … they are both inside the teacher and outside in the social, material, and technological world.
   This facet of LTI reinforces the interrelationship between the individual dimensions of LTI and the social. “Inside” simply refers to the individual—aspects of LTI that are associated with a particular teacher, a particular physical body, whether they be cognitive, emotional or biographical. “Outside” refers to the external, social world, and Duff notes their connection: Language teacher identity … arises out of the intersections within and across two particular sets of factors: (1) personal biography … and (2) local socio-educational contexts. As does Cheung: My identity as a second language writing teacher has evolved over time because of changes in internal and external factors. Internal factors refer to my emotional state … external factors, such as work environment and job circumstances. “Outside” thus includes interactions with people and with spaces and places, but the nature of the inside-outside relationship is viewed in different, not necessarily opposing, ways.
   Martel signals that identities can be designated or imposed from the outside: In symbolic interactionist terms, actual identities refer to negotiated identity positions, an internal-to-the-teacher construct, while designated identities refer to role expectations, an external-to-the-teacher construct. Role expectations and identities are in continual, mutually shaping interaction with each other. Varghese notes the centrality of language and power for negotiating and constructing LTIs in interaction: Identities in discourse captures a more poststructuralist definition that underscores the importance of language, power, and situatedness in this definition. And Mercer describes how the internal self and external context are dynamically integrated: The self as a CDS [complex dynamic system] integrates context into the system as opposed to viewing contexts as being outside of the supposed internal self influencing from an external position.
   Also outside within ecological spaces is the teacher’s arrangement of and engagement with material objects such as furniture in classrooms and teaching/learning materials; for example, the way teachers prepare and use materials during lessons: My professional identity plays an important role in my teaching not only in terms of how I teach but also how I present myself and the materials for teaching and learning (Matsuda). White extends materiality to the technological world: Reflection and critically adaptive learning … is closely related to identity formation in particular settings (e.g., moderating online discussion lists, providing feedback on assessments, working within multimodal distance environments, embarking on course design processes).
3. LTIs are being and doing, feeling and imagining, and storying.
   It is now widely recognized that LTIs are not something teachers possess, like an object, but rather something they do or perform—LTIs are relational. Farrell, for example, says: For me the core of identity is manifested in how people enact roles in different settings. Teachers perform being teachers, for example, when they give lessons in the classroom, grade assignments, and participate in professional development workshops. When they talk with parents about their children’s language learning progress they are performing their LTI. Morgan emphasizes the relational nature of identity: The performative display of an alternative or transgressive image-text is always dialogic and negotiated, suggesting possibilities rather than certainties. LTIs are neither certain, therefore, nor static.
   From a complex dynamic system perspective, Teacher identity … is a fractal system because it is a complex interactive system; it changes, self-organizes, and adapts to the environment (Menezes). And from a sociocultural perspective, Golombek’s language teacher education work continues to grapple with tensions in LTI by exploring how teachers’ emotional and cognitive dissonance in response to classroom activity points to contradictions in feeling, thinking, and doing that can be mediated to promote teacher development. Emotions or feelings are associated with thinking and teacher activity in the doing of identity. But LTIs are not always about here-and-now pe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Language teacher identity research: An introduction
• 2 Tangled up with everything else: Toward new conceptions of language, teachers, and identities
• 3 Teacher autonomy and teacher agency
• 4 Becoming a language teaching professional: What’s identity got to do with it?
• 5 Journey to the center of language teacher identity
• 6 Towards sociolinguistically informed language teacher identities
• 7 Language teacher educator identity and language teacher identity: Towards a social justice perspective
• 8 Recognizing the local in language teacher identity
• 9 Narratives of identity: Reflections on English language teachers, teaching, and educational opportunity
• 10 The tension between conflicting plots
• 11 Multilingual identity in teaching multilingual writing
• 12 Language teacher identity in troubled times
• 13 Learner investment and language teacher identity
• 14 Identity, innovation, and learning to teach a foreign/second language
• 15 Boundary disputes in self
• 16 Understanding language teachers’ sense-making in action through the prism of future self guides
• 17 Searching for identity in distance language teaching
• 18 Second language teacher identity and study abroad
• 19 Becoming a researcher: A journey of inquiry
• 20 Identity and teacher research
• 21 “This life-changing experience”: Teachers be(com)ing action researchers
• 22 Teacher identity in second language teacher education
• 23 Identities as emotioning and believing
• 24 Grappling with language teacher identity
• 25 Situating aff ect, ethics, and policy in LTI research
• 26 Language teacher identity in teacher education
• 27 Language teacher identities and socialization
• 28 Acknowledging the generational and aff ective aspects of language teacher identity
• 29 “Who I am is how I teach”: Reflecting on language teacher professional role identity;
• 30 Questioning the identity turn in language teacher (educator) research
• 31 “English is a way of travelling, Finnish the station from which you set out”: Reflections on the identities of L2 teachers in the context of Finland
• 32 Language teacher identity as critical social practice
• 33 Critical language teacher identity
• 34 Who we are: Teacher identity, race, empire, and nativeness
• 35 Reflecting on my flight path
• 36 Feminist language teacher identity research
• 37 Identity dilemmas and research agendas
• 38 Second language writing teacher identity
• 39 Writing teacher identity: Current knowledge and future research
• 40 Multiple selves, materials, and teacher identity
• 41 Language teaching identity: A fractal system
• 42 The intimate alterity of identity
• Index