The Teacher Self Construction of Language Teachers
Submitted by Nelly Paulina Trejo Guzmán, to the University of Exeter as a thesis
for the degree of Doctor of Education in TESOL, February, 2010.
This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright
material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper
acknowledgement.
I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified
and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a
degree by this or any other University.
______________________________
Dedication
To language teachers and learners, whose lives represent a rich source for learning.
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Acknowledgements
Writing this doctoral dissertation has been one of the most challenging experiences
in my professional life. Throughout this journey there have been several persons
who guided me and gave me their support, and friendship. I thank my supervisors
Jill Cadorath and Sarah Rich for their insightful comments, which always
encouraged me to learn and grow as a researcher. I am also grateful for their
continuous support and kindness during these years, without Jill and Sarah this
experience would not have been as enriching as it was.
My gratitude goes to the institution where I work, who supported me during my
years of research. My superiors and my colleagues were also important inspirational
sources throughout this time. By being who they are they gave me the opportunity to
grow not only as a researcher, but also as a person. I hope I can be able to do for
them as much as they have done for me.
Finally, two persons who were unconditionally by my side through every step I gave
were my husband Alberto and our son, Albertito. I am deeply thankful with them for
their love and faith in me. They are the best proof of how deeply intertwined
personal and professional lives can be and of how one can become a source of
empowerment for the other.
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Contents
Abstract ........................................................................................................................ 9
List of abbreviations .................................................................................................. 10
1. Introduction ............................................................................................................ 11
1.1 Rationale for the study ......................................................................................... 11
1.2 The focus of the study.......................................................................................... 13
1.3 The central concepts of the study ........................................................................ 15
1.4 The aim, objectives, and research questions of the study .................................... 17
1.6 Significance of the study ..................................................................................... 18
1.5 Organisation of the study ..................................................................................... 19
2. Research Setting .................................................................................................... 21
2.1 The status of English language learning in Mexico ............................................ 21
2.2 The North East State University .......................................................................... 22
2.2.1 Development Plans ....................................................................................... 23
2.2.3 The status of English language teaching in NESU ....................................... 24
The institutional English language teaching programme .................................. 25
The English language teachers’ professional development programme ........... 25
2.3 The Centre for Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics .............................. 26
2.3.1 CLTAL’s language teaching faculty ............................................................ 27
2.3.2 CLTAL’s professional development programme ......................................... 28
3. Review of the literature.......................................................................................... 30
3.1 Self and identity ................................................................................................... 31
3.1.1 Traditional conceptions of self and identity ................................................. 32
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3.1.2 Modern conceptions of self and identity ...................................................... 33
3.1.3 Postmodern conceptions of self and identity ................................................ 36
3.2 The importance of self and identity in educational research ............................... 38
3.2.1 Self and identity research within the TESOL area ....................................... 40
3.3 Traditional teacher self and identity research ...................................................... 42
3.4 Modern teacher self and identity research ........................................................... 45
3.5 Postmodern teacher self and identity research..................................................... 48
3.6 Conception of self and identity in this research project ...................................... 51
3.6.1 Personal, professional and student teacher identities. .................................. 55
4. Methodology .......................................................................................................... 60
4.1 The theoretical perspectives that guide educational research. ............................. 61
4.2 Theoretical perspective to the study .................................................................... 62
4.3 Research Design .................................................................................................. 65
4.3.1 The research aim and questions .................................................................... 67
4.3.2 Selection of participants ............................................................................... 68
4.4 Data-collection methods ...................................................................................... 70
4.4.1 Data-collection procedures ........................................................................... 71
Seeking approval................................................................................................ 71
Piloting the interviews ....................................................................................... 72
Approaching participants ................................................................................... 73
The first interview .............................................................................................. 74
The second interview ......................................................................................... 74
Interviewing issues ............................................................................................ 75
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How the interviews became narratives .............................................................. 76
4.5 Data analysis ........................................................................................................ 77
4.6 Ethical considerations .......................................................................................... 79
4.7 Limitations ........................................................................................................... 81
5. Results .................................................................................................................... 83
5.1 Summary of the participants’ life histories .......................................................... 84
5.1.1 Daniela .......................................................................................................... 84
5.1.2 Gloria ............................................................................................................ 86
5.1.3 Tania ............................................................................................................. 87
5.1.4 Alejandra ....................................................................................................... 88
5.1.5 Raúl ............................................................................................................... 90
5.1.6 Laura ............................................................................................................. 92
5.2 Analysis of participants’ life histories ................................................................. 93
5.2.1 Becoming an English language teacher. ....................................................... 94
5.2.2 Influence of personal and professional context ............................................ 97
Learners ............................................................................................................. 98
Leaders ............................................................................................................. 102
Family .............................................................................................................. 107
5.2.3 Influence of formal learning experiences ................................................... 110
The role of teachers.......................................................................................... 111
The role of colleagues ...................................................................................... 114
The emerging student teacher identity............................................................. 117
Reflexivity and teacher self formation ............................................................ 118
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Strengthening of agency .................................................................................. 120
5.2.4 Evolving views of teacher self .................................................................... 122
Emerging teacher self ...................................................................................... 122
Current views of teacher self ........................................................................... 125
New ideal teacher selves .................................................................................. 129
6. Discussion of findings ......................................................................................... 133
6.1 Teacher self construction, reconstruction in the context of CLTAL. ................ 135
6.1.1 Micro-social influences .............................................................................. 136
6.1.2 Macro-social influences .............................................................................. 139
6.2 Teacher emotions as transformative sources of the teacher self ....................... 141
6.2.1 The role of subjectivity and reflexivity in teacher emotions ...................... 145
Subjectivity and reflexivity as catalysers of emotions of empowerment ........ 147
Subjectivity and reflexivity as catalysers of emotions of alienation ............... 149
6.3 Interrelatedness between teacher self formation, values and emotions ............. 151
7. Conclusions and implications .............................................................................. 154
7.1 Implications for practitioners ............................................................................. 157
7.1.1 For teachers ................................................................................................. 157
7.1.2 For teacher educators .................................................................................. 158
7.1.3For school leaders ........................................................................................ 160
7.1.4 For researchers ............................................................................................ 161
7.2 Concluding remarks ........................................................................................... 162
Appendix 1 Participants’ profiles ........................................................................... 163
Appendix 2 Administration approval request .......................................................... 165
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Appendix 3 Informed consent form ......................................................................... 166
Appendix 4 Example of interview schedule design ................................................ 168
Appendix 5 Excerpt from interview ........................................................................ 170
Appendix 6 Example of initial color-coding ........................................................... 172
Appendix 7 Example of identification of emerging themes .................................... 174
References ................................................................................................................ 175
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Abstract
The main purpose of this thesis is to deepen the current understanding of how the
teacher self is constructed. Specifically, the study intends to integrate into this
understanding the way in which language personal, professional, and student teacher
identities inform this process. A special emphasis is placed on the role that language
teachers’ life histories play on the construction of teacher selves.
Narrative research constitutes the research design for this thesis project since I
strongly believe that selves are narratively constructed through stories. This study is
focused on the storied self (Chase, 2005) that is co-constructed between the
researcher and narrator that reveals how personal, professional, and student teacher
identities resist and interact with discursive environments in order to create and
recreate a language teacher’s self.
Life histories constitute the source of data collection in this study. This facilitated
the construction of a broader understanding of how six language teachers’ personal,
professional, and student teacher identities are shaped throughout a lifetime and the
way these impact the formation of the teacher self. The results suggest that language
teachers’ selves are in close relation to emotions. Language teachers negotiate their
identities and emotions in order to make sense of the different sets of values that the
social context presents to them. This in turn leads them to create/recreate their own
teacher selves that serve as sources of agency that generates new sets of social/moral
rules or stagnation that leads to the preservation of the current status quo. The thesis
concludes by providing a series of suggestions tailored to the needs of the teaching
context where this research took place with the purpose of fostering a continuous
engagement with individual actors and socio-cultural factors that motivate
transformation through reflection.
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List of abbreviations
BA
Bachelor of Arts
CELE
Centre for Foreign Languages
CLTAL
Centre for Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics
ELT
English Language Teaching
ESL
English as a Second Language
FLE
Foreign Language Education
NESU
North East State University
PI
Professional Identity
PND
Mexico’s National Development Plan
SEP
Mexico’s Public Education Secretary
TESOL
Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages
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1. Introduction
The study of teachers’ identities and selves began to gradually gain importance in
educational research from the early nineties as they were considered important
factors that determined to a great extent teachers’ professional development
pathways. The earlier research conducted in this area provided ample evidence on
the kinds of influences that give shape to student teachers’ and teachers’ identities
and the impact this has on their professional practice and knowledge (e.g. Antonek,
McCormick, & Donato, 1997; Beijaard, Verloop, & Vermunt, 2000; Goodson &
Cole, 1994). More recently, Day, Kington, Stobart, & Sammons (2005) have
claimed that teachers’ emotional or personal identities have not received sufficient
attention from educational researchers which leads to an incomplete understanding
of issues such as teacher motivation, satisfaction or commitment to the job.
The purpose of this thesis project is to investigate the way in which language
teachers’ selves are constructed, taking into consideration three main constituents of
their selves: personal, professional, and student teacher identities.
1.1 Rationale for the study
There were two main reasons why I decided to conduct this study. The first is
related to my personal experience as a language teacher and student teacher.
Throughout the years of my teaching practice I noted that most of the problems that
arose when implementing educational change, promoting professional development,
or selecting coordinators in my teaching context stemmed from not taking into
consideration the language teaching faculty’s opinions. Educational leaders seemed
many times to be taking decisions based solely on their understanding of what
teachers appear to need in terms of professional development. Leaders’ attention
appeared to be mainly concentrated on teachers’ attainment levels and never took
the time to reflect on the reasons why these attainment levels increased or decreased.
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The second reason is related to the contextual issues that stress the importance of
conducting research in this area. In 2003 the North East State University (NESU)
and the Centre for Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics and (CLTAL)1
began an ambitious project that aimed at professionalising the latter’s foreign
language teaching faculty and implemented courses of action such as offering
international language teaching certification courses and granting scholarships for
postgraduate studies overseas. In spite of this, the CLTAL continues to have a large
student population and a teaching staff who do little collegial work or conduct
research. There is also a very low teacher retention rate and most of the faculty
members who received financial support to do postgraduate study abroad have left
the institution (eight out of twelve). This seems to suggest that educational
administrators and leaders tend to frequently ignore the fact that every teacher is
undergoing a continuous transformation of their self and that any kind of educational
reform requires a better knowledge of teachers’ selves in order to understand what
they consider valuable and why they act in the ways that they do.
According to Taylor (1992), every person holds specific ideas regarding the sort of
person they would like to become, the project of their ‘selves’. These projects are
made, up to a great extent, of moral, ethical and aesthetical values. Whenever this
‘ideal self’ is not consistent with what is valued in their social contexts, individuals
tend to either generate resistance actions that enable a performance that is consistent
with their ideal self, or to capitulate to the context’s values adjusting their ideal self
to the demands that the context presents. The way in which teaching contexts
influence the construction of teacher selves and their professional decisions is an
1
For confidentiality purposes the names of the institutions have been changed.
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issue that deserves thorough investigation since financial and human resources run
the risk of being wasted if language teachers selves are not taken into consideration
during decision-making processes.
Unfortunately, there are neither institutional documents nor studies that support
some of the claims made above. Most of this information comes from anecdotal
evidence that I have become familiar with after holding informal conversations with
my colleagues where I have discussed issues of job commitment, loyalty to the
institution, and motivation to initiate new educational projects. However, this
suggests the need to conduct research that not only takes a close look at how
language teachers’ professional selves are constructed but also acknowledges the
impact that personal, professional and student teacher identities have on the
construction of teachers’ selves.
1.2 The focus of the study
Language teachers selves are multifaceted and in continuous transformation due to
the influence of factors such as training, educational and professional experiences
and the teaching context. Other factors that to my view also play an important role
in the construction of teacher selves are our social, cultural and family experiences.
In other words, teacher selves have increasingly become a “complex project of daily
living” (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000: X) due to the multiplicity of everyday
discursive influences which they face in their personal and professional lives. What I
intend to explore in this research project is the way in which personal, student
teacher, and professional identities give shape to language teachers’ selves.
More specifically, the study explores how these distinct identities and selves interact
with each other in order to construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct a teacher’s self
through the discourse of participants’ life stories. I sought to collect the life stories
of English language teachers, focusing initially on the life experiences that brought
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them to the profession. This was with the purpose of finding out which identities and
values constituted a pivotal source from where their selves as language teachers
stemmed. I also sought to investigate the way in which personal, student teachers’
and professional identities interacted with each other and illuminated the
participants’ professional decision-making processes throughout their teaching
career.
When making attempts to understand how personal, student-teachers and
professional identities contribute to the construction of teachers’ selves, it was
similarly important to distinguish between the lived self (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000)
and the storied self (Chase, 2005). My understanding of the lived self is the self
which every person, in this case language teachers, constructs through their
motivations, choices and actions. The lived self can get to be known and understood
through observation and ethnographic studies. The storied self is the reconstruction
we make of our lived self through the narration of life stories; it is in a way the
storyteller’s interpretation of his or her own life. This study is more focused on the
storied self that is co-constructed between researcher and narrator, the narrative that
is produced in a specific social setting (a language centre) and that reveals how
axiological frameworks, and personal, professional and student teacher identities
resist and interact with discursive environments in order to create and recreate a
language teacher’s self. However, the lived self was an ever-present entity
throughout the data-collection stage since it is practically impossible for a person to
disengage themselves from “the self they live by” (Hosltein & Gubrium, 2000).
Simon-Maeda (2004) claims that language teachers’ identity features stem from a
continuously changing network of personal, social, and cultural circumstances. In a
similar vein Varghese, Morgan, Johnston & Johnson (2005) contend that in order to
fully understand the complexity of a teacher’s self a multiplicity of theoretical
approaches is of cardinal importance. These are some of the reasons why this study
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looks at how language teachers’ selves are constructed taking into consideration
three different aspects of identity (personal, professional and student teacher). It is
through the interrelatedness of these notions that the conceptual framework that
guides the present study was developed, which is explained in more detail in
Chapter 3. Another aspect that was equally important in the study was an
understanding of how the conceptions of identity evolved throughout time and
across paradigms. This served to emphasise the meeting points that traditional,
modern and post-structural understandings of identity have in order to conduct a
piece of research that leads to the provision of results that encourage moral, critical
and democratic practices within the language teaching profession.
In the following section I will provide a brief explanation of the central concepts that
will be explored and that constituted a major influence that guided the present study.
1.3 The central concepts of the study
It is essential to have a clear understanding of the central concepts that guide the
present study in order to establish the foundations that uphold it. This research
project comprehends an analysis of professional, student teacher and personal
identities as essential components of the teacher self.
The conception of self in this research endeavor understands it as a project of
everyday life (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000). This means that the self is still
understood as a social entity influenced by culture and society. This self is also
characterised by individuality which is the result of the combined action between
agency and subjectivity. Contextual circumstances constitute a powerful source for
the formation of self. However, the self is not a passive entity that simply
incorporates the discourse of institutional contexts. The influence that self and
society exert on each other is thus always bidirectional. The creation of personal
narratives through reflexivity and subjectivity, that is to say through an ongoing
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conversation with oneself in order to create unique understandings, are equally
important to generate a self that is recreated as we live and perform different roles in
society and influence this society. The present study focuses on what I have decided
to call “teacher self,” which is basically the discourse that is co-created between
researcher and participants when narrating the story of their lives but paying special
attention to their lives as language teachers.
In this piece of work self and identity are understood as differentiated but wholly
integrated entities. According to Stets & Burke (2003) every position that a self
occupies in society constitutes an identity. The performance of different roles in
society constitutes the source of identities, that is to say, if a person is a father, a
teacher, and a golf player he will enact each of these distinct identities in different
social contexts. Social interaction is thus commonly sustained between fragments of
persons’ selves. However, it is possible for more than one identity to be present in a
social situation. Multiple identities give shape and structure to the self, in other
words, when two or more of our identities converge in a social context the self
begins to emerge. For example, at work a person can enact their professional
identity but if they have a close friendship with a colleague they will also enact their
personal identity. Colleagues who have close friendships will thus have a fuller
understanding of each other’s selves and will understand better their thoughts,
feelings and actions.
In the specific case of language teaching, professional and personal identities are
frequently simultaneously enacted in the language classroom. This is due to the
nature of the interaction that is held in language classrooms where many aspects of
students and teachers personal identities are shared. There is a third identity that
similarly plays an important role for language teachers: that of student teachers.
Language teachers frequently become lifelong learners and most of the things they
learn have a strong impact on what happens inside their language classrooms. This is
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why I argue that professional, personal and student teacher identities are intimately
tied to participants’ professional decision-making processes in their teaching career.
Personal, professional, and student teacher identities constitute an important drive
that determines to a great extent the importance that language teachers give to their
teacher selves in their lives.
Finally, every person constructs through experience and incorporates into the self a
set of expectations of how identities should be performed. This set of expectations
comprise a self’s axiological framework (Taylor, 1992). It is constructed in a very
similar way to self and identities: through a mixed influence of culture, society,
subjectivity and reflexivity. According to Taylor (1992) we have an innate capacity
to distinguish right from wrong; the sort of things that lead us to live a good life. He
conceives morality and selfhood as profoundly intertwined. The axiological
framework appears to play a central role in determining the way our identities are
constructed and the sort of actions that we undertake. This is why it constitutes an
important component of the self that deserves thorough exploration.
1.4 The aim, objectives, and research questions of the study
This study intends to provide a contribution that expands the discussion on how
language teachers’ selves are constructed. The aim of the study is to deepen the
current understanding of how personal, professional, and student teacher identities
impact on the creation and recreation of the teacher self.
The objectives of this research intend to develop an understanding of:
 the way language teachers’ selves are developed;
 the role that personal, professional and student-teacher identities play in the
construction of teachers’ selves;
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 the ways in which professional development initiatives can be supported
through a fuller awareness of teachers’ selves
In order to meet these objectives I shall seek to answer the following questions:
 What sort of social and contextual influences have the greatest impact on the
construction of language teachers’ selves?
 What is the role of subjectivity and reflexivity in the construction of language
teachers’ selves?
1.6 Significance of the study
Even though the role that values play in teacher self construction has increasingly
been gaining importance in the literature on teacher self and identity formation, this
has not been taken into consideration in the Mexican EFL teaching context. An
example of this issue is the efforts being made by the ministry of education at a
national level to offer bilingual education in the public primary schools sector. A
great deal of emphasis is being placed on levels of coverage of this programme
(http://www.programa-ingles.net/site/images/maparesultados_.jpg) which suggests
an unproblematic link between levels of coverage and quality of teaching. In other
words, the quality of language teaching is simply reduced to the number of students
being taught the language without taking into consideration that an understanding of
language teachers’ selves and identities is a central factor in the design and
development of teaching standards.
There has also been an effort in the institution where this research took place to
improve the quality of language teaching. In a study carried out on 2003, Roux &
Mora conducted an evaluation of the general state of the CLTAL and made a series
of recommendations aimed at the professionalisation of EFL teachers such as the
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improvement of the faculty’s profile through the acquisition of language teaching
qualifications, namely higher degrees and international certifications.
I argue that while teaching qualifications are very important and even desirable in
any effort to improve the quality of teaching provided by an educational institution,
there is more to do. There remains a need to generate knowledge about the role that
identities play in the formation of the teacher self. In particular, it is important to
generate knowledge that can inform the design of new policies intended to improve
the quality of language teaching in this area that goes beyond an understanding of
language teachers as mere degree holders. I argue that the discourses of formal
training may mean there is a danger that quality teaching may be understood in
technical terms only, leaving teacher self formation processes unexamined.
The results provided by this study may also be relevant to administrative decisions
concerning education policies and goals intended to prepare TESOL professionals.
That is to say, an understanding of identity formation issues may be useful for the
design of language teaching education programmes in helping prospective teachers
to address restrictive or inequitable societal conditions in their teaching contexts.
Finally, this study may provide insights to EFL programme administrators who are
intending to foster greater levels of commitment and permanence of faculty
members through a more holistic understanding of their teacher selves.
1.5 Organisation of the study
To answer the questions posed above and meet the objectives of this research I
present and discuss in this thesis the following things. Following the present
introduction, chapter two contains a description of the research setting and provides
contextual information that serves to justify the need for conducting a piece of
research in this area. Chapter three provides a review of the literature that is relevant
to the present study and introduces the conceptual framework that guided the
19
research process. Chapter four outlines the philosophical and methodological issues
that have influenced the research approach adopted to meet the objectives of this
study. This chapter also provides a description of the research project design, an
explanation of how data were collected and analysed, and a discussion on the
authenticity and trustworthiness of the study along with a reflection on ethical
considerations. Chapter five presents the analysis of the data relating it to the
conceptual framework introduced in chapter three. Chapter six provides the
interpretation of the data presented in the previous chapter and answering the
research questions posed. Finally, chapter seven provides the conclusion to this
thesis and discusses the implications that the findings have on the profession. This
last chapter summarises the research findings that serve as a scaffold for reflection
on the research process and ideas for further research.
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2. Research Setting
The purpose of this chapter is to describe the research setting where the present
study took place. It begins by providing an overview of the status of English
language learning in Mexico in order to set a clear illustration of the general context
where this study took place. This is followed by a brief description of the North East
State University (NESU), the different development plans that have influenced the
financial rewards and professional development opportunities for the teaching
faculty, and the institutional English language programme. The third section
provides a description of the origins and evolution of the Centre for Language
Teaching and Applied Linguistics (CLTAL). The chapter concludes with a
reflection on the complexity of establishing “a research context” in a study whose
methodology is based on narrative inquiry and, more specifically, life histories.
2.1 The status of English language learning in Mexico
The learning of foreign languages in Mexico such as French, English, German and
Japanese is considered as “elite bilingualism” by Lethaby (2003) since he claims
that most middle and upper-class parents are willing to pay high tuition rates in
order to give their children the opportunity to learn a foreign language. Learning a
foreign language is perceived by students’ parents as cognitive, cultural, and job
advantages over monolinguals. In Tamaulipas, the state where this study was
conducted, English is also taught in public elementary, secondary and tertiary
schools. However, in most of the cases these programs only cover three hours of
class per week. In addition to this, it is usually difficult to find well-prepared English
language teachers. The English language learning situation in public schools of
Tamaulipas mirrors what McGuire (1996) describes in her research; students are
obliged to take English classes that are frequently taught by incompetent English
teachers. This is why parents opt to either send their children to costly private
bilingual schools or register them in English language teaching institutes.
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Although the centre where this research took place is part of a public institution it is
undoubtedly the one with most demand in the city. In addition to having affordable
costs, innovative technology and a broad variety of ELT resources, CLTAL prides
itself on being the language centre with the highest student intake in the region and
being the place where most language teachers from the region attend to obtain
nationally and internationally recognized ELT certifications.
2.2 The North East State University
The North East State University (NESU) is a public educational institution which is
made up of seven campuses located in six different cities of the state and has a
population of 34, 266 students. NESU has twenty-two Academic Schools with a
total number of sixty-six degree courses and 2, 493 teaching faculty members.
Since 2003 NESU began undergoing a series of changes which were based on the
belief that “societies throughout the time have always placed their hope and trust on
education and therefore their teaching faculties”. One of the first lines of action was
to conduct an evaluation of NESU’s general academic situation. The outcomes of
this evaluation with respect to the situation of the teaching faculty indicated that
fewer than 60 faculty members:
 had desirable qualifications as established by the National Programme for the
Improvement of Higher Education Teaching Staff (PROMEP);
 had the status of active researchers;
 were part of professional associations and participated in academic meetings;
 took part in either national or international conferences and symposia.
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2.2.1 Development Plans
The Strategic Development Plan 2003-2006 Millennium III was designed with the
purpose of overcoming the deficiencies identified in different areas of NESU. Its
main goals with respect to the teaching faculty were the following:
 promote an ongoing improvement of the teaching faculty
 encourage research activity
 strengthen and broaden collaboration with the society
 increase academic exchange at a national and international level
This plan also states that the teaching faculty’s research practices should form the
cornerstone of academic work, the purpose being to enable NESU’s faculty to meet
the challenges that the technological, social, economic, and political changes in
higher education pose them. As a result, the following vision for NESU’s teaching
faculty was established:
‘It is expected that by the year 2006 the teaching faculty will be integrated in academic
bodies and familiarised with pedagogical approaches which facilitate student learning.
These academic bodies will also encourage academic exchanges with national and
international HE institutions’. 2
In order to achieve the above, several plans of action were established; this was done
with the support of national and institutional programmes. The plans of action came
in two main strands: the first consisted of the provision of financial rewards and
2
In order to protect anonymity the institution’s web-page where this information can be found will not be
provided.
23
professional development opportunities; the second was related to several
modifications to the management policies for NESUS’s teaching faculty.
In 2007 Mexico’s Public Education Secretary’s (SEP) 2007-2012 National
Development Plan (PND) (http://pnd.calderon.presidencia.gob.mx/) established
learning a second language as a pivotal factor that enables students to increase their
productivity and competitiveness in the economic world. It is therefore an
imperative for higher education institutions in Mexico to show proof that they are
achieving plausible results with respect to what is proposed in the PND. As a result
of this policy, in July 2007 NESU established as an exit requirement for
undergraduate students an intermediate level of English. Students wishing to
graduate must show an institutionally approved document 3 that proves they have an
intermediate level of English. This is why efforts have been made to establish an
Institutional English as a foreign language learning programme that enables
undergraduate students to fulfill this requirement successfully.
2.2.3 The status of English language teaching in NESU
The national and institutional development plans described above have similarly had
a big impact on the support that was given to the teaching and learning of foreign
languages within the institution. NESU has two different kinds of programmes for
foreign language learners. One is the institutional English programme which is
delivered in each of the academic schools. The second programme is delivered in the
3
These documents are the international TOEFL test, the international PET test or an institutional English
proficiency test.
24
language centres that are part of the university. The latter programme not only
includes English; French, German and Italian are taught as well.
The institutional English language teaching programme
The institutional English language programme (IELP) had its origins in 1999 when
members of the English language teaching academy decided to implement two noncredit bearing courses in each of NESU’s undergraduate programmes. The IELP’s
main objectives were to increase students’ communicative abilities and to develop
autonomous second language learners. Roux & Mora (2004) found that the impact
of the programme five years after its implementation had been variable in each of
the academic schools. The majority of the schools had neither the teachers with an
appropriate preparation nor the facilities or space in the curricula to improve the
language learning experiences of NESU’s students. Even though the programme
aimed at enabling students to obtain at least 400 points in the TOEFL test most of
the students barely reached a basic level of command of the language at the time of
their graduation.
In 2003 efforts were made to improve the IELP and the result was the creation of an
institutional project that aimed at improving the quality of foreign language teaching
and learning. The most important line of action that was suggested at that time was
the creation of a language centre that integrated the administration of activities such
as ELT certification programmes, English language learning tutorials for NESU’s
students, and academic support for NESU’s students wishing to do postgraduate
degrees overseas and publish research in internationally recognized journals (Roux
& Mora, 2004). However, this institutional project was only partially implemented.
The English language teachers’ professional development programme
Although NESU does not have an official professional development programme
there have been several sporadic professional development opportunities for its ELT
25
faculty. The earliest of these opportunities occurred in 1997 when some faculty
members took a diploma course in English for specific purposes. This course served
as a catalyser for the formation of NESU’s ELT academic committee. In 1999 the
opportunity to enroll in a Master’s Degree in English as a Second Language
awarded by the University of Texas Pan American was offered to all NESU’s
English language teachers working in academic schools. Finally, in 2000 a small
group of teachers who were accepted to the Master’s programme designed a
Bachelor of Arts in English Language. The main purpose of this undergraduate
programme was to give NESU’s ELT faculty who did not have an undergraduate
degree the opportunity to obtain one. Since the year 2000 there have been no further
actions aimed at improving the degree of professionalization of NESU’s ELT
faculty.
2.3 The Centre for Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics
The CLTAL was originally founded in the Campus of Central City on August 1992
under the name of Centre for Foreign Languages (CELE) and in 1996 a second
Centre was founded in the Campus Southern City. The objective of these English
language institutes was to enhance the English language skills of NESU’s learners as
well as the academic and administrative staff, with the purpose of enabling them to
access knowledge and to improve their research practice. Since its foundation the
Centre’s lessons have taken place in borrowed classrooms from three different
academic schools. In 2003 NESU’s Rector changed the status of the Centres and
gave them the title of Centre for Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, with a
view to expanding their functions to include the preparation of language teachers.
The CLTAL thus became the chief organ that regulated the teaching and learning of
foreign languages in the institution and by the end of 2006 two new buildings with
state of the art technology were being used for the sole purpose of teaching and
learning of foreign languages.
26
2.3.1 CLTAL’s language teaching faculty
Since its foundation the CLTAL has always had a high number of teachers to satisfy
a continuously growing student population. In spite of this, language teachers are
given no benefits and are paid on a taught hour basis. In 2003 CLTAL’s
administration conducted an evaluation of the general state of the Centre, and the
outcomes with respect to its teaching faculty were the following (Roux and Mora,
2003):
 the Centres housed a total population of 2,200 students and 53 teachers;
 49% of those teachers did not have a BA, 11% had a BA in ELT and only 4%
had Masters’ Degrees
 fewer than 15% of the teachers had in-service foreign language teaching
certifications;
There was no evidence of collegial work, research or actions which encouraged the
professional development of language teachers. These findings make evident the
lack of professionalization, which could be defined as the continuous investment in
teacher knowledge and its responsible use, that reigned at the CLTAL. This is why
the following lines of action were established (Roux & Mora, 2003):
 hire only BA holders who already have an in-service foreign language teaching
certification or who are willing to initiate a certification process;
 offer scholarships for postgraduate studies to those faculty members who
already hold a BA or Masters’ Degree and an in-service foreign language
teaching certification;
 favour the hiring of staff who already hold postgraduate qualifications in areas
such as TESOL, ESL, FLE, or applied linguistics.
27
Three years after applying these measures the CLTAL experienced a series of
positive transformations. The profile of CLTAL’s faculty considerably improved
and 20% of the teachers now held Masters’ Degrees in TESOL or Applied
Linguistics, 34% held a BA in TESOL or Applied Linguistics, and the number of
teachers who held an in-service language teaching certification increased from 15%
to 75%. Now in 2008 it seems that the CLTAL has gone back to where it started.
Most of the teachers who had received financial support to do postgraduate studies
overseas have left the institution (eight out of twelve), teachers who are not certified
and who do not hold either undergraduate or postgraduate degrees in the area have
been hired to satisfy the growing student population demands and there is scarce
research activity or collegial work.
CLTAL has always had high rates of attrition due to two main factors. One is the
continuous change of directors, which leads to the inability to create strong teacher
networks. The second is the lack of benefits for teachers who work there, which
forces language teachers to continuously change jobs in order to find better salaries
and benefits.
2.3.2 CLTAL’s professional development programme
One of the earliest professional development programmes in the CLTAL began in
1995. The purpose of this programme was to help the teaching faculty to obtain an
internationally recognized ELT certification. The director at that time made the
necessary arrangements to bring certified tutors from other states of the country and
to obtain institutional funding for the teachers who were interested in taking the
course. Although the teaching faculty responded well to this opportunity, there was
no other professional development opportunity offered until 1999. This time,
teachers had to pay the cost of the course and completion rates were extremely low.
The same course was offered again in 2002 with similar results to the one offered in
1999. Professional development opportunities thus had consistently been scarce and
28
have never been chosen based on teachers’ interests or needs: they were chosen
taking into consideration only what the management thought was best for the
teaching faculty.
In 2003 one of the policies of CLTAL’s new administration was to provide teachers
with continuous opportunities for professional growth. Three of the most important
courses of action were to offer an ongoing process of teacher certification, to
provide opportunities for academic exchange programmes and postgraduate studies
overseas, and to encourage the certification of teachers’ English language
proficiency. The change of the university’s central office head in 2006 and
CLTAL’s director in 2007 were some of the most important factors that led to these
actions being postponed. Nowadays, only one of these is being implemented;
teachers still have the opportunity to certify their ELT knowledge in the CLTAL.
However, most of the teachers who are certified at CLTAL work for other
educational institutions in the region.
The kinds of issues that have been discussed throughout this chapter make the
understanding of teacher selves a central interest for researchers and teacher
educators. By understanding the impact that different life experiences have on the
formation of teacher selves, we will be able to have a clearer perspective of why
language teachers in this specific context behave in the ways that they do, which
might lead to a closer relationship between the different members of an educational
community.
29
3. Review of the literature
How do we become the kinds of teachers we are? What makes us embrace certain
core moral values throughout the exercise of our professional lives? What motivates
us to take the professional decisions we take? These questions are placed at the heart
of this investigation which makes identity a central issue. Varghese, Morgan,
Johnston & Johnson (2005) have rightly claimed that educators and educational
researchers could only arrive at the understanding of teaching and learning by
seeking ways of knowing teachers. One of the best ways of understanding teachers
is by having a clear idea of who they are. This means knowing about the different
roles they play in life, the people who are important to them, the concept that they
have about students and about themselves as persons and professionals, what values
they believe are important for teaching and learning, critical moments throughout
their lives, etc.; that is to say their self and their identities. The purpose of the
present chapter is to provide a theoretical framework that serves as a basis to this
research project.
The present chapter is organised as follows. Following this introduction, the first
section provides a discussion of how identity is understood by traditional, modern,
and postmodern thinkers. This serves as a basis for section two, which presents a
discussion of why educational researchers began to consider the investigation of
identity as an important issue. Sections three, four, and five contain an analysis of
how traditional, modern and postmodern self and identity research has been
conducted in the mainstream education and TESOL areas. These sections also
contain a description of several papers that characterize each of these research
approaches and the way these impact on teachers’ professional lives. Section six is
aimed at providing a detailed account of how identity and self are understood in this
research project.
30
3.1 Self and identity4
Questions regarding self and identity have existed almost since the emergence of
philosophy. Major philosophical figures such as Plato, Descartes, Locke, Hume, and
Kant have attempted to answer questions such as “Who am I?”, “Who could I have
been?”, “Who will I become?”, “What is it to be a person?” and “How do we find
out who is who?” There is not a unique answer for these questions and most answers
are illuminated by each philosopher’s view about the world and the nature of reality
and knowledge (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2007). For example,
positivist and post-positivist philosophers would attribute self and identity features
to nature and development, meaning that the unfolding of a person’s identity is in a
way beyond their control or the control of society (Gee, 2000-2001). Modern
thinkers, however, assign a much more central role to a person’s culture, history,
and agency in the formation of a self or identity. Finally, postmodern philosophers
resist the concept of a unique stable self or identity claiming that these are
multifaceted and in constant creation/recreation through discourse (Zembylas,
2003). Postmodernists go as far as considering self and identity as continuously
changing states of mind and refer to them as subjectivity or intersubjectivity.
Traditionally, the terms self and identity are not clearly distinguished from one
another. However, in this thesis project self is understood as emerging from the
integration of multiple identities, which are profoundly intertwined with the social
context and morality. In the following sections a more careful examination of how
4
Identity and self are conceived by many sociologists and philosophers as closely interrelated and dependent
on each other to exist. It is thus necessary for discussions of identity to go hand in hand with those of self and
this is why they appear alongside each other in this section of text.
31
identity and self conceived by each of the previously mentioned schools of thought
will be provided in order to clarify how I arrived to this understanding.
3.1.1 Traditional conceptions of self and identity
What is understood as a traditional conception of self and identity in this piece of
work is that which is influenced by positivist and post-positivist ideas. Advocates of
these conceptions were the philosophers Ullin T. Place, David Armstong, John
Jamieson, and Herbert Feigl, who was a member of the Vienna Circle. They
developed slightly differing versions of what is known today as Type Identity
Theory, according to which there is a very strong relationship between mind and
body and thus mental states are identical to physical states of the brain (Schneider,
2008). Type identity theory was strongly influenced by modern medical research
into brain function, which was conducted in the 19th century and attempted to solve
the mind-body problem raised by dualists through the equation of physical brain
states with mental states.
Traditional ideas about self contend that truth, rationality and identity could only be
found inside human beings’ brains and identity, therefore, was a unique and
ahistorical project of an autonomous subject. These conceptions also claim that self
and identity are determined by external sources such as kinship, race, or even a
deity. Gee (2000-2001) argues that this kind of perspective on identity could be
labeled as nature perspective, since the origin of who a person is or becomes is a
natural force over which they have no control. It is thus not surprising that positive
and post-positive psychology conceive identity as a relatively stable characteristic
which is not influenced by lived experiences or socialization processes. In a similar
vein, positivist sociologists envisaged identity as an essentialist attribute that was
determined to a great extent by a person’s membership of a specific social or
demographic group (Korfmacher, 2008).
32
Ericksonian and neo-Ericksonian identity theories share many of the characteristics
of traditional conceptions of identity. The main ideological tenets of Erickson’s
theory are based on Sigmund Freud’s structuralist readings. Identity is conceived as
a psychological/philosophical construct that is centred on individuals and their selfconcept as members of humankind. Erickson’s (1968) definition of identity
emphasised the notion of identity as ‘a subjective sense of an invigorating sameness
and continuity’ (p. 19). Identity formation, according to Erickson, is a process that
people pass through. It is constituted by eight stages that are marked by a conflict
and change in chronological order due to biological and psychological maturation
(Erickson, 1968). Erickson’s identity theory reflects a “mathematised view of the
world” (Crotty, 2003: 27), where identity is found in a pathway of inevitable and
continuous progress. It is also an essentialist view of human experience, since it is
expected that every person would experience each of Erickson’s eight stages in the
same order and develop a new virtue out of the successful resolution of each stage’s
conflict.
Erickson’s identity theory, however, bears also a slight constructionist influence.
The environment played an important role in identity formation, according to
Erickson; the interaction between the individual and the environment was
considered a key factor that enabled the individual to resolve or not each stage’s
conflict. A successfully resolved conflict facilitated the individual’s transition to the
following maturation stage; unresolved conflicts however would lead to further
identity crisis in the future. Agency thus seems to play a very subtle role in identity
formation, according to Erickson, since he conceives individuals as capable of
acting upon their environment in order to resolve each stage’s conflict.
3.1.2 Modern conceptions of self and identity
Perhaps the best known modern social philosopher is Anthony Giddens. His theories
about the impact of modernity and globalization on self and identity have certainly
33
evolved into a new identity paradigm. Giddens (1991) claims that modern society
confronts the self with four different dilemmas, whose successful resolution enable
the individual to develop a coherent identity. This aspect of Giddens’ self and
identity theory resembles in many ways the identity theory proposed by Erickson. In
both theories the successful resolution of a conflict by the individual leads them to
develop their identity in positive ways. Both theories also share the adverse
consequences for self and identity development, when a conflict is not favourably
resolved. Giddens, however, is less influenced by structuralism and does not assume
that identity develops like clockwork; therefore there is no chronological order in the
four dilemmas he presents. There is, in fact, even a suggestion that individuals are
continuously confronted with these dilemmas and that continuous confrontation
enables them to “preserve a coherent narrative of self-identity” (Giddens, 1991: 187)
which seems to convey a moderate postmodernist influence.
Agency plays a more important role in modernist identity theories. Identity
formation is no longer perceived as a process that happens independently of people’s
lived experiences. Giddens (1976) contends that, although context and society may
be a constraining force for self-identity development, every person actively
incorporates distinct elements of mediated experiences into their selfhood and
therefore their identities. Constructivism and dialogical interaction thus illuminate
modern conceptions of self and identity since it takes shape through social
exchanges with the phenomenal world and not as a direct consequence of natural or
evolutionary processes, as traditional identity theories had claimed. Giddens (1991)
places special emphasis on the role that reflectivity plays in identity construction. It
is through a reflective process that individuals become capable of taking certain
elements from their lived experiences in the real world and incorporating them into
the biographical narratives that constitute their identities.
34
The work of the Lev Vygotsky, a developmental psychologist who is considered the
founder of cultural-historical psychology, has provided a useful framework for
understanding how identity formation processes evolve according to the modernist
tradition (Zembylas, 2003). Vygotsky (1978) does not talk specifically about
identity; however, his sociological/anthropological view of human development
assigns an important role to the interaction between individuals and culture in the
emergence of individuals with unique personal and intellectual characteristics.
Vygotskian inspired socio-cultural understanding of identity formation has been
applied in education by Wertsch (1985), Van der Veer (2007) and others.
Vygotsky’s theory does not disregard the role of genetically inherited factors in
identity formation. He does, however, assign them a lower order status, while
socially and culturally mediated actions are assigned a higher order status.
Similarly, language is perceived as central in the development of the self. According
to Vygotsky it is through language that we are able to interact with our reality and
make sense of our selves (Van der Veer, 2007). This is, in fact, similar to what
Giddens has claimed with respect to the role of language and biographical narratives
in identity construction.
A number of issues that receive little attention in modernist self and identity theories
are those of power relations, politics, and the quality of cultural resources. These
issues are perceived as paramount for identity development in other identity
paradigms as will be discussed in the following section.
35
3.1.3 Postmodern5 conceptions of self and identity
A postmodern view of self and identity contends that it is impossible to claim an
origin of self and identity within traditions that consider them as a merely
neurological, psychological, or sociological issue. The French thinker Michel
Foucault strongly argued against the scientifically established knowledge about
human nature, claiming that the knowledge from the human sciences was simply the
result of historical forces and not scientifically grounded truths (Gutting, 2003).
Foucault (1984) also contends that modern society is a disciplinary society that
exerts control over people through three distinct means: hierarchical observation,
normalizing judgment and examination. It is through these modern disciplining tools
that behaviour, knowledge and therefore self and identity are subjugated in order to
maintain the status quo. Identity for Foucault is just one more disciplining concept
used by the social sciences with the purpose of forcing the individual to remain
static inside a set of fixed boundaries, and he thus argues for the dissolution of
identity.
Postmodernism presents us then with a self that is in continuous construction/
reconstruction through discursive practices. Identity is understood as a dialogical
concept that emerges out of the intersubjective worlds in which people are immersed
(Biesta, 1994). Language and discourse therefore play a pivotal role in identity
formation since they are the mediums through which individuals are able to exercise
5
Following Crotty (2003) I have decided to employ the term postmodernism to refer to the societal shift
which attempts to destabilize concepts such as epistemological certainty, historical progress and uniqueness
of meaning and identity. This includes French thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques
Derrida who are often identified as poststructuralists due to their critiques of the structuralist readings of Marx
and Freud.
36
power and resist the disciplining tools of modernity; identity is an interpretation and
always subject to revision. Social constructionism and hermeneutics illuminate
postmodernism’s ideological tenets. In this way a critical spirit that entices the
challenging of “reification” and “sedimentation” processes (Crotty, 2003: 59) is able
to come to the fore.
Holstein & Gubrium (2000) observe that there are two differing reactions of
postmodernism towards identity that cause ideological debates of what
postmodernism entails. One of these reactions is called affirmative and the second
one is known as a skeptical or radical reaction. Representatives of the former
reaction conceive the modern crisis of confidence as an opportunity for the self to
multiply and hybridize identities. The multiplicity of images and representations do
produce an identity crisis; however, they do not dissolve the self completely. In
contrast to this, skeptical or radical postmodernists understand the self as one of a
myriad of images that coexist in the modern world. This self is therefore close to
being nothing.
This is one of the reasons why educators such as Cole, Hill, & Rikowski (1997) and
Bailey (1999) have claimed that postmodernism attempts to disregard the possibility
of the self’s existence, referring to skeptical or radical postmodernists claims. In
contrast to the above, Atkinson (2002), who can be considered an affirmative
postmodernist, claims that the role of this theoretical perspective in education should
be understood as an inclusive project of the self. This sheds new light on a
scholarship that is both individual and liberating, a scholarship that takes into
consideration people’s personal journeys and challenges the automatic acceptance of
ideas or absolute truths. It is through the deconstruction of grand narratives about
how education should deal with identity that it is possible to foster a growing
awareness of self. I believe that this latter view provides greater opportunities for
researchers and practitioners to understand better how teachers’ identities and selves
37
are constructed. Affirmative postmodernism enables the empowerment of language
teaching practitioners without falling into the trap of undervaluing the importance of
identity in education.
3.2 The importance of self and identity in educational research
Identity and the self were issues of interest only to philosophers and religious men
until the late 19th century, when the first psychological descriptions of the self
appeared. Behavioral scientists, however, largely ignored these descriptions since
they preferred to concentrate on the study of observable behavior, which could also
be measured, in order to make claims regarding human conduct. It was the
American psychologist William James who first wrote about the self in his book
Principles of Psychology (1890). He was later followed by Freudians and neoFreudians, who departed from Freud’s original concept of ego and began linking it
to interpersonal processes. The first formal investigation into the self was conducted
in the 1960s. Social scientists made attempts to theorize how individuals’
understanding of themselves as separate entities was formed. Consequently, interest
in researching the formation of identity originated in order to prove these identity
theories (Swartz, 2008). Psychology, sociology, social anthropology and social
psychology are among the disciplines which have more thoroughly explored issues
of identity formation and have influenced the conception of identity in education.
This has also had an impact on the kind of research that has been conducted in this
area.
One of the earliest references regarding the centrality of identity in education came
from John Dewey, who, in 1916, shifted the discourse away from the what is to be
taught to one of dialogical exchange between the self (i.e. the teacher’s identity) and
the contextual influences that affect the self (Dewey, 1916). In spite of this, identity
research in education began to gain importance only in the early nineties when
educators and educational researchers realized that it was an important unit of
38
analysis that enabled them to understand a large number of phenomena inside
classrooms, schools and within the broader community of schools (Gee, 2000-2001).
Identity was considered of vital concern, not only to teacher educators, but also to
educational leaders and decision makers. One of the most important reasons why
identity research became so central in education was the rapidly changing nature of
schools. It was thus of utmost importance to understand how teachers adjusted to a
variety of simultaneously occurring changes and how these impacted on the
teachers’ sense of self.
A second reason that motivated the flourish of identity
research in education was the possibility of providing rich data on contextually
specific issues that facilitated decision making processes.
Identity research is also a valuable instrument that is useful in promoting
cooperation among colleagues, in helping teachers cope with institutional change,
and as a basis for institutional and educational changes (Hargreaves & Goodson,
1996). Carson (2005) narrates how, in a Canadian context, anti-racist educators were
faced with large groups of teachers who openly displayed resistance to learning
about racism. This problem, Carson contends, was due to anti-racist educators’
ignorance; they should have known that dynamics of resistance emerge when
teachers’ identities are threatened by authorities that intend to discipline through
language and knowledge. Carson ends by suggesting that it is necessary to articulate
an “alternative theory of the subject” (ibid. p. 8) which takes into consideration that
teachers’ identities are in continuous formation and involves a negotiation of new
collective and individual identities.
Throughout this time identity research in education has brought together a diversity
of identity theories coming from disciplines such as psychology and sociology.
Some of the most influential figures have been the symbolic interactionist George
Herbert Mead, the psychologists Erick Erickson and Lev Vygotsky, the educational
psychologist James Wertsch and the French philosopher and historian Michel
39
Foucault. This is why researchers’ who investigate teachers’ selves and identities
must take well informed methodological decisions that match their conception of
self and identity in order to avoid ontological, epistemological and theoretical
contradictions.
3.2.1 Self and identity research within the TESOL area
Even though the TESOL area has followed the steps of mainstream education in
many research issues such as professional development, motivation, and leadership
and management, this is not the case with respect to teacher self and identity
research, where the dates of early scholarly articles coincide in both disciplines.
Thus the teacher self and identity research conducted in the TESOL area will be
included in the review of traditional, modern and postmodern teacher self and
identity research under sections three, four, and five.
It is however important to know which type of academic events gave rise to teacher
self and identity research in the TESOL area. When the TESOL profession was just
beginning to emerge language teachers were often conceived as technicians who just
needed to learn the right ways to teach. Identity did not play a role in TESOL
professionals’ research agendas. However, with the increase of classroom research,
there was a growing awareness of the central role that language teachers’ beliefs
played in classroom instruction practices. Researchers realized that the moment by
moment decisions that teachers took inside the classroom were not only informed by
the techniques and methods that they learned in workshops or training sessions. The
teacher thus became a central unit of study and what began as a quest to find out
what the teacher’s beliefs about learning, teaching and their profession were, has in
many cases transformed itself into an investigation of how more complex identity
issues impact on classrooms and schools’ lives (Varghese, Morgan, Johnston, &
Johnson, 2005).
40
Varghese et al. (2005) contend that the exploration of sociopolitical and
sociocultural issues of teaching was another line of TESOL research for which
identity became paramount. As a result of classroom research there was also a
growing awareness of the fact that the way in which language teachers faced issues
such as race, nationality, social class, and sexual orientation (just to mention a few)
inside the classroom was contingent upon their identities. This, indeed, had an
impact on the kinds of educational experiences that students had and determined to a
large extent the kinds of academic opportunities that they might have in the future. It
was thus of utmost importance to analyze closely this phenomenon in order to find
out the ways in which the language teachers’ positionality in the classroom impacted
on learners and the broader context.
One of the issues that TESOL identity research has explored more thoroughly is the
role of culture and marginalization. The conflicts that emerge when language
teachers’ assigned and claimed identities clash are determinant factors in the
establishment of commitment and permanence in the profession and various other
issues such as their attitude towards a new curriculum or professional development
opportunities. A second recurrent theme in TESOL self and identity research is the
status of English language teaching as a profession and English language teachers in
local contexts. This also impacts on the personal and professional identities of
teachers and determines the extent to which they are willing to professionalize
themselves or to invest in formal TESOL education. Finally, the role of non-native
language teachers is a continuously emerging theme in TESOL self and identity
research; this is an aspect of many language teachers’ identities over which they
have no control, since it is a nature or institution identity (Gee, 2000-2001) that has
been imposed on them that carries weight in the kinds of opportunities that are
available for them in different teaching contexts. These issues are discussed by
Hayes (2005, 2008), who aims at empowering English language teachers beyond
41
English – speaking nations by providing thorough description and analysis of their
lives in order to generate knowledge that enables better understandings of their
conceptions of selves as language teachers, needs, and professional aspirations.
Morally heated affinity groups (Gee, 2000-2001), that is to say groups of people that
have a common goal towards a specific situation, are another topic of interest in
TESOL self and identity research. In many cases we have observed how groups of
this kind, such as professional associations, can operate towards resistance of
dominant discourses (e.g. the argument that TESOL is not a profession) and
generate a new discourse (e.g. Non-Native English Speaking Teachers special
interest groups) that changes the current state of affairs and empowers the members
of those affinity groups. Other examples of morally heated affinity groups are
English for specific purposes teachers’ groups or professional development groups.
A close examination of the theorists’ propositions about self and identity mentioned
in section 3.1 provides clear evidence that they represent three differing views
regarding self and identity formation. Each of these views about self and identity
resulted in three identity research paradigms. These identity research paradigms
exist simultaneously as different responses to the importance of professional identity
in education. In the following sections I will outline how research into professional
identity is carried out by traditional, modern, and postmodern researchers. This will
open space to discuss the main epistemological principles that underpin them, how
each research paradigm impacts on the research that is conducted on teacher identity
and the implications it has for teachers’ lives.
3.3 Traditional teacher self and identity research
Traditional identity research gives primacy to the analysis of institution identities
(Gee 2000-2001). This means that researchers concentrate on investigating how
teachers define themselves in terms of the roles they play inside schools. Data are
42
collected using survey questionnaires, self-reports or structured interviews. In many
cases the purpose was to find out how passively or actively participants occupied the
role that they were required to fulfill by the institution where the work. Outcomes of
this kind of research may have unwittingly imposed the researcher’s conception of
who a teacher is, since the participants’ discourse, and thus what they could convey
about their selves as teachers, was limited to a great extent to the researcher’s
agenda.
There was very limited room for resistance towards the institutional
identities that may have been imposed on them.
Ericksonian and neo-Ericksonian approaches exert considerable influence on
traditional identity research, which seems to give analytic primacy to the individual,
leaving aside important local and contextual issues, and to create and maintain a
dynamic conception of oneself as a coherent whole. This implies a notion of
compartmentalised identity construction and a view of identity as a set of relatively
independent, interacting factors. One gains insight into self and identity by
examining how people describe themselves in the various compartments of their
lives. There is no mention about the role of power relations in the sociocultural
context in which one is situated.
Dillabough (1999) argues that the conception of education in this research paradigm
is oversimplified and leads to the neglect of issues such as the discursive notion of
self and identity and the centrality of socializing mechanisms in self and identity
construction. It is also problematic to perceive any evolution or change in teachers’
identities or to have an insight into the day to day enactment of those identities
(Varghese et al. 2005). Traditional teacher self and identity research, however, can
be useful for finding out how teachers feel about themselves with respect to the roles
they play within the school. It might also be beneficial to find out how larger groups
of teachers are dealing with institutional change and the impact that this is having on
teachers’ professional identities and their commitment towards the institutions
43
where they belong. Traditional teacher identity research offers the researcher the
possibility of exploring language teachers’ self perceptions.
The outcomes of traditional self and identity research for teachers’ lives may be the
imposition of pre-packaged fool-proof (language) teaching methods that are
formulated by experts or policy makers. Teachers are only required to respond to a
set of goals or quality standards such as student retention rates or the achievement of
good results in official (language) tests. On the other hand traditional self and
identity research can illuminate decision-making processes in educational
institutions. By knowing the state of the identity of school members, educational
leaders can be more aware if they are helping their faculty to walk the development
paths that are important to them. It also enables decision makers to re-orient their
efforts towards actions that are more respectful of language teachers’ selves and
identities.
An example of a traditional identity research is that conducted by Moore & Hofman
in 1998. They define professional identity (PI) as “the extent to which someone
thinks of his or her professional role as being important (centrality), attractive
(valence) and in harmony with other roles (consonance)” (Moore & Hofman, 1998:
70). This definition could be rather problematic, since it automatically imposes on
the research participants a positive professional self or identity. If participants
considered their role as teachers of little importance, as clashing with other roles
they had to perform, such as being a parent, or as not very attractive, then, they
would have no PI or an underdeveloped PI. Although the data collection instrument
was not provided in the appendices it is very likely that the design of such an
instrument was influenced by this skewed conception of PI. This might be why one
of Moore & Hofman’s (1998) major findings was that teachers had a positive
perception of their PI in spite of the poor working conditions in which they were
immersed; participants were given no opportunity to convey to the researcher how
44
poor working conditions impacted on their PI. Participants’ resistance or opposition
discourses were silenced by the research instrument that unwittingly imposed the
researchers’ own agendas.
On the other hand, Moore & Hofman (1998) also found that, when school leaders
were committed towards the continuous improvement of their schools, teachers had
a highly developed PI, meaning that the answers in the questionnaires were closely
related to Moore & Hofman’s definition of PI. This finding may bring positive
outcomes for the participants of Moore & Hofman’s research, especially if, in the
places where this research was carried out, emphasis was placed on how a highly
developed PI could benefit student learning and the working environment.
3.4 Modern teacher self and identity research
Modern teacher identity research is characterized by having a research focus that
pays special attention to human action and speech that is mediated by tools and
signs, which are not only representational systems, but also resources that empower,
constrain, or transform action. Discursive identities (Gee 200-2001) become as
important as, or even more important than, institution identities. Therefore, data
collection methods now include in-depth semi-structured or unstructured interviews,
life histories, portfolios, observations, autobiographies, reflective journals and
ethnographic investigations in addition to those used by traditional researchers.
These kinds of investigations enable participants to construct their teacher selves in
a freer manner and this is why it becomes an amalgamated identity that is made up
from the various roles that participants play, not only in their professional but also in
their personal lives. Modern PI research is no longer large scale since it attempts to
provide in depth descriptions of local situations (Dillabough, 1999).
Story telling turns into a valuable data collection method that facilitates the
understanding of teachers’ personal and professional lives. By narrating the histories
45
of their lives, teachers are provided with the foundations needed to construct their
professional identities. Teachers’ life stories become the vehicles through which
aspects of experiential knowledge are brought to the fore; they allow teachers a
voice by offering stories about teaching which provide a counterbalance to the more
powerful discourses of academics or policy makers. Life histories also shed light on
the factors that have shaped teachers’ pedagogical beliefs. Sugrue (1997) contends
that some of these factors are immediate family, significant others or extended
family, observation of colleagues, and atypical teaching episodes.
Vygotskian influences on modern research result in giving analytic primacy to
socio-cultural processes as primary influences on teacher self and identity
development. That is to say, special emphasis is placed on how contextual
influences impact on the formation of self and identity. The question of what
constitutes teacher identity within modern research accounts seems to center on the
issue of what features of PI remain unchanged through time and space in order to
conform a core teacher identity. At the same time, a modern approach towards PI
research would seek to understand teacher identity formation in terms of an agency,
which is a central factor in the constitution and performance of the various roles that
language teachers’ play throughout their professional lives. Agency is not attributed
to the isolated individual; it is understood as socially distributed or shared and
contingent upon a broad diversity of contextual factors.
The implications that modern teacher self research may have for teachers’ lives tend
to be more positive, since they take into consideration participants’ life experiences
regardless of whether these are personal or professional. The data collection
methods used in this kind of research set the teachers’ voices free and do not limit
what participants can say; of course, the researcher’s sole presence will always be a
factor that influences (ether positively or negatively) what participants have to say
regarding the issue being investigated. Due to the nature of most modern research –
46
in-depth and small scale - whatever course of action is taken as a result of the
research outcomes is more likely to be successful since it will be tailored to contextspecific needs. In addition to the above there is a growing awareness of the
complexity of teachers’ lives. I believe the outcomes of this research are highly
valuable in humanizing the profession, since now researchers, teacher educators, and
school leaders realize that teachers’ personal lives have an impact on their PI and
vice versa. However, issues that are not dealt with in modern research are those of
politics and power relations in schools, which to my understanding are central for
any truly educational experience.
Volkmann & Anderson (1998) provide a useful example of modern teacher identity
research. The study aimed at describing how a science teacher created his PI.
Volkmann & Anderson understood PI as a complex and dynamic equilibrium
between personal self-image and the assigned PI that requires teachers to perform
certain roles. This conception of PI is in line with modernist thought, and the
research instrument, a year long teaching journal, provides rich data that is then
analyzed to find emerging themes. Volkmann & Anderson concluded that three
dilemmas characterized this teacher’s PI formation. Firstly, she aimed at behaving
like a teacher in front of her class, while still feeling like a student; secondly, she
was expected to be tough on students when what she wanted was to care for them;
finally, she felt she was expected to behave like an expert, even though she felt
incompetent in her knowledge of the subject-matter.
This piece of research certainly helps teacher educators understand to a very large
extent the professional identity processes through which student teachers may pass.
The richness of the data enabled the researchers to provide a thorough description of
this teacher’s struggles to construct her PI. Even though this piece of research was a
case study, many other student teachers may feel some of their struggles mirror
those of this particular teacher. This makes it a useful resource for student teachers
47
and teacher educators, since the former may find encouragement in it while the latter
may develop a growing understanding of what happens inside student teachers’
minds when they are trying to become a teacher. Some issues that remained
unexplored within Volkmann & Anderson’s paper are those of politics and power.
They did not question why this particular teacher felt compelled to behave in the
ways she did or the reasons why she did not show any resistance to those
impositions in her early teaching practice.
3.5 Postmodern teacher self and identity research
Trinh (1992) contends that a postmodern approach to researching teacher identity
departs from solely asking questions about who teachers are and takes a closer look
at questions of when, where and how teachers are becoming who they are.
Therefore, postmodern research aims at revealing how power structures shape
teachers’ selves and identities and how teachers respond to these influences.
Discursive identities similarly play a very important role in postmodern research and
research participants are conceived as “fluid actors and thinkers” (Gee, 20002001:104) who can transform their reality and reconstruct themselves to resist the
power structures that attempt to impose institutional identities on them. Affinity
identities (ibid) are paramount in the achievement of this objective. Even though
teachers may be physically far away from each other, the fact that they have a
purpose in common and are able to employ their knowledge, language, and
discourse as empowerment emancipatory tools empowers them to transform their
teaching realities.
Teachers have the potential to deconstruct “the intellectual pretensions of universitybased, scientific knowledge as a basis for teacher professionalism” (Hargreaves &
Goodson, 1996:12). A postmodern focus on teacher identity establishes a strong link
between learning and identity, since identity is understood as a process of
identification. Learning takes place in dialogical exchanges and different kinds of
48
dialogical exchanges produce distinct types of learning. This is why postmodern
teacher identity research places as much emphasis on local situations as in fact
modern research does. Teaching is no longer conceived as a set of standards and
proved methods but as different ways of being and engaging with teaching issues.
The focus of the analysis of the self within the postmodern conception of identity is
the discourse of experience rather than the experience itself (Foucault, 1984). A
postmodern approach to conducting PI research highlights the importance of cultural
and political contexts as central elements that exert a major influence in PI
formation. Postmodernists present us with an integrated notion of identity rather
than a dichotomy between individual functioning and socio-cultural processes, as
traditional thinkers do. This is an approach that refuses the singularity of each
component of identity formation. By using a postmodern analysis of identity
formation, researchers create spaces for individuals to develop a sense of agency in
their lives and to construct strategies of power and resistance.
A postmodern lens in conducting PI research seeks to obtain a more critical
awareness of how the existing power structures impact on the construction of
identities. Postmodern research may similarly add a collaborative dimension to the
establishment and maintenance of an emancipatory school culture. The creation of
affinity groups (Gee, 2000-2001) might enable teachers to establish collaborative
networks that work towards the resistance of educational narratives that attempt to
disempower learners and teachers. Educational leaders may also play a role in
encouraging the formation of these groups. Affinity groups generate identities that
develop a growing awareness of how discourse, knowledge and language could
facilitate the generation of truly liberating individual scholarship. On the other hand,
postmodern research may fall into an exaggeration of the principles that underpin it;
this, I believe, leaves teachers with a highly complex educational discourse that is
meaningless for their professional practice. Thus postmodern PI research may not
49
achieve the emancipatory purposes that it in the first place had set out as of
paramount importance.
Watson (2006) presents us with an investigation into the construction of a secondary
English teacher’s PI. Watson draws on Giddens’ (1991) notion of self- identity to
define PI as a reflexive project of the context of our working lives that influences
professional action. An in-depth interview, where the participant narrates the story
of his life (mainly concentrated on his professional life), is the method that Watson
(2006) used to collect her data. She presents the reader with a series of excerpts from
the interview, which mainly narrate atypical teaching episodes and uses narrative
analysis to infer how these episodes influence the participant’s construction of a
teacher self and how the participant’s identity is enacted in each of these teaching
episodes. The analysis also makes reference to the influence that institutions have in
the formation of teacher identities and how a subversive identity is used to resist
what the participant conceives as “a tension between educational values and the
structure of the educational system” (ibid: 514).
Watson’s (2006) paper is truly fascinating and exhibits a thorough analysis of a
teacher’s life history that illustrates how discourse is used to both construct a teacher
self and resist the power structures that intend to unify practice in secondary English
teaching. However, this investigation has a similar shortcoming to that of most
postmodern teacher identity research: it is limited to a discussion of issues of power,
politics and culture. There is no suggestion as to how these issues could be dealt
with and this kind of research, although it offers a very rich theoretical and
philosophical discussion, has no value for the people who day by day face
disempowerment in their workplaces. Educational inquiry should be approached
pragmatically; otherwise we run the risk of becoming entangled in philosophical and
scholastic discourse. We researchers might end up disempowered by the discourse
we claim is a tool of empowerment.
50
The analysis of traditional, modern, and postmodern teacher self and identity
paradigms and some examples of research that represent them has made it clear that
each has its shortcomings. This might explain why nowadays there is still PI
research being conducted within modern, traditional, and postmodern traditions. It is
my belief that, as educational researchers, we should be committed towards our
profession and part of this commitment implies conducting research that is likely to
have a positive impact on the educational experiences of both teachers and learners
in our contexts. Informed decisions with respect to the research tradition that we
wish to follow are probably the best we can do in order to ensure epistemological,
theoretical and methodological consistency.
However, it is also desirable to think outside the box and dare to employ eclectic
research practices that turn our inquiry journeys into practices that are empowering
and emancipatory not only to ourselves as researchers, but also to our colleagues and
students, who often generously participate in educational inquiry, to ensure that the
outcome is more than just a published paper.
3.6 Conception of self and identity in this research project
As we have observed by the previous analysis of three different identity paradigms,
and the research that characterizes each of them, discussions regarding identity and
self can easily become highly complex. It is therefore necessary to provide a detailed
account of my understanding of self and identity and the implications it has for this
research project. I strongly agree with Atkinson’s (2002) claim that conceptions of
the self should be illuminated by inclusion rather than exclusion. Inclusion enables
researchers and practitioners to generate truly emancipatory actions, as it was
previously discussed. A closer look at traditional, modern, and postmodern views of
self and identity actually brings to the fore that there is certain overlap among these
differing, though not incommensurable, identity paradigms. Traditional identity
theories propose that identity is determined by factors such as race, nationality, or
51
kinship and it remains essentially static during people’s lives. This is not denied by
modernist identity theories, which contend that natural factors do play a role in self
and identity construction but they are not considered as important as culturally
mediated actions. In the same vein, postmodernists consider culture a paramount
factor that affects identity and the self; they, however, argue for the deconstruction
of identity in order to challenge the power structures (e.g. culture and/or history) that
attempt to limit the possibilities of the self.
A second example of the interconnectedness of identity paradigms are the modern
dilemmas of the self and the conflicts with which the self in traditional theories is
faced. The successful or unsuccessful resolution of these conflicts or dilemmas leads
to the emergence of either virtues (Erickson, 1968) or pathologies (Giddens, 1991)
that are later integrated to the self. Finally, the role of discourse and social
interaction in identity construction is present in both modern and postmodern
6
identity theories. Modernists argue that it is through language and dialogical
interaction that people are able to construct biographical narratives that constitute
their identities. Similarly postmodernists contend that it is through discourse and
intersubjectivity that individuals will be able to deconstruct and reconstruct their
identities in order to challenge the power structures that attempt to maintain
reification and sedimentation processes. However, it must be recognised that a
tension among these traditions will remain due to their different understandings of
self and identity.
6
Following Holstein & Gubrium (2000) and Taylor (1992) I have decided to include references to Michel
Foucalut under postmodern discussions of identity even though he is, against his will, conceived as poststructuralist by many researchers.
52
Following Giroux (1997) I strongly believe that the search for meeting points among
these traditions is more beneficial for educational and empowerment purposes than
the attempt to stress divergent ideas. The discourse of identity in education must be
illuminated by an emancipatory eclecticism that goes beyond a simple language of
critique. It should concentrate its efforts on encouraging a climate of hope in order
to foster unprejudiced and unbiased transformation.
It is not possible for me to claim that the conception of self and identity in this
research project is illuminated by modernism or postmodernism since there is
considerable overlap in some of their central assumptions regarding self and
identity. However, an important issue that must be clarified here is the distinction
that I see between the two. I concur with Stets & Burke (2003) in the differentiation
that they make between self and identity. The self nowadays is deeply intertwined
with the social structure (Giddens, 1991); it thus reflects society, and the different
roles we perform constitute a distinctive aspect of this self. Each of these distinctive
aspects makes an identity; therefore, we have as many identities as roles that we
perform in society. Stets & Burke (2003) claim that interaction, therefore, frequently
takes place between fragmented selves. For example, on the first day of classes in a
language classroom we enact our professional identities and pupils enact their
learner or student identities; it is thus a fragment of the self that we get to know on
this occasion. I argue that we also have the capacity to enact more than one role in a
social situation. For example, if the relationship with my students becomes closer,
we might also enact our personal identities in the classroom.
My understanding of how current times give shape to the self is that culture and
society are powerful influences that delineate important aspects of our selves and
multiple identities. However, agency and subjectivity also play a pivotal role, since
human beings cannot be conceived as passive recipients of social and cultural
influences; we have the agentive and subjective capacities to resist and challenge the
53
demands that current times confront us with (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000; Stets &
Burke, 2003).
I understand the self as the result of these four influences. It is
undeniable that we are social selves that are constructed through everyday life
experiences. The way in which society and culture respond towards our everyday
actions defines to a great extent how this self is constructed. In addition to this, the
power of global modern institutions can indeed affect the self in a variety of ways
(Giddens, 1992). However, we actively construct our selves through reflection and
action. Every person is a unique project of a self in the making. It is, in the end,
individuals who empower global institutions that shape selves (Holstein & Gubrium,
2000; Giddens, 1992).
Traditional, modernist and postmodernist theorists are right when they claim that the
development of the self is contingent upon culture, lived experiences, and individual
choices. Modernity and postmodernity have certainly instigated the fragmentation of
the self and the existence of multiple identities. Self and identities can no longer be
considered unique and static when technological advances have transformed what
the world is and what time, place, and distance mean. This is why the self is
constantly being reconstructed through discursive practices and it is the analysis of
discourse which enables researchers to understand who people are, where they have
come from, and the direction(s) in which they want to move (Holstein and Gubrium,
2000). I argue that the teacher self, which is one of the central focuses of the study,
emerges in the specific moment that the life history interviews take place. Narrations
will be filled with important stories regarding teachers’ professional identities.
However, they will also frequently bring to the fore stories regarding their student
and personal identities and several others depending on the course that their lives
have taken. The teacher self is thus basically the discourse that is co-created between
researcher and participants when narrating the story of their lives but paying special
attention to their lives as language teachers; this discourse will include references to
54
their personal, professional and learner selves, just to mention those which have
become more central in previously conducted research.
3.6.1 Personal, professional and student teacher identities.
In the previous section I argued that the self is deeply intertwined with the social
structure, while at the same time it is empowered by agency and subjectivity to
affect this social structure. We similarly saw that selves’ identities stem from the
different roles that we perform in society. Finally, there was a mention regarding
how selves are made manifest through discourse. Discussions regarding the
multiplicity of teachers’ identities are present in most of the examples of TESOL
and educational research to date and the three identities that have been more
thoroughly studied are personal, professional, and student teacher identities. Taking
into consideration the range of research projects reviewed in this chapter, it seems
that professional identity is understood by many as the superordinate term from
which the student teacher identity stems and which is influenced by the personal
identity. This is why an analysis of the debates regarding what PI entails is needed in
order to clarify how professional, personal and student teacher identities are
understood in this research project.
The term professional identity was initially coined in business with the purpose of
facilitating the attainment of objectives. Organisations design this identity according
to their corporate philosophy and assign it to its members. It is expected that each of
the organisation’s members will enact this assigned identity by attending formal
training sessions and conforming to the identity standards set by the organisation
(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2007). It is expected that members of the
organization will create a bonding among themselves, customers, and the
organization itself that will result in higher profits for the organization. This
conception of PI is the result of the new capitalism; enterprises have tried to take
advantage of the possibilities of discursive selves that are continuously constructing
55
and reconstructing their identities. Administrators promote specific sets of practices
that ensure their employees and customers live experiences that lead them to
perceive their selves according to what is valued for the organization.
PI in education and teacher education, however, cannot be so simplistically defined
since researchers and teacher educators conceptualize it in differing ways. This
largely depends on the lens through which they look at reality. PI to some
researchers is a continuous process where the personal and professional selves of
teachers are gradually merged into one self that results in the becoming and being of
a teacher (e.g. Goodson & Cole, 1994; Samuel & Stephens, 2000; and Volkmann &
Anderson, 1998). To others, however, PI is simply how teachers describe
themselves as an occupational group or how teachers perceive the roles they play or
the characteristics of their profession (e.g. Beijaard, Verloop & Vermunt, 2000;
Gaziel, 1995; and Moore & Hoffman, 1988). A third group of researchers conceives
PI as made up of many sub-identities that come alive as teachers narrate the story of
their lives in order to make sense of their personal and professional selves (e.g.
Clandinin & Connely, 1996 and Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). In addition to the
above mentioned contrasting - though not excluding – concepts, there are
researchers who fail to provide a clear or explicit definition regarding their
understanding of PI (e.g. Antonek, McCormick, & Donato, 1997; Mawhinney & Xu,
1997; and Nixon, 1996).
As a logical consequence, although PI emerged as a separate research area more
than two decades ago, there is no clear agreement as to what PI entails; some
examples of research do not even provide information regarding their understanding
of identity ad/or self. As a result, they investigate a variety of topics and pursue a
diversity of goals. A similar phenomenon is present in the TESOL area (e.g.
Mawhinney & Xu, 1997 and Simon-Maeda, 2004).
56
The concept of PI in this piece of work is inevitably illuminated by my
understanding of self. I understand professional identity as the concept or internal
image that a person has regarding his or her performance as a language teacher. This
image is contingent upon context, culture, lived experiences, and individual choices.
Thus agency plays a central role in PI construction, an agency that is exercised in
and out of dialogical interactions with others. Knowledge, language and discourse
are the tools that teachers have to recreate their professional identities in diverse and
emancipatory ways. To my understanding, personal and student teacher identities
emerge in exactly the same way as professional identity and are as important as
professional identity in defining the teacher self.
The following diagram represents my understanding of how the teacher self is
constructed. Due to the multiplicity of identities and the complexity of self
construction processes in current times, Diagram 1 exclusively represents the
discursive teacher self that emerges as a result of my interaction with the
participants of this study during the interviews. The teacher self that emerges is
discursively co-created by researcher and participant. It is the participants’
subjective understanding of who they are as language teachers and how their life
experiences have shaped their selves as language teachers.
57
Diagram 1. Schematic representation of the teacher self.
The outer circle of the diagram represents the teacher self, the one that emerges as
the result of the dialogical interaction between researcher and participants. The three
inner circles represent the identities on which the present study is focused: personal,
professional, and student-teacher identities. Personal, professional and student
teacher identities are interconnected and exert similar influences on the continuous
construction of the teacher self. The axiological framework is placed at the centre of
the diagram since it can be considered as containing the core values that nurture our
identities and, therefore, our selves. It is our axiological frameworks towards which
we look when evaluating our selves. The axiological framework similarly helps to
hold together our multiple identities in order to shape them into a coherent self.
58
Each of the circles in the diagram is made up of a double line of short dashes to
emphasise the dynamic nature of the axiological framework, identities, and the
teacher self. According to my understanding, teachers’ axiological frameworks,
identities and selves are continuously being constructed and reconstructed,
influencing each other and the social context. This influence is represented by the
arrows pointing outwards. The arrows pointing inwards represent the different
contextual issues that exert influence on the construction of the teacher self. In many
occasions, contextual influences trigger the transformation of certain values that
constitute the axiological framework. These contextual issues, such as colleagues,
teacher development programmes, family life, or children, may be present
throughout different moments of participants’ narratives. The diagram above
represents the orientation I shall take to address the research questions posed in
chapter 1 and constitutes the basis of the methodology described in the following
chapter.
59
4. Methodology
The literature reviewed in chapter three indicated that research into teachers’ selves
and professional identities could be classified into three broad traditions that are
determined basically by the researcher’s ontological and epistemological beliefs:
traditional, modern, and postmodern research. We also observed how the conception
of identity and methodologies used in each of these traditions varied. The chapter
concluded by presenting a diagrammatical representation of how the teachers’ selves
and identities are conceived in this research endeavor. This study intends to
investigate the way in which language teachers’ selves are constructed, taking into
consideration three main constituents of their selves: personal, professional, and
student teacher identities placing special emphasis on how axiology impacts on the
creation and recreation of the teacher self. I intend to provide a much needed
understanding of how language teachers have developed the set of pedagogical
beliefs that guide their professional practice and how they have come to embrace
certain ethical and moral values throughout the exercise of their profession, which
guides to a great extent their decision making processes.
I am aware that, for a piece of educational research to make a real contribution to
learning and teaching communities, practising social researchers have the
responsibility of engaging with philosophical and methodological debates that lead
to a continuous enhancement of quality in educational research (Lather, 1993; Pring,
2000; Crotty, 2003). Engaging in such a debate is thus one of the purposes of the
present chapter. I also intend to outline the reasons for using narrative inquiry as a
methodology in this piece of research and the specific research techniques used in
the study along with the steps I took to avoid causing harm or distress to the
participants of this research.
This chapter is organized as follows. After this introduction, sections 4.1 and 4.2
begin by providing a brief account of the ontological and epistemological beliefs
60
that underpin this methodology as well as a description of how different social
research theoretical perspectives have influenced this thesis’ theoretical orientation.
Section 4.3 describes the research design employed for this study. Section 4.4
provides a description of the data collection methods and the procedures followed to
collect data while section 4.5 discusses the steps taken to analyze the participants’
narratives. Section 4.6 describes the steps followed to ensure this research was
conducted ethically and did not produce unnecessary harm or distress to participants.
Finally, section 4.7 provides an account of the study’s limitations.
4.1 The theoretical perspectives that guide educational research.
Theoretical perspectives have come to be known as research paradigms, a term
appropriated by social researchers echoing Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) concept in his
book “The structure of scientific revolutions”. Kuhn (1962) contends that a
paradigm takes shape as the result of several scientific achievements that have the
same rules and standards for research practice. He claims that a paradigm shift
occurs when an anomaly is found within the current set of rules and standards and
an improved and unprecedented way of conducting research appears on the scene.
However, in this chapter I will refer to Kuhn’s idea of paradigms as theoretical
perspectives since I believe that in the social sciences there is more than one set of
rules and standards for conducting high quality research. According to Crotty (2003)
the term theoretical perspective is more inclusive and does not entail the sharp
contrast and incommensurability among different ways for conducting research that
has provoked endless debates that have operated only to the detriment of educational
research.
The major elements that constitute a paradigm are a theory of reality or ontology and
a theory of knowledge and how knowledge is gained or epistemology (Cohen et al.,
2000). Ontology derives from the Greek word existence. In the strictest
philosophical sense it is the science or study of being (Crotty, 2003). Researchers’
61
ontological position, therefore, reflects their beliefs regarding the nature of both the
knowable and the reality. Ontological assumptions provide an underpinning for the
logic of the research process. Epistemology provides a philosophical grounding for
deciding what kinds of knowledge are possible and how we can gain that
knowledge. Epistemological assumptions also guide the ways in which the inquirer
should go about finding out knowledge and therefore bear direct influence on the
methodology and methods of the research process. I strongly believe that paradigms
also entail different axiological postures, each of them placing emphasis on different
ethical standards and sets of values. This means that moral and ethical standards are
embedded in paradigms rather than external to each of them. There are three broad
theoretical perspectives in social research: positivism, interpretivism and critical
theory.
Although ontological and epistemological beliefs are rarely explicitly stated in most
of the articles of published scholarly research, they permeate the whole research
process; from the kinds of research questions that are asked to the conclusions that
are drawn, going through the conception of what ethical research entails. This is
why I strongly believe that a philosophical discussion on our ontological and
epistemological beliefs as researchers not only must be present in research
endeavors but must also be stated explicitly. Such a discussion will demonstrate that
there is a profound knowledge of not only the technical but also the philosophical
aspects of our research and therefore validate its quality in the eyes of the research
community.
4.2 Theoretical perspective to the study
In order to achieve this research’s main purpose I have decided to employ life
histories as a methodology. There is a substantial interest in finding out how the
narratives of the participants to this research reflect the growth and transformation of
62
their teacher selves. This places the current research under the theoretical
perspective that is known as interpretivism.
Interpretivism aims at understanding what is unique about human nature since it
conceives knowledge as something that is socially constructed, that is to say, reality
is being continuously constructed through observations and the pursuit of knowledge
(Cohen et al., 2000). Interpretivism’s ontology is phenomenological and non-dualist.
This means that reality is conceived as the product of human experience and is
determined by social context and constructed out of interaction between human
beings and their
world (Crotty,
2003; Guba,
1990; Pring, 2000). A
phenomenological research process entails an investigation that aims at capturing
the reality of the participants. Rather than confirming or rejecting hypotheses the
researcher acts like a historian whose concluding theory remarks are grounded in the
recording, analysis, and classification of participants’ subjective experiences.
Phenomenology is therefore in its purest sense highly critical since its openness to
alternative constructions of reality entails calling into question what is frequently
taken for granted due to pre-established cultural understandings (Crotty, 2003).The
non-dualist ontology that characterises interpretive research blurs the distinctions
that exist between mind and body. The Cartesian mind-body divide is never a reality
in interpretive research processes since they entail close personal interactions where
the objective world of things and bodies comes into contact with the subjective
world of ideas, feelings, and thoughts.
Interpretivism’s epistemological assumptions are influenced by constructionism and
constructivism. The former highlights the importance of individuals in the
construction of knowledge, while the latter places more emphasis on the influence of
culture and society in the generation of knowledge (Crotty, 2003). Perhaps an aspect
of interpretivism that is also prominently present in this piece of research is
intentionality, which implies an intimate and very active relationship between
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knower and known. Constructionism, constructivism, and intentionality together
entail a deep connection between knower, known and the culture and society that
surrounds them. With regard to my own study, this unique construction emerged out
of interaction with a variety of discourses and narratives where the dualistic
relationship between subject and object was dissolved. Such a relationship arose
with every piece of text that I read; it could be a research article on professional
identity, a book on philosophical discussions of educational research, or the
transcribed data from the interviews with the participants in this research. In this
work my attention was always completely concentrated on the object and the
meanings that could arise from my relationship with the object were limited by the
object itself, whether it was a piece of research, a chapter from a book, or
transcribed data.
With respect to interpretivism’s axiology we can see how the ontological
perspectives of interpretivists lead them to conceive research without interaction as
incomplete research which can present distorted pictures of educational situations.
The subjects of the study become now participants in the process of enquiry and the
control of the study’s direction is shared between participants and researchers (Guba
and Lincoln, 2005). Interpretivists recognise that the process of enquiry is never
neutral; ethics and values therefore are embedded in every step of the enquiry. The
validity and trustworthiness of the research’s findings are determined to a great
extent by the moral integrity of the researcher (Hesse-Biber and Leavy, 2006). The
close personal interactions that result from the methods used by interpretivists may
result in many ethical dilemmas such as: To what extent should the researcher’s
authority be shared with the participants? Is it always ethical to empower our
research participants? If we feel an obligation to empower our participants, do we
necessarily endorse their behaviour? Is an informed consent enough to guarantee the
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participants’ emotional well-being? And it is the researcher’s responsibility to
address these issues as fully as possible.
Interpretivism’s methodologies are both hermeneutical and dialectical (Crotty,
2003). When conducting this type of research the researcher enters a hermeneutic
cycle where he makes interpretations of participants’ interpretations. The aim of
both the researcher and the participant is to arrive at a consensus that enables the
researcher to construct theory that is the result of dialectical interchanges. This
consensus could be understood as a reconstruction of previous life events. Paulo
Freire (1972) claims that an essential capacity of human beings is their ability to
reconstruct or recreate their worlds. Deconstruction then serves to challenge the
reification and sedimentation processes to which identity is subjected on many
occasions, and reconstruction brings people the opportunity to act upon their
realities and their identities. Persons are no longer conceived as mere spectators of
reality, performing identity roles that had previously been assigned to them by
culture. Human beings are able to reflect upon, question and deconstruct their
realities at the same time that they reconstruct them and emerge with renovated
identities that empower them to act upon their realities to initiate this spiraling
process again. Reflection and action go hand in hand, challenging or deconstructing
present realities and acting or reconstructing in a never-ending process (Freire,
1972).
4.3 Research Design
This study aims at improving our understanding of how personal, professional, and
student teacher identities impact on the creation and recreation of the teacher self.
An element that is considered central to identity formation processes and is placed at
the heart of this investigation is the self’s axiological framework.
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Narrative research constitutes the research design of this piece of research. Narrative
research can be considered a subtype of qualitative inquiry, which is commonly used
in interpretive research. Narrative inquiry is understood in this piece of work as “the
type of discourse composition that draws together diverse events, happenings, and
actions of human life into thematically unified goal-directed processes”
(Polkinghorne, 1995: 5). However, as Chase (2005: 651) has claimed, narrative
inquiry is still “a field in the making” since it entails a very rich research tradition
that had its origins in sociology and anthropology and presents the researcher with a
very broad variety of analytic lenses and traditional and innovative methods. The
most significant characteristic that all these analytic lenses and methods have is a
central interest in the biographical events that constitute a person’s life (Chase,
2005).
What this understanding entails is that life history is one of the most important
methods that constitute a type of narrative, an autobiographical narrative that intends
to answer questions like: Why do you make sense of the things that happen to you in
the way you do? Why has your life taken the course that it has? Who are you? Why
do you believe in the sort of things that you do? Three of the main reasons for
employing this methodology were, firstly, arriving at the understanding that
education, and language education indeed, constitute a narrative and political
enterprise. Secondly, I gradually developed the belief that language teachers’ stories,
which are lived in and out of schools, constitute a significant element in order to
understand the dynamics that generate and give shape to the pedagogical and
axiological beliefs that direct their professional practice. Finally, the multiple and
subjective nature of human experience and thus the self has brought recognition
back to life history as an ideal methodology that enables the researcher to better
understand the multiplicity of identities and the subjective nature of the self
(Goodson & Sikes, 2001).
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Atkinson (1998: 7) claims that life history approaches shed light on “the most
important influences, experiences, circumstances, issues, themes, and lessons of a
lifetime.” In the same vein, stories have been regarded by Thody (1997, cited in
Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2000) as an “unparalleled method for reaching
practitioners’ mindsets.” In addition, life histories are able to capture developmental
changes in people’s identities; it is through the ongoing construction and
reconstruction of narratives that persons (in this case language teachers) are able to
connect lived experiences with new knowledge and vice versa in order to integrate
them into who they are becoming. Life history, therefore, lies at the heart of this
methodology since what participants in this research have narrated is their
autobiographical stories in their own words. Thus the main source of data for the
present research are the narratives that the participants in this research and I have
reconstructed about a significant aspect of their teaching lives; their lives as
language teachers.
4.3.1 The research aim and questions
The main aim of this research is to gain a better understanding of how personal,
professional, and student teacher identities impact on the creation and recreation of
the teacher self, placing special emphasis on how axiological frameworks inform
this process.
I intend to reach this aim pursuing the following objectives that will enable me to
develop an understanding of:
 the way language teachers’ selves are developed;
 the role that personal, professional and student-teacher identities play on teacher
selves construction;
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 the ways in which professional development initiatives can be supported
through a fuller awareness of teachers’ selves.
By answering the following research questions I intend to meet the objectives above
mentioned:
 What sort of social and contextual influences have more impact on the
construction of language teachers’ selves?
 What is the role of agency and subjectivity in the construction of language
teachers’ selves?
Although the questions above mentioned helped to a great extent to give shape to
this research, unexpected issues emerged while carrying out the life story interviews.
This meant that an unstructured approach to interviewing left open the possibility of
exploring unknown dimensions of identity construction processes.
4.3.2 Selection of participants
The type of sampling used in this study can be considered a mixture of directed
sampling and snowball sampling (Wellington, 2000). My intention when conducting
this study was to contact language teachers who had at least two years teaching
experience and had had diverse opportunities for professional development
throughout their teaching careers. The main reason for selecting participants with
this profile was that they would provide richer accounts of the impact that these
professional life experiences have on their teacher selves. The participants in this
study have more than two years of teaching experience and have worked for the
CLTAL for at least three years. These teachers have taken or are taking an
internationally recognized certification for language teachers awarded by a
prestigious English university and five of them have been overseas with the specific
objective of improving their professional practice.
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In order to select the participants I sought the advice of a former academic
coordinator of both Language Centres. He suggested some potential participants and
put me in contact with some of them by sending them an invitation via e-mail. Two
of these participants responded affirmatively to this invitation and one of them
suggested, at the end of the interview, that I invite two of her colleagues. I contacted
the fifth participant when I met her at the CLTAL on the day I conducted the third of
the interviews. Finally, I contacted the last two participants when I returned to my
hometown and was able again to have contact with my colleagues in the Central
CLTAL. Therefore, although not every member of the staff in the CLTAL was
given an equal opportunity to participate in the study, the fact that I knew the
participants well and that they suggested other colleagues with whom I could talk
meant that our conversations were much more interesting, richer, and revealing than
those I could have had with colleagues who I knew less well. An additional benefit
was that all the participants were prepared to devote a considerable amount of time
to a research project which was not their own and to share personal, difficult, or
even painful aspects of their personal and professional lives.
Gloria, Laura, Tania, Daniela, Alejandra and Raúl
7
have shown a serious
commitment towards their profession and have continuously sought professional
development opportunities. This has been evident in students’ surveys that are
administered at the CLTAL every term for quality assurance purposes. More
detailed bibliographical notes of each of the participants are provided in Appendix 1.
The issue of representativness arises here as a long positivist and/or postpositivist
shadow that attempts to disqualify interpretive qualitative research. It is true that
7
To preserve anonymity the names of the participants have been changed.
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adopting a methodological approach that not only recognizes but rejoices in the
intersubjective nature of the human world entails a risk for researchers (Goodson &
Sykes, 2001). However, I believe that it is the diversity of the participants’ life
experiences that provides more richness to the study. It also enables us to gain a
deeper understanding of what made them the professionals they are and of the issues
they consider valuable for their personal and professional lives. This might open the
possibility for better opportunities that improve the lives of language teachers in the
CLTAL.
4.4 Data-collection methods
Life history interviews are the main source of data collection in this study. These are
generally used in social research to elicit deep-rooted beliefs and feelings from the
participants which other methods such as observations, analysis of documents, or
questionnaires are not able to elicit (Wragg, 2002). These are the most important
reasons why the main purpose of the interviews was to elicit from the participants a
discourse that narrated the story of their lives.
The data for the present study were collected in two different stages: the first took
place during November and December 2007 and the second stage occurred
approximately five months later. As my aim was to investigate how language
teachers’ life experiences shape their professional identities I used face-to-face, indepth unstructured life-history interviews which began with the following question:
“I’d like you to tell me a little bit about how you became an English teacher. What
brought you to the profession?” I took the decision to use unstructured interviews
for three main reasons. Firstly, an unstructured interview would allow participants to
feel the freedom to direct the progress of the interview. Secondly, I believe it would
have been unethical to arrive at the interview with a set of prepared questions
through which I may have imposed my own agenda on participants’ discourses thus
compromising the trustworthiness of the data (Guba, 1990). Finally, an unstructured
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approach to interviewing would enable me to obtain original stories generated by the
participants themselves, without the intrusion of my own biased lens.
The reason for conducting a second set of interviews five months later was to gain a
deeper understanding of how the different experiences that participants have lived
throughout their lives change or affirm their perspectives regarding what they
consider valuable or good for their careers. The interviews length ranged between
one and a half and three hours. Participants had the freedom to choose the place and
time of the interviews.
In addition to conducting interviews I kept a research diary with the purpose of
recording detailed descriptions of the research process, but more importantly, the
data collection stage. This diary enabled me to generate a story of the research
process and reflect on what I was learning through reading, writing, talking to my
colleagues, and interpreting data. The research diary served as a mirror in which I
could see myself reflected as a researcher and conduct an ongoing evaluation of my
research practices. It also provided a space where I could employ writing creatively
and experiment with new ideas that would later become important sections of this
research endeavor. Finally, the diary served as a link between myself, fellow
researchers, and the participants of the study. By allowing them to read and
comment on different sections of this diary, incipient ideas were enriched and initial
interpretations took shape.
4.4.1 Data-collection procedures
Seeking approval
The initial step that was taken in order to conduct the interviews was to seek the
ethical approval from Exeter’s School of Education and Lifelong Learning ethics
committee. I also sent a letter to the CLTAL’s Director of in order to be able to send
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an invitation to participate in this study to some of my colleagues (see Appendix 2).
Once I had received the approval from both authorities I approached a pair of
colleagues to help me pilot the interview.
Piloting the interviews
Wellington (2000) contends that the use of unstructured interviews may not be the
most desirable data collection method in a qualitative study since it relies heavily on
the interviewer’s social and communication skills. It was therefore of utmost
importance to be well prepared for the interviews by examining my own social and
communication skills. One of the most important comments I was given as part of
my colleagues’ feedback was the serious tendency that I had to complete the phrases
or ideas that they struggled to voice. By completing their phrases I was
compromising the richness and reliability of my data. In the final interviews, I
waited until the interviewee gave me a clear sign that she needed help, for example,
a direct question (e.g. how would you say X?) or their body language gave clear
indications of uneasiness.
Another piece of feedback that helped me to improve my performance as an
interviewer was the comment that on several occasions I changed the topic abruptly
when my colleagues were giving me clear signs that they wanted to say more about
the experience they were talking about. I went back to my colleagues and asked
them for examples of those “clear signs” that they sent. They commented that
sometimes their seating positions were relaxed and their arms were pointing towards
me. Other signs were making direct eye contact frequently and increased
gesticulation. During the final interviews I took special care to pay attention to those
kinds of signs from the participants. Whenever I thought of an interesting question
regarding a specific issue in the stories of their lives I made a quick written note to
ask the question when the participants were ready to answer it.
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Addressing issues such as those described in the previous paragraphs is of utmost
importance when conducting narrative research. Authors such as Clandinin and
Connelly (2000) describe situations where little attention from the researcher to
building trust and being respectful to participants’ feelings causes participants to feel
uneasy and reluctant to provide important details about their lives. Life- histories
that emerge out of such narratives prove to be too shallow to provide sufficient
accounts on how a teacher’s professional identity is formed. In addition to this,
Clandinin and Connelly (2000) highlight that there must be a continuous negotiation
of researcher-participant relationships in order to maintain a good narrative working
relationship.
Approaching participants
When I initially contacted each of the participants I gave them a brief description of
the type of study I aimed to conduct and the reasons why I considered this kind of
research important for the language teaching profession. After explaining to the
participants what they could expect from the interviews I gave them the informed
consent form (see Appendix 3). It basically contained information regarding the
participants’ rights such as anonymity, confidentiality, and the right to withdraw
from the study at any time. Participants could also read the transcripts of their
interview and comment on them to add new ideas, suggest amendments, or opt to
refuse permission to use certain information in the research.
Although I was very aware that informed consent would not suffice to address the
ethical dilemmas that would arise during the study, I felt it was still a valuable tool
that might help the participants to feel more at ease with the whole process though
momentarily. All the participants were given the option to decide the date, time, and
place of the interview.
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The first interview
I asked participants’ permission to record the interview. Before and during the
interview I took special care to make participants feel as comfortable as possible. I
wanted my role to be that of an attentive listener and made an effort to reduce my
verbal interventions to the minimum. Most of the participants decided to be
interviewed in their own offices or classrooms at the LC. However, one of them
preferred to be interviewed at the central library of the Northeast university, another
one opted for being interviewed in my home, and one more participant decided she
wanted to be interviewed in a cafeteria close to her workplace. The length of the
interviews ranged between one and a half to three hours. Since one of my priorities
was to make participants feel at ease I also gave them the opportunity to choose the
language in which the interview would be conducted; all but one decided to be
interviewed in English.
The second interview
Data analysis commenced during the data collection phase and continued through to
the completion of the writing phase. This early-begun data analysis process enabled
me to identify emerging themes that gave shape to important aspects of participants’
teacher selves and establish some links between these and the research questions.
This preliminary data analysis facilitated the identification of life events that needed
further exploration due to the centrality they have in teacher self construction
processes. The second interview took place five months after the first interview.
Since the purpose of this second interview was to explore in further detail specific
issues regarding participants’ inner teacher selves, it was semi-structured. However,
each interview schedule was specifically developed for a different participant. An
example of how interview schedules emerged from the initial interviews is provided
in Appendix 4.
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When conducting the second interview my purpose was to make participants feel as
comfortable as possible so the life history interviews developed like conversations.
Participants were also required to do a more in depth reflection of key incidents in
their lives. In addition to this, a further exploration as to the path their professional
selves had taken during these five months was equally important.
Interviewing issues
In spite of all these efforts not all the interviews went as smoothly as I would have
wanted. The research journal I kept helped me later to reflect on issues that can
hamper the research process and compromise the trustworthiness of our data. After
the second of the interviews I wrote the following research journal entry:
I had not realized how intimidating the researcher’s presence could be for
participants until I arrived to my colleague’s office to conduct the second of my
interviews. The participant is someone who has little academic preparation in the
TESOL area and her language teaching career has just begun; she is therefore not
familiar with how research is conducted within the profession and seemed to distrust
the whole interviewing process indiscriminately. This colleague has a good command
of the language and was given a high responsibility position within the Centre right
after the administrative changes took place. From the moment I arrived her attitude
was defensive and made it very clear that she wanted the interview to be conducted in
Spanish. In the beginning she gave very brief answers to my questions and did not
seem to be enjoying the experience. Since I was familiar with her good progress as a
language teacher I tried to make her some honest positive comments about what she
had been doing. I also tried to empathize with what she was sharing with me. I
believed this made it easier for her to speak honestly and from the bottom of her heart
since her replies progressively became longer and she felt comfortable enough to tell
me about the struggles she went through in order to improve her teaching.
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The journal entry above served to clarify for me how important it is for the
researcher to be aware of the impact that our presence has on participants’
contributions during the interviews. It is not only an issue of rapport, nor is it a
matter of avoiding double, restrictive, or leading questions. Educational researchers
have the responsibility to bear in mind that interviewees are likely to feel vulnerable
during the interview and the feeling of vulnerability may actually increase after the
interview, when participants begin to reflect on what they have said. In addition to
this, when research is conducted within our workplaces, as is partly the case in this
study, political issues become more evident for interviewer and interviewee and
there is similarly the risk of falling into “political minefields” (Malone, 2003: 798)
which might lead to serious discomfort on the part of the participants. I made a
mental note of these issues and constantly kept them in mind while interviewing
participants and took special care that neither my words nor my body language
could cause any unnecessary distress to them.
How the interviews became narratives
As I described previously, my main objective when interviewing each of these
language teachers was to collect narratives that contained the story of their lives.
Life history is an approach that has been described as an autobiographical narrative.
It has been adopted by feminist, postmodern and poststructuralist researchers to
challenge essentialist views of gender and ethnicity (Chase, 2005; Speer, 2005). In
this study one of my objectives is to challenge essentialist perspectives of language
teachers’ identities; therefore, rich narratives that contain not only a description of
events but the impact that these had on how participants thought and felt about
language teaching and about themselves as professionals were a key element. The
question with which I began the interviews: “I’d like you to tell me a little bit about
how you became an English teacher. What brought you to the profession?” in itself
triggered in the participants the need to tell the stories of their lives as the reply of
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the first of the participants shows: “If I want to tell you about that I have to go back
to my childhood.” This gave me the reassurance that I was following the right
pathway.
Similarly, although I was totally aware that the storied self that emerged throughout
each of the interviews was a co-construction between narrator and researcher
(Chase, 2005), I tried not to influence with my comments and opinions the stories
that each of the participants intended to tell. Instead, I opted for making continuous
eye contact and using paralanguage. Later, when transcribing the interviews, I
realized that most of the questions I posed were unnecessary to give coherence to
each of the stories. Both issues can be observed in Appendix 5 where the words of
the participant predominate transforming my role into that of an attentive listener.
This meant that a real narrative had emerged, one in which the voice of the
participants predominated; a narrative where participants could freely discuss the
personal, the theoretical, the political and the institutional dimensions of their
experience. Such dimensions, according to Middleton (1991) are paramount when
there is a search for the advancement of social and educational agendas.
4.5 Data analysis
I personally transcribed the recordings from the interviews and this gave me the
possibility of, on the one hand keeping data securely stored in my personal
computer, and, on the other hand, gaining a deep understanding of the participants’
life histories. Although I listened to the interview recordings in their entirety before
transcribing them, I avoided transcribing only sections of the interviews. As I have
said before the discourse in the participants’ life histories is the main source of data
in this piece of research. Refining the discourse by editing it would certainly
produce an artificial clarity of a life history that I fabricated using my participant’s
words (Wellington, 2000). The analysis of the data in this study is closely linked to
the data collection stage since both processes occurred almost simultaneously. While
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interviewing participants I began making inferences regarding which were the
greatest influences that shaped their professional identities and the different aspects
of their professional identities that underpinned the moral and ethical values that
were central in their professional lives.
While interviewing the participants, I tried to establish links that either compared or
contrasted their life experiences, their reaction towards them and the impact these
had on their professional identities. Every time I found one of these links I wrote a
note about it in the research journal along with some initial interpretations about
what this could entail for professional identity formation. This process was
cyclically repeated with every piece of research I read and even with some of the
conversations I had with my colleagues. The inferences I was making about the data
were therefore continuously gaining structure and being reshaped by the
participants’ discourse, the discourse in the literature and my colleagues’ discourse.
This is thus a highly flexible method of data analysis, as required by a flexible data
collection method such as an unstructured interview.
According to Neuman (2000), flexible and creative approaches to qualitative data
analysis are highly desirable, since words are frequently imprecise, dependent on
context, and commonly entail more than one meaning; this is one reason why I
opted not to use software analytical tools such as NUD*IST or NVivo. Analytical
tools such as the above are unable to capture the meaning of paralinguistic features
such as laughter, silences, hesitations, and stress variations, which, on many
occasions may either undermine or contradict the verbal messages that participants
appear to be saying.
After the data were transcribed, verbatim was color coded in order to find repeating
ideas (see Appendix 6). This initial coding included a very broad range of themes
that naturally emerged as I read the transcriptions and related what participants had
78
said to what had been previously stated by other researchers. As this was an initial
phase of the analysis many of these themes did not constitute the final categories
included in the results chapter. A second stage of the analysis was intended to
“move from raw text to research concerns” (Silverstein & Auerbach, 2003) and the
color coded verbatim were then grouped together in charts (Appendix 7). Reading
and reflecting on shorter stretches of talk enabled me to have a clearer perspective of
the common themes that characterized the group in each chart and focus my
attention on which of the research questions could be answered through those
stretches of talk.
All the participants received a copy of their transcribed interview which also
included some of my initial interpretations and invited them to amend or comment
on any aspect of the transcript or the interpretations I had made. Four of the
participants returned their transcripts and added some additional details to some life
events that they considered important. None of them, however, made any comment
regarding the omission or correction of data that was included in the transcriptions.
4.6 Ethical considerations
Although I have decided to include a section which specifically discusses the ethical
considerations of conducting this piece of research, discussions of ethical issues
which arose during the research process have permeated several other sections of
this study. I strongly believe that as researchers we cannot indulge ourselves into
simply having a succinct and thorough ethical considerations section. This in itself
would be unethical as it might give the impression that ethical issues have become a
mere formality to comply with which is forgotten along the rest of the research
process. Ortega (2005) discussed this issue amply, claiming that, while
methodological rigour has become a central issue of concern for researchers, this is
not the case with ethical questions. This is highly problematic, especially in the field
79
of second language learning and teaching, where research has a direct impact on
human participants.
Ethical issues were of central concern to me from very early planning stages of this
research project. Since my intention was to investigate issues of professional identity
formation, I was very aware of the ethical problems that may arise as a result of
conducting a study such as this. I have always found research on identity and its
impact on personal lives fascinating. However, I have also been very aware of the
highly intrusive nature of identity research. Posing a research question that enabled
me to develop a piece of research that would both address some of the language
teaching profession’s problems in my educational community and at the same time
would not cause harm to the participants of the study or the members of my
educational community is not an objective that can be achieved in its entirety.
Therefore, it is of utmost importance to take steps in order to conduct research as
ethically as possible. Two key practices that illuminated this process were a critical
engagement with the research conducted on professional identity and a continuous
reflection and questioning of my research practices.
Reading and reflecting made me recognize from the initial writing stages of this
research project that achieving value neutrality in research is a utopia. I could clearly
perceive how the institutional and indeed the political pressures of my teaching
context influenced what and whom I researched. This pressure continued to be
present during the data collection stage, the analysis of the participants’ narratives
and the actual reporting of the data. However, intentionality enabled me to focus
more closely on the object of this study and thus avoid causing harm or distress to
any of the participants in spite of the pressures that I mentioned above.
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4.7 Limitations
One important limitation of this study, as perhaps is the case with most of narrative
inquiry research, is the honesty or dishonesty with which participants told the stories
of their lives. They had the possibility of omitting or changing the details in their life
events. This was more likely to happen with participants who felt either intimidated
or potentially harmed by the research or the researcher. Although I may never know
whether participants did intentionally change or omit important aspects of their lives
that gave shape to their professional selves, I prefer to believe that the narratives that
emerged during the interviews do reflect participants real feelings, thought and
views regarding the life experiences they have had.
In a similar vein, the fact that there were only two interviews with each of the
participants made it more difficult to pinpoint the moments when these events took
place. Further interviews would have facilitated the building of a better rapport with
all participants and more intimate details of their lives would have emerged.
However, participants were given the freedom to build on their comments during the
interviews by having access to the transcripts at all times. Clandindin & Connelly
(2000) have rightly claimed that, in spite of all our efforts, narrative inquirers would
always have the sense of having arrived too late and leaving too early a research
setting. The lives and therefore the narratives of our participants began long before
we arrived; similarly, their narratives will continue long after we have left. This is
why narrative research will always have the sense of being “in the midst” (ibid: 154)
of life histories regardless of the number or duration of the interviews conducted.
Perhaps the most important limitation of the present study is closely related to the
researchers’ subjectivity. The qualitative nature of this research and the fact that I
was the research instrument imply that, to a large extent, the trustworthiness of the
study rests on how reflective and objective I was when conducting the interviews,
analyzing the data, and drawing conclusions. Four of the participants and I have
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very similar professional backgrounds: we all took the same undergraduate
programme in English, we took the same international English language teaching
qualification as well and three of us did postgraduate studies in British universities.
It was inevitable that throughout our conversations we formed that special bond that
exists between colleagues who share the same ideals. In addition to this, a fifth
participant was my student several years ago when he was learning English as a
foreign language. After spending two years in the United Kingdom and returning to
my workplace I found out that he was now my colleague and that his professional
future seemed very promising due to his commitment to teaching; I felt – and feel –
very proud of him. All this definitively biased the lenses through which I was
looking at all of them and influenced the depth in which I explored some issues in
the histories of their lives.
The researcher’s subjectivity influences the researcher’s presence in the research
report itself. Nelson (2005) claims that there is a very thin line between an
enrichment of the research data through recognition of our limitations as researchers
and an over-indulgent or even narcissistic attitude that makes the person producing
the text the central focus of the research. In this respect intentionality,
deconstruction and reconstruction were key elements that enabled a continuous
calling into question of my attitudes as a researcher.
We should always bear in mind that ‘the search for the complete and coherent is a
delusion’ (Goodson & Sykes 2001: 16). Most research will always produce a
snapshot of the reality, and, in the case of narrative research, the outcome is a partial
selective commentary on one’s life. It is our lives reflected, interpreted, and made
textual.
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5. Results
In this chapter I present the results of the present investigation which will enable us
to understand how the participants’ teacher selves are continuously being
constructed and reconstructed throughout their lives. The results will provide a view
into participants’ personal, professional, and student teacher identities and describe
how each of these influence the formation of teacher selves. Throughout this chapter
it will similarly be possible to distinguish how social and contextual influences
impact the teacher self and how agency and subjectivity together act as powerful
influences that shape teachers’ selves in unique ways.
A central issue in life history research is the opportunity for participants to “create
an identity” (Goodson & Sykes, 2001: 41) and for the researcher to craft “a
representation of informants’ experiences and representations” (ibid: 37). With the
purpose of representing as closely as possible the stories the participants of this
research told, I have opted for using extensive quoting and reduce my own words to
the minimum in order to facilitate readability and understanding of how participants’
lives evolved.
This chapter begins by presenting a summary of each participant’s life history.
These summaries have been included with the purpose to enable the audience to
become more familiar with the lives of each participant and to more fully understand
the results presented across the chapter. Following these summaries, the analysis of
the participants’ life histories is presented around four major themes: becoming an
English language teacher, influence of personal and professional context, influence
of formal learning experiences, and evolving views of teacher selves.
An issue to highlight is that even though some of the participants have lived similar
experiences, these have had a very diverse impact on their teacher selves, shaping
them in unique ways. In addition to this, separating the participants’ life histories
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under such themes proved to be a challenge, since there is continuous overlap and
threads that weave across two or more of these themes. The analysis revealed that
although participants’ lives were unique in more than one way, the influence of the
society, culture and context proved to be highly important on the construction and
reconstruction of their teacher selves. Therefore, the sections that discuss the
influences of personal and professional context and formal learning experiences are
the largest ones in this analysis. The chapter concludes by providing an overall
summary of the issues emerging from the life histories.
5.1 Summary of the participants’ life histories
5.1.1 Daniela
Daniela is a woman in her mid-forties. She has been teaching English for eleven
years and has worked with young learners, teen-agers, young adults and adults.
Daniela began working for CLTAL in 2004, where she was a part-time teacher. She
is currently the coordinator of CLTAL’s self-access centre at NESU’s southern
campus and has been accepted to a Master’s Degree programme in a leading British
university.
Since she was very young Daniela was in direct contact with the English language.
Even though she lived in Mexico, some of her neighbours were American and some
others used to speak to each other in English in spite of being Spanish native
speakers. In addition to that, she had in her home different kinds of books written in
English, which she found very appealing. She began learning English at a language
centre when she was nine and always kept in touch with the language. Although
Daniela firstly started working as a chemical engineer, she could no longer continue
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working since she was made redundant twice after falling pregnant with two of her
children. Since she deeply disliked the idea of being considered “only a housewife” 8
she looked for professional alternatives.
Daniela decided to become an English teacher to be able to help her children in
school at the same time that she developed professionally. Daniela began taking
training courses early on her career as a language teacher and places great value on
formal learning opportunities. This has motivated her to take a language teaching
diploma, a language teaching certificate and a B.A. in English language. In addition,
she will begin in the summer of 2009 a Master’s degree at a leading British
university. Shortly before completing her B.A. programme Daniela gave birth to her
third child. After a year of staying at home with her newly born, she returned to
work with kindergarten children where she felt confident enough to put in practice
some “personal learning theories.” However, she decided to quit this job in order to
start working for CLTAL where she felt “very happy because the students come to
learn.”
A core value that has become central for Daniela’s professional self is responsibility
“because what you do impacts the others.”
9
She considers that it is the lack of
responsibility that is to blame for the little respect that the language teaching
profession suffers from in her teaching context. She feels deeply worried about the
impact that this situation has on learners and contends that ill prepared teachers need
8
Participant’s words are italicized and placed between quotation marks.
9
The following transcription conventions are used: underlined = utterance marked by raised voice, pitch,
and/or volume; […] pauses of two seconds or longer. Brackets [ ] are used to enclose laughter or other noises,
nonverbal actions or other explanatory material.
85
to make the time to study more. Daniela continues to construct her professional self
around a central value, responsibility; this has enabled her to develop continuously
without fear for change and a deep joy for learning.
5.1.2 Gloria
Gloria is a woman in her late twenties who has been teaching English at CLTAL for
three years. She began as a part-time teacher and is currently the coordinator of
NESU’s institutional English language learning programme. Gloria was raised in a
wealthy family whose head was a well known leader in NESU. She was educated in
private bilingual schools and from a very young age she was in contact with the
English language. She was a bright student at school and considers herself as
someone who “always liked learning, mainly learn and study.” Gloria also had the
opportunity to study other languages such as German and French during summer
visits to Europe in her teenage years. She majored in engineering information
systems from one of the most prestigious private universities in the country. After
completing her undergraduate programme, she “did not have a job, and did not want
a job.” However, her mother made arrangements for her to get a teaching post at
CLTAL and was very pleased when Gloria became part of CLTAL’s academic staff;
she wanted her daughter to follow her father’s footsteps as a prominent leader in
NESU.
Shortly after she began to teach, she realized teaching was not as simple as she had
expected: “I think that my class was really boring that summer, I really don’t feel
satisfied with what I did.” Gloria then turned towards formal teacher training
programmes. She began taking an internationally recognized language teaching
certification, which she found very fruitful for improving her teaching practice.
However, it was her commitment towards her students’ learning the greatest source
of motivation, commitment and personal change. Two years after having completed
this certification Gloria was appointed the coordinator of NESU’s institutional
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English language learning programme and she decided to stop teaching. This new
responsibility became the source of various changes in Gloria’s teacher self; she
began to display the sort of behaviours commonly displayed by educational leaders
within NESU, which departed greatly from those of commitment, motivation and
search for the good and flourish of others.
Gloria is still committed to achieving the objective of becoming a prominent leader
just like her father was in NESU. She is planning to study a Master’s degree in an
overseas institution and even contemplates the idea of pursuing a doctoral degree.
Gloria appears to be reconstructing her teacher self with every experience that she
has and every dialogical exchange that she holds in her professional life.
5.1.3 Tania
Tania is in her early twenties and has more than eight years of teaching experience.
Before working for CLTAL she worked for several other small English language
teaching institutes. Tania was a bright and confident student who “for some reason
always got ten [top marks] in everything.” One of the most powerful influences that
motivated Tania to become an English teacher and leave aside her career as an
international businessperson was her aunt, who was a primary teacher. Tania had her
first contact with the English language thanks to her aunt and her teaching style was
deeply influenced by that of her aunt. While studying her major in International
Relations she accepted a job offer as an English teacher and although she continued
to teach English for several years, she did not speak of teaching as “my career.”
A visit to a private university with a very prestigious foreign language teaching
department was the final catalyst that motivated her to teach English professionally.
After living this experience, Tania was very interested in becoming “a good
teacher.” This is when her professional life at CLTAL begins; she worked there for
more than four years and during this time she took an internationally recognized
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language teaching certification and was granted a scholarship to study a Master’s
degree in an English institution. Although these learning opportunities meant
struggles and challenging times for Tania, they shaped important aspects of who she
is now as a professional and enabled her to better understand how her teacher self
can change through reading and reflection.
After returning from England Tania became one of CLTAL’s academic
coordinators. She highlighted that the learning experiences during her Master’s
programme enabled her to better understand her students and colleagues, to be
“more human.” Tania finds teaching as a “very rewarding” profession mainly
because of the interaction she has with her students. She finds special joy in
knowing that her students love, care about, and trust her enough to share “their
stories.” Now she thinks of herself as “a good teacher, a professional teacher” who
would like to share the things that she knows by participating in academic events
and conducting research. Shortly after the second of our interviews took place, Tania
decided to stop working for CLTAL, opting for pursuing her professional goals as a
coordinator in a different language teaching institution.
5.1.4 Alejandra
Alejandra is in her late forties, has eighteen years of teaching experience and has
been working as a language teacher educator for the past three years. She worked for
CLTAL for three years and she decided to leave this job due to “misunderstandings”
with her colleagues and CLTAL’s director. Throughout her professional life she has
worked with children, teen-agers, young adults and adults in a variety of language
schools and educational institutions. Alejandra was raised in a middle class and
extremely traditional family. She defined herself as a student who “enjoyed reading
books” and “enjoyed studying;” her greatest dream was to become a medical doctor,
but her parents denied her the opportunity to study middle school and forced her to
become a bilingual secretary. Alejandra got her first full time job at the age of 16
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and by the age of 20 she was a married woman with one child. During this stage of
her life she lived as “a happy housewife” and devoted her days to taking care of her
home and her children. However, when she turned 30 her husband lost his job and
this made her begin to give private English lessons to young children as a way of
helping him to support their family. Alejandra mentioned during the second of the
interviews that even though many years had gone by, she still held the dream of
going to university “deep inside my heart.” The language teaching profession finally
gave her the opportunity to make this dream come true.
Soon after Alejandra began teaching she looked for formal teacher training
programmes that would enable her to improve her teaching skills. When she took the
first of these programmes she met several experienced colleagues who offered her
teaching posts in different private primary schools. Even though these experiences
made her feel more confident, she remembers herself as “a very bad English
teacher” who “just followed the book.” It was not until she had the opportunity to
teach adults that she fully realized of the potential that she had as a language teacher.
Teaching adults made her feel “delighted, really delighted.” With renewed energies,
she began to teach only adults and to study middle school. She soon finished high
school and the day after she took her final test she enrolled in a B.A. in English; “I
was fulfilling my dream.”
Taking this B.A. programme meant a variety of changes in Aleandra’s teacher self;
she felt empowered enough to challenge teaching and assessment practices, and
even authorities in her teaching context. She also met valuable friends and began
building a closer relationship with her students. This programme also had a positive
impact on her personal life, since it enabled her to have a closer relationship with her
sons, who began to deeply admire her efforts for learning. After finishing the B.A.
programme Alejandra took other courses and continued to learn. However, she felt
deeply dissatisfied with these experiences since she considers herself “very critical
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and also demanding.” Alejandra is currently a teacher educator and is highly critical
of many of the teaching and leadership practices in her teaching context. She is
beginning to feel that her teaching career is coming to an end, with many of her
professional dreams still unfulfilled.
5.1.5 Raúl
Raúl is in his early twenties and has spent most of his professional life at CLTAL.
He is currently enrolled in a B.A. programme in applied linguistics and, in addition
to teaching English to teen-agers; he works as an assistant in CLTAL’s self-access
centre. Unlike the rest of the participants, Raúl provided little detail regarding his
life as a young learner. Instead, he placed special emphasis on narrating his
experiences as a language learner and student teacher at CLTAL.
Raúl has always felt attracted to learning languages; he thinks of himself as a
committed student who “didn’t know that wanted to become a teacher.” After
graduating from high school he decided to begin an undergraduate degree
programme in international relations since he thought this would give him the
opportunity to continue to practice English and learn new languages. However, his
learning experiences there were related to “mainly politics” and “just memorizing”
course contents.
He began his story as a language teacher when he applied for an English teaching
job at a primary state school. Raúl was surprised that he was hired simply after
passing a test of English. He worked there for very little time. However, this
experience helped him to realize that he was “really enjoying it.” Consequently, he
started looking for alternative options to his current undergraduate programme in
international relations.
The undergraduate programme in applied linguistics in which Raúl later enrolled
meant important changes for him. He encountered a remarkably different “not
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Mexican” teaching style where he has learned “to be critical, not just to keep what
the teacher says.” In spite of his youth, Raúl has had professional development
experiences that few teachers of his age have had. He has spent periods of academic
stays in overseas institutions which made him discover “this different culture thing
that they had.” This experience made Raúl question many of the teaching practices
and learner attitudes that he sees in his everyday work. Raúl thinks in very unique
ways about language teaching, learning and professionalism. He attributes the little
respect and professionalisation in language teaching to our culture; he understands
this situation as a “vicious cycle” where leaders do not require “demanding
teachers” because students do not conceive learning English as a life skill and “do
not demand a well prepared teacher.” According to Raúl, this is the reason why
most of Enlgish teachers opt for not developing professionally, because in their
culture “they [leaders and students] don’t care about it.”
In spite of this, Raúl is constantly making an effort for “changing mentalities: from
students, from teachers, from schools.” In addition to constantly helping his students
to “be responsible for their own learning,” he has recently been involved in a
mentoring programme for teachers. However, Raúl dislikes being considered a
mentor; he simply says that he has had the opportunity to work “on the area that
helps teachers.” Raúl intends to soon begin conducting research and start working
“on both sides” of the profession; he sees this as an opportunity to better understand
why teachers, teacher educators and schools are behaving in the ways that they do.
He also wants to do a Master’s Degree and focus more his attention now on the
mainstream education area in order to begin developing “things that can help
teachers inside classrooms.” Raúl feels that being able to know what he wants to do
for the following years is “really amazing, mostly because I’m doing what I like.”
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5.1.6 Laura
Laura is a woman in her early thirties who has been teaching English for nine years.
Before entering the language teaching profession she worked as a lab technician.
Laura remembers that as a young learner she always felt attracted to the English
language; she remembers herself singing songs and reading the words that were a
“challenge” for her to pronounce correctly. Two of her language teachers were very
influential in sustaining her motivation to learn the language and initiating a
continuous path of professional development. The first of her teachers “was like a
model to follow” for Laura, while the second “showed that she really cared about
her students” by inviting Laura to an undergraduate programme in English language
after discovering that Laura was an English kindergarten teacher.
Laura began teaching kindergarten children as a way of being closer to her
daughters during a summer camp. When her language course finished Laura
enrolled in the undergraduate programme that her teacher had suggested and her
teacher became her classmate. The experience of taking the B.A. in English enabled
Laura to learn not only “techniques, strategies, and the theory behind them,” she
learned a lot from her classmates who were “a very interesting group” of highly
experienced teachers with a very good command of the language. Laura always felt
especially thankful to the teacher who had invited her to take this B.A. programme
since it meant the start of highly positive changes in her personal and professional
life. While doing this B.A. programme Laura changed jobs and began teaching in a
State primary school. According to Laura, this was “a hard time” for her and her
daughters, which meant adverse changes in their personal lives due to Laura’s job at
that time where she had no colleagues, scarce resources and long teaching hours.
After her graduation Laura felt truly satisfied with who she was as a professional
and thought “I finished with the B.A, this was my goal, I’m done” but she was soon
invited by one of her former classmates to take a certification in English language
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teaching that had worldwide recognition. In this course she had the opportunity to
build new teaching skills, but above all, to enhance the teacher support network that
she had built around herself. In a social gathering with some of her classmates in
that course, Laura met one of her former teachers, who was at that moment
CLTAL’s academic coordinator, and invited her to work at CLTAL.
Laura’s previous teaching experiences influenced deeply her teaching practice in
CLTAL. Even though she was teaching adults, she had a very playful and dynamic
teaching style. This built a positive relationship between her and her students and
was reflected in the end of term student evaluations. As a result of the positive
student evaluations, during this time Laura was given one of the most important
opportunities for development in her professional life: studying a postgraduate
degree in an overseas university. This meant a variety of positive learning and
cultural experiences for Laura and her two daughters. She graduated with honours
and after returning to Mexico she became one of CLTAL’s academic coordinators.
Even though Laura seemed motivated in her post as a coordinator and was willing to
conduct research, a year after returning from England she decided to quit her job at
CLTAL. Laura opted for keeping the reasons for leaving the institution to herself.
5.2 Analysis of participants’ life histories
Throughout the interviews the participants narrated different stories of their lives
that were important influences for the formation of their teacher selves. All the
interviews began by asking participants to tell me about their lives as language
teachers. This invariably led them to narrate stories about how they had decided to
become language teachers, the people who had played an important role in their
personal and professional lives, how different social and contextual influences
impacted the way they felt about themselves throughout different stages in their
careers, their experiences when learning how to teach and the plans they had for
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their professional future.
The following sub-sections present in detail what
participants had experienced and thought about these events in their lives.
5.2.1 Becoming an English language teacher.
When asked about why they had decided to become language teachers all
participants concurred on the issue that this had not been their first career option.
Most of the participants had undergraduate studies in other areas and different life
events led them to consider language teaching as a possible career. For Gloria and
Raúl, two of the youngest participants, it was dissatisfaction with what they were
doing at that time that drew them closer to the language teaching career:
Raúl’s learning experiences in his undergraduate programme had not been fully
satisfying for him and he began looking for alternative activities that could be more
fulfilling than his major:
Raúl: By the second year of my major in international relations I knew about the job
offers that they had in primary schools.10 They were asking for [English] teachers. So I
said “I don’t have a job, I sort of need money” and I said what everybody says “so I
know English, so I can teach.” I went there, asked for a job, made an exam and they
said “ok, you have the level, you’re in.”
Raúl began teaching English and according to him “after this happened I noticed
that I was really enjoying it.” Raúl began to realise that learning languages and
teaching were activities that he found fulfilling for his personal and professional
identities.
10
The State’s Secretary of Education (SET) recently implemented an English language teaching programme
in primary schools. Therefore, many people with little training and language qualifications were recruited in
the state.
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Gloria narrated a similar story. She found her job as an engineer at that time deeply
unsatisfying. However, instead of finding a new job, Gloria intended to stop
working for at least six months, but her mother made arrangements for her to work
as a language teacher in CLTAL.
Gloria: I studied information systems [laughs]. I worked for six months but I really
didn’t like it, I got bored, I didn’t have fun. There wasn’t any satisfaction in what I did. I
arrived there and I thought “Oh my God, how horrible, how boring!” My mother talked
to [CLTAL’s administrative coordinator] because she knew her and she told me “Well, I
already got you a job as an English teacher” and I said “well, I’m going to try it.” I had
just graduated and I wanted at least six months of doing nothing.
Tania’s story was slightly different; she did not actively search for a job as a
language teacher. However, once she started working as an English teacher, she felt
more and more attracted to the profession.
Tania: In front of the council [where I worked] there was this small little school and
they invited me to teach a class. Actually, I liked teaching because my aunt is a teacher
so I liked this experience of teaching. The principal offered me a class because I spoke
English, so I could teach it [laughs] why not? [laughs]. [The first day] I was so nervous
that I wasn’t able to talk properly […] but my students liked the class! I mean, because
they learned something new. And when the class finished I wanted to teach again! Then I
started a new job and continued with my class in the evenings.
Even though Tania continued to teach English for about two years, she talked about
international relations as “my career.” It was not until she visited a Mexican
university with a very prestigious foreign language teaching department that she felt
strongly motivated to be part of this profession.
Tania: I saw this university and I said “wow!” But [I was told] you need to have a
Master’s degree if you want to teach here or something […] so I came back to [my
hometown] and I started looking for a job seriously as a teacher. I decided in my mind
that I was going to be a good teacher. I gave away a lot of résumés and then they called
from CLTAL to interview me and then I start my story as a teacher.
It was not until Tania came into contact with a context in which language teaching
was considered seriously as a profession that she felt it was worth initiating a career
in that area. Daniela held a similar feeling when she decided to become a teacher.
She was feeling uncomfortable with her single role as a housewife and thought she
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needed to look for a profession that did not clash with her responsibilities as a
mother of two.
Daniela: I am a […] a chemical engineer but you know, because of my [laughs][…] my
gender, a female, it is very difficult to become successful in this career, a chemical
engineer. I had my first baby and then I felt frustrated because imagine, your entire
career, all your years of study and you are only a housewife. I know that it is not very
bad, but, for me it was. That’s why I started studying to become like an assistant for
kindergarten English teachers
Similarly, although Laura held a certificate as a lab technician she soon felt very
attracted to the language teaching profession because, as a young mother of two, it
gave her the opportunity of being close to her daughters.
Laura: I wanted to take my daughters to summer camp and the school was like a kind of
bilingual school and there was a click in my mind like: “Oh, I can teach here!” because
I like English, the English language. They hired me and I started working as an assistant
in nursery and that’s the way I started. Then I got really engaged into the teaching stuff
and then I started the bachelor in English […] it was like a chain of events, one after
another.
Like the rest of the participants, once Laura started teaching she felt deeply attracted
to the profession. The story of Alejandra is slightly different from those of the rest of
the participants. When she was young her parents denied her the opportunity to go to
secondary school
11
and forced her to become a bilingual secretary. Alejandra soon
got married and became the mother of two; a sudden turn of life motivated her to
begin teaching English to other children.
Alejandra: When I was 30 my husband lost his job, he was fired and he had a
depression, it was very stressful, we didn’t have any money. He didn’t want to work and
I had to do something, but it wasn’t easy, I was already 30 and nobody would like to hire
a secretary of that age […] and I put an ad on the newspaper saying that I taught kids
with problems with English. That’s where I started.
11
Secondary education in Mexico is three years long, from grades 7 to 9.
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These findings above are in line with the experiences lived by informants in Hayes’
(2005, 2008) studies with Sri Lankan and Thai teachers which suggests a common
pattern among language teachers in ‘Expanding Circle’ (Kachru, 1992) nations.
There are three important issues to highlight regarding the ways in which the
participants of this study began their stories as language teachers. The first one is
that they were admitted to the profession despite their lack of language teaching
qualifications. Raúl, Laura, Daniela, Gloria, Alejandra and Tania were only asked to
take an English proficiency test in order to obtain a job as language teachers.
The second, and perhaps the more important issue, is that English language teaching
was not the first career choice for any of these participants; Alejandra was a
secretary who wanted to help her recently laid off husband, Laura was a lab
technician who wanted to spend more time with her daughters, Raúl was an
unsatisfied international relations student who “sort of needed money,” Daniela felt
very unhappy for simply being “a house wife,” Gloria was forced to teach English
by her mother, and Tania simply happened to work in front of a private language
school and was offered a job there.
However, their accounts show how they all gradually fell in love with the
profession. In all the cases this becomes a source of continuous satisfaction and a
desire to grow professionally.
5.2.2 Influence of personal and professional context
After all the participants entered the profession there were several social and
contextual issues that played important roles in shaping different aspects of their
professional lives. The most powerful factors for the participants were, in the first
place, learners, followed by leaders and family.
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Learners
For most of the participants, the interaction they had with their students was a source
of a variety of changes in their teacher selves. Gloria was one of the participants
whose changes were more remarkable. Gloria began teaching because she had no
other option left; her mother had already found a teaching job for her and Gloria
accepted “just not to get bored.” However, several incidents inside Gloria’s
language classroom served as a trigger for her motivation to continue to develop
professionally:
Gloria: Students began to tell me things like “we learned a lot with you, we want you to
teach us again [the next course]”[…] I also had this group of mostly women with whom
I took along very well and I noticed that when the course had almost finished they had
improved their English a lot […] that day [the last day of the course] they took me a
cake, a card, and a balloon that read “Thanks for a job well done.”I almost cried that
day, I felt really, really well. I guess they thought that the time they had invested [in the
course] was worth it, because it’s hard for an undergraduate student to invest four
hours every day during a summer course. One of them told me “It’s just that we think
that you know very well how to balance play with learning” and that made me feel very
satisfied. [Today] they still ask me “When will you teach us again? We learned a lot
with you and we want to practice like that again.”
These comments, details, and attitudes from her students sustained Gloria’s
motivation to continuously improve as a professional. Learners’ influence was not
simply limited to Gloria’s professional identity; these young people also taught her
valuable lessons regarding the real value of life and the sort of opportunities and life
experiences that she had had.
Gloria: I have learned a lot from my students mainly because I studied in a private
university and this is a public institution. I studied in schools where my classmates were
very wealthy people, and the things that we talked about were different. I remember that
there was an exam in which they [Gloria’s students] were asked to make a comparison
between using public transportation versus having their own car. When I read their
answers I was shocked [smiles] […] I had always had my own car and [chuckles][…] I
don’t know why I never realized that most of them had to use public transportation, well
[…] I started to reflect on things that were not relevant for me before [...] their answers
made me think I had wasted loads of money on clothes [chuckles] […] I learned from my
students that most of the people is not (sic) […] is not (sic) like [smiles] […] the world is
not like I had seen it […]to be honest, they helped me to set my feet on the ground, to
face reality as it is [her eyes are filled with tears]. Do you understand what I mean?
[smiles and chuckles].
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The continuous pauses while Gloria was telling this story show that she was deeply
touched by these events. Even the smiles and the chuckling that are present in these
excerpts show that these were critical experiences for the formation of her personal
identity and teacher self. The tears that filled her eyes towards the end of this
fragment are a sign of how deeply Gloria’s students had touched her life. Gloria’s
personal identity was remarkably touched by her student’s life stories. It is in issues
such as this one that we can clearly see how language teaching invariably implies
teachers and students coming into contact with their whole selves, not only their
professional or student identities.
Alejandra lived a similar experience to that of Gloria in which the importance of
understanding learners and teachers as whole selves is highlighted and shows that it
is whole selves that interact in the classroom. Alejandra had previously narrated that
even though she had taken several teacher training courses, she could not still feel
comfortable with what she was doing inside her classroom. As soon as Alejandra
found the students’ age group with which her personal identity harmonised, her
teacher self began to flourish. Alejandra felt that her adult students responded
positively towards the activities she used in her classroom and she felt that teaching
a second language became easier because there was a common ground between her
and her students.
Alejandra: I started teaching engineers. I was delighted, really delighted because they
were very funny. For example, if I took them songs, they knew the song because they
were all more or less of my age so we had many things in common, many interests in
common and we could talk about many things. That was when I decided to stop teaching
children because I didn’t; I thought that I didn’t have the characteristics to teach them.
Teaching children implies a lot of movements, a lot of energy and I am calmer than that.
Alejandra’s students also taught her valuable lessons that modified her professional
identity, and consequently, the way she thought about teaching and learning.
Alejandra: I was teaching junior high. I remember that one day I was talking to a girl
and she told me “Our teachers are very close-minded, they don’t talk to us” and that
comment impressed me a lot because I was […] I started to analyze the way I was myself
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and I said “yes, sometimes I don’t ask them [personal] questions.” And it was because
of that that I started to talk to them not as students but as equals, as the persons who I
teach. So I started to observe my students more closely I had better results when we had
that proximity with each other.
Alejandra’s students’ words penetrated so deeply in her teacher self that she soon
developed a teaching maxim to which she referred on several occasions throughout
the interview:
Alejandra: I want them to feel comfortable in my class, to feel relaxed and not stressed,
to make them feel that I really want to teach them something; that they have to learn
something with me but in a good way that can help them as persons.
Alejandra here placed special emphasis on the phrase “as persons.” It seems that she
became aware that it is not only learners’ and teachers’ identities who come into
contact with one another in the language classroom. She recognizes that there is also
a personal identity, which cannot be left outside the classroom, involved in this
process. Alejandra became aware that, when she opted for taking the relationship
with her students a step beyond and involving her whole self with her students’
whole selves, learning and commitment in the language classroom increased.
A similar situation was experienced by Raúl with his students:
Raúl: I had this class which all of them were my age, or around my age. I mean 20 year
olds to 24 year olds. They would just call me “Raúl” and they would work with me and
if I said “ok, you have to stop now, let’s get to work” they would stop and get to work.
So for me it was a group that I really, really liked a lot, and I enjoyed that, that’s one of
those experiences that I have liked the most because of this like […] ok, they would
understand me “ok, you are the teacher, we do as you say but you understand what we
like here.”
As young adults, Raúl and his students had had a broad diversity of life experiences
in common. This made them develop similar interests and values, which were the
source of that unique relationship that they constructed throughout the course. Seven
months after he began teaching, Raúl was given the opportunity to participate in an
academic stay in the United Kingdom. He went there for eight weeks he taught an
intermediate Spanish conversation class in the UK. The sharp contrast in learners’
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commitment to learning was something that left a big impression on him and is
evident on his account of his experience teaching a second language overseas:
Raúl: Students are very demanding there, they, uh, they expect the teacher to teach them.
I mean, sometimes here students if the teacher says “ok, today we’re not going to do
anything, we’re just going to relax and have a good time” they get very happy and they
say like “ok this is the best teacher ever because he lets us do whatever we want” and
they don’t do that there. They expect the teacher to teach and they expect the teacher to
be well prepared to go there. If they are going to be there they want to take advantage of
their time because they could have done something else with it. So this like demanding
thing from them was really different.
Raúl felt a lot could be learned from the contextual values regarding learning he
lived in Britain. This experience served as a starting point for many of Raúl’s future
professional plans when returning to his home country. After living this experience,
Raúl decided to focus his teaching on “tightening some knots” in order to help
students “to get responsibility for their own learning […] to know what and why
they are learning a second language.” He similarly became very interested in
autonomous language learning and teaching and he even visualizes himself
conducting research in this area.
Laura’s learners also became a source for motivation to improve her professional
practice. From the beginning, she was concerned about her students’ needs and this
made her invest time and energy on bettering the quality of learning opportunities
that she provided to her students.
Laura: My students, well, as I told you, they were very energetic. They were pretty
demanding, sometimes and uh, I learned that I have to give them what they expected.
They had high expectations, so my goal was to fulfill those expectations. They made me
improve my teaching, they made me think to plan and give quality, what they deserve.
Laura’s previously lived professional experiences as a teacher of young learners
made her develop a dynamic, interactive and playful teaching style which was
warmly accepted by her adult students. This reinforced her beliefs regarding
learning and teaching and strengthened her teacher self identity.
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Laura: I’m still in touch with some of my first students when I started working here
[CLATL] and one of them is very special for me because he’s got special needs. He had
a stroke when he was very young so some of his motor skills are not working 100% and
he really made a great effort in attending his classes and trying to speak and trying to
learn. He was very fun in spite of this. And sometimes he’s passing just to say hello and
he always tells me that he remembers that class very much because they were like kids
during the class and he used to say “Well, if you become a kid, you learn. If you have
fun in the class, you learn.”
From all the extracts above we can conclude that teaching is a profession deeply
filled with values and emotion. Participants in their relationships with their students
placed a lot of emphasis on their emotions and on what they considered valuable or
desirable for the well-being and flourishing of their students.
Overall, the influences of learners shaped participants’ teacher selves in three main
ways. Firstly, learners’ life experiences became a source of reflection that had an
impact at a personal level and enabled participants to reshape their personal
identities. For example, we observed how Gloria was able to reevaluate the life that
she had lived and understand the all the privileges she had enjoyed as a middle class
woman after finding out about her students struggles in their everyday lives.
Secondly, they proved to be a source of motivation to improve participants’ teaching
practice and to establish future professional plans. Raúl’s interaction with foreign
language learners from overseas made him realize how important autonomy and
responsibility were to successfully learn a second language.
Finally, the interaction with learners enabled participants to gain a deeper
understanding of their sense of self as teachers. After reflecting on her young
learners’ preferences for learning and some of her personality traits, Alejandra
realized how important it was for her as a language teacher to focus on teaching
young adult and adults in order to fully develop her potential as an educator.
Leaders
In this section we will notice that the relationship between teachers and leaders is
diametrically different from those between teachers and students or teachers and
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colleagues. While in the latter relationships a mutual relationship of care, trust and
respect
gradually
emerges,
the
former
relationship
is
characterized
by
misscommunication, political games, and mistrust in many cases.
Participants narrated how, in some cases, the positive relationship that arose
between teachers and leaders facilitated continuous growth, well being, and sense of
belonging.
Alejandra, the participant with most years of experience, provided different accounts
regarding the positive influence of several of her coordinators. Shortly after she
began her career as a language teacher, she worked with two young programme
administrators who helped her to develop a diversity of teaching skills.
Alejandra: I worked with Mariana and Eduardo and they taught me a lot of things; a lot
of dynamics, uh […] a lot of strategies, for example to teach grammar in a more
meaningful context, to make students speak more. I felt that I was learning a lot, I was
improving my teaching a lot, I had more confidence about myself, and I was learning a
lot of things.
Alejandra similarly described her two current coordinators as holders of the leaders’
qualities which she valued the most.
Alejandra: Gail is a very good coordinator she really is organized, she listens to our
suggestions; she’s open to our suggestions. Also Kathleen, she’s also a very good
coordinator, she’s very comprehensive. She respects you a lot as a professional and she
always asks for your opinion. She’s a very good leader, approachable. I think that
Kathleen and Gail are good leaders. If you as a coordinator respect your teachers they
learn to respect you […] and you have to be very well prepared to fulfill that role, in
order for not to loose credibility from the teachers you coordinate.
Alejandra’s accounts of good leaders are not centred on their leadership skills. She
places emphasis on the respect and openness from leaders towards language
teachers’ ideas and on programme administrators’ empathy towards teachers’ lives.
Even when Alejandra stressed the words “being well prepared” she did this pointing
with her index towards her heart and then to her head. This might have meant that
she did not only mean academically well prepared, but also emotionally well
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prepared; it is emotion which is more closely related to people’s axiological
frameworks.
From the accounts above we can clearly see that language teachers appear to value
leaders whose teacher selves seem to be constructed from a set of values that
prioritise the emotional aspect of leading language teachers inside educational
institutions.
Gloria and Laura narrated two experiences with their coordinators that contrast
sharply with the examples provided above. Laura described a situation where she
was granted a scholarship for postgraduate studies due to the continuous positive
feedback that the administration received from her student evaluations. Two months
after she was given this notice, once she had started application procedures for her
postgraduate programme and her daughter’s schools, CLTAL’s programme
administrator took away the offer.
Laura: I said “[Opening eyes and mouth widely] Oops! […] well, never mind, maybe in
another time or” […] I was discouraged because why did they tell me that I was going
to be considered for that? And why did they ask me to start looking out for schools and
arranging some of the requirements and then they just say “no”? And they didn’t give
me any reasons and, well […] then I thought of my students, well I need to work and I
have to work the way I’ve been working, so I don’t need to change and I don’t have to
change the way I work ‘cause that’s the way I like to do my teaching thing. I’m not
working here to get a scholarship or anything. If I get it, that’s a good thing, and if they
offer me the possibility of doing it, it is because they think I’m able to, so […] just keep
on working and see what happens next.
Laura turned this experience into an opportunity to affirm and strengthen her
identity as a language teacher. She decided to understand her profession as “my
teaching thing,” as something that nobody could take away from her.
Similarly, during the first of the interviews Gloria, one of the youngest participants,
narrated how she felt isolated and not guided when she began teaching at CLTAL.
Gloria: The truth is that there was never an induction or a meeting where I could say
“Hi, I’m Gloria and I’m joining the team here.” I had to do everything on my own and
ask people around me “what’s your name?” and stuff like that […] Its is extremely
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useful to share these things with your colleagues, in the beginning this was very
important for me, I wanted to meet my colleagues, because I could go and say these
things to, say, my boyfriend, but he wouldn’t understand me […] When I started here I
asked “and what do I do now?” the reply was “well, nothing, you come in, you sign here
and then you go to your classroom.” But what do I do? I’ve never taught a class!
[laughter]
Instead of feeling disempowered or lost Gloria opted for doing “everything on my
own” in order to improve her teaching practice.
In contrast to Gloria and Laura’s reactions, when Alejandra lived a similar
experience, she denied herself the opportunity to learn and grow from that
experience. The absence of dialogue and reflection between Alejandra and
CLTAL’s director made her draw her own conclusions regarding the criterion used
for granting professional development opportunities in CLTAL. She felt that these
opportunities were granted to younger and less experienced colleagues. Therefore,
she assumed that she was being discriminated against due to her age and experience.
Alejandra: At that time I wanted to go to England, to study there, to do this program
[…] because I really wanted a Master’s degree and I could leave, I didn’t have any
problems, but the opportunity wasn’t offered to me. She [CLTAL’s director] never told
me the reason why, she was not the kind [of person] to give reasons or explanations to
anybody. She only chose young people and I told Laura and I told Tania “well, you were
taken because you are young and I can understand that.” She chose two future
coordinators who are young and easy to manage.
Every language teachers’ subjective understandings of their experiences lead them
to shape their teacher self in diverse ways. The stories that Alejandra provided seem
to suggest that one of the hardest things for her to understand was not feeling heard
and valued in her workplaces and her resentful reactions prevented her from learning
from adverse experiences and growing as a professional.
Alejandra: I remember that we had to share the exams, something that I didn’t like, and
I remember that I saw an exam from one of the teachers and I thought “no, this is not
good because this is not well designed. I would like you to change this and that” and the
coordinator said “no, you have to accept it as it is.” She had just studied at [a
prestigious local immersion school] but she didn’t have, she doesn’t have any academic
preparation but she was experienced. And I was prepared but nobody paid attention to
that.
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The above is a quite common issue in this teaching context; people who are
proficient in English are frequently hired as language teachers. As they gain
experience, these persons begin to occupy authority positions within English
departments of schools in spite of not having an appropriate academic preparation to
occupy these posts. This is an issue that obviously does not do any good to the
profession and Alejandra seemed to be deeply troubled by this situation. With
another of her coordinators Alejandra lived a similar experience.
Alejandra: Not all the books are appropriate for our students. I started complaining
about books when I was in CLTAL; I really hated the book we used [laughs]. I used to
ask [the director] “When are we going to change this book?” but she never answered, I
don’t know, sometimes she just didn’t answer those questions.
In contrast to Laura and Gloria, who did not feel disempowered in spite of the
adverse experiences with their coordinators, Alejandra felt little respected and not
valued. In all the cases she opted for leaving the jobs where she lived these kinds of
experiences.
The last of these stories shows the power that the teaching context and institutional
discourse have on the formation of language teachers’ axiological frameworks. Two
years after she began working for CLTAL, Gloria was appointed to be one of the
coordinators of NESU’s Institutional English Programme. The following is what she
narrated during the second of our interviews regarding her responsibilities as a
coordinator and shows how she was now beginning to reproduce the kinds of
behaviours that she found dissatisfying at the beginning of her teaching career.
Gloria: My position is sort of administrative, my office is here [in CLTAL’s building]
but I’m not part of the CLTAL, I coordinate what is institutional; English teaching in
each of the Academic Schools within NESU. What I mean is that I have nothing to do
here.
Paulina: Okay. Can you tell me a little about your experience as a coordinator?
Gloria: Well, no. I have nothing to do with English teachers in Academic Schools. I just
tell them “We have a meeting” and the Head of each school tells the English teachers to
come with me for things like “I’m going to give you this exam for the next examination
period” or give them memorandums. I have nothing to do with hiring teachers. I have
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nothing to say regarding how they train them in each of the Academic Schools, that’s not
my business […] […] well, I have already planned, at least in my mind, well, to do a
workshop on activities for the book. But our meetings are mostly informative, things like
“here’s what you’re going to teach this semester”, “give me your grades”, “remember
I’m going to send you the exam”, “this is for the Academic Secretary in your School to
fill out”. Alright? Things like that.
At the time of the interview, Gloria had been in this post a relatively short period of
time; she was beginning to familiarize herself with the English teaching faculty and
other coordinators. While she narrated her responsibilities as an institutional
coordinator Gloria was clearly feeling uneasy, she began to avoid eye contact and to
increase the pace of her speech. Towards the end of the paragraph, Gloria even
intends to highlight that this sort of attitude towards teachers from NESU’s
Academic Schools will not last for long and she is planning to implement some
training sessions. Perhaps she recalled the story she had told regarding her
experience with academic coordinators who did not encourage the formation of any
teacher support network and how lost she felt during the earlier stages of her life as a
language teacher.
An interesting issue to highlight is the contrast that exists between the values that are
displayed by coordinators in other language teaching institutions and the ones
displayed by CLTAL’s and NESU’s coordinators. While most of the coordinators
from other institutions seem to be willing to support, listen to, and collaborate with
language teachers, coordinators from CLTAL and NESU display diametrically
different values in their attitudes towards teachers. The substantial impact that
coordinator’s decisions have on language teachers’ lives is manifest in the accounts
provided by Laura. Programme administrator’s decisions were not only affecting
Laura’s professional life, but her personal life and those of her daughters.
Family
The influence of the family appeared to be stronger for Tania, Laura and Alejandra.
An interesting finding was that the impact that participants’ family members had
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was atemporal. That is to say, several early life experiences appeared to have an
impact on current teacher selves. One of the reasons why Tania decided to accept
the offer to become a language teacher was the role model that her aunt represented
as a teacher. During the second of our interviews Tania explained the reasons why
her aunt was so influential in her language teaching career.
Tania: Yeah, actually yes because she is kind of […] like […] my second mom so we
had, we have a very […] strong relationship, I think, I believe. Actually she taught me
how to read and write before I started first grade. Yeah, so… if I think of a teacher that I
love a lot it could be her.
Tania’s aunt’s influence was not only limited to career choice but also to her
teaching style and the kinds of behaviors that she considered valuable for her
teachers, colleagues, and herself as a professional.
When talking about why she became a language teacher, Alejandra immediately
referred to an early life experience that was intimately linked to her family life.
Alejandra: If I want to tell you about that I have to go back to my childhood. I always
liked studying, I enjoyed studying, I enjoyed reading books. I remember that I wanted to
be a [medical] doctor since I was a child, but my mother told me “you have to study to
be a bilingual secretary,” so I was really disappointed because of that fact […] uh
[…]and I said, well […] at that time children didn’t use to say anything, disobey. We
had to say yes to everything that our parents told us to do. So what happened is that I
married a person that worked there, a lawyer. I was married when I was 18 and I
became a mother when I was 20. […]
This early life experience had a heavy impact on Alejandra’s project of her “self”
and being able to pursue a degree became one of her most important dreams in life.
Alejandra: My dream was to go to university to study […] whatever thing now, not a
doctor but […] it was a thing that was deep inside my heart because when I was a child
I was a good student and it was not fair that I didn’t have the chance to study a degree.
When Alejandra was finally able to fulfill this dream, the role of her two sons
became very important to her since she frequently found in them the support she
needed to continue studying.
Alejandra: My children, well they were really […] I didn’t have to put pressure on them
to help me because “mum was studying” and I think it was very nice for both of my
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children. I didn’t have any problems with them and they helped me with the computer. I
remember that whenever I didn’t know what to do I asked them, and they helped me a lot
and they kept on studying. The relationship with my sons only changed for good. They
used to ask me “how do you manage to do all these things?” Sometimes they said
“mum, studying is difficult. How can you do this?” They admired me and I think that I
set a good example for them.
One of the most positive consequences of fulfilling her dream was the new
relationship that Alejandra constructed with her teen-age sons and how they gave
her the support that she needed through difficult or challenging times during her
studies.
Laura’s daughters were also a strong influence for the formation of her teacher self.
In addition to this, Laura’s daughters felt the negative or positive impact of every
change during her language teaching career; when Laura had to work long hours at a
promising job in a public primary school her daughters went through a difficult time.
This situation changed when Laura began to work for CLTAL and she could
dedicate more time to them. When Laura was granted the scholarship to study a
Master’s Degree overseas her daughters felt very excited since it meant a promising
experience for them too.
Laura: I had very clear in my mind that I was there for studying, not for traveling or
having fun, because, well, in my position, I was there like a mother, with my children. So
I couldn’t risk anything because, for example, just to think if something happened to my
daughters, I had to go back. If I go back I’m going to leave this, I’m finished; and I had
to do this right because I was here like with a compromise. I had something signed [a
letter of commitment in NESU] and I had to fulfill this.
Laura very clearly explains how her failure or success in taking good care of her
children and achieving good results in her Master’s programme would have an
impact on both her professional and personal life. Both aspects of her teacher self
were closely interrelated affecting one another in every step of Laura’s pathway
towards learning and development. The experience of living overseas enabled Laura
to harmoniously connect her personal, professional and student teacher identity. She
talked about this issue with her daughters and helped them understand and value the
impact that her professional development opportunities had in all their lives.
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Laura: So I always made sure they understood the opportunity we had, we all three had
and that they were aware that we were there to learn, enjoy as well the experience of
being there and to take advantage of the whole thing around us. I mean, in learning,
because it is not only the language, it is the culture, it is the people you meet, it is
everything.
The experience that Laura and her daughters had in a context which held such a
broad range of learning opportunities was truly unique and she consciously made an
effort to raise her daughters’ awareness of this fact. The connection that existed
among Laura’s personal, professional, and student teacher identities was so strong
that she could even base her final research project on the development of a bilingual
identity of one of her daughters. This is a very good example of how language
teachers, if adequately supported, are able to harmoniously develop their
professional, personal, and student-teacher identities.
5.2.3 Influence of formal learning experiences
Most of the formal learning opportunities that were available to the participants were
organised by NESU’s or CLTAL’s leaders. These opportunities ranged from
certificates in language teaching, B.A. programmes in English language and applied
linguistics, to academic stays and Master’s degree programmes in overseas
countries. Participants’ formal language learning experiences seemed to play a
central role in shaping their teacher self perception. Learning is understood by many
as an essential process for human beings to develop an independent judgment that
enables them to act autonomously. This autonomy, in turn, becomes the source of
empowerment and emancipation (Biesta & Tedder, 2006). The above arguments
seem to be supported by the findings presented in this section. We will observe how
early teacher selves and student teacher identities are impacted by the reflection that
learning experiences activate and this reflection becomes the source for agentive
capacities development that lead to a renewed conception of teacher self.
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The role of teachers
Teachers were a powerful influence in teacher self formation for the participants of
this study. Participants’ language teachers and teacher educators were equally
influential in the formation of their teacher selves. Language teachers mainly
provided inspiration for procedural aspects of teaching in early stages of
participants’ careers. On the other hand, teacher educators were a source for both
participants’ procedural knowledge and values that underpinned their teaching
practices.
Gloria’s German teacher during her teenage years became a source for creative
activities that Gloria tried to implement when she first began teaching English.
Gloria: I was really surprised of how much I could learn with her without using a book,
no rules, no nothing. I think that she left a very big impression on me; we used to play a
lot with her. Her classes were always like a conversation. In fact, when she taught me I
used to think “Wow! I’d like to have a job like hers; it’s a really cool job.” In fact, when
I began to work here [CLTAL] I tried to remember the kinds of games that we played
with her.
Similarly, when Raúl was first told that he was going to teach at CLTAL, he claims
he “got like […] scared” mainly because of his “experience studying that book […] I
knew how my teachers worked; ok, I would like to do this, as they did with me.”
During the first one of our interviews Laura spoke about how one of her language
teachers who “involved us like in a very humanistic way” and “used to guide a
discussion about your personal plans, about your future” During the second
interview she mentioned that she currently thought that “when you link what you
have in your classroom with your students’ personal lives, when you make that
connection, I guess it’s more […] how can I say it?[…] meaningful, yeah it is more
meaningful for the students to remember or to learn.” The influence that this teacher
had on her is clear since now she intends to foster with her students a similar caring
relationship.
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Regarding the influence of teacher educators, Daniela and Tania appear to be the
participants who mostly valued the concrete language teaching strategies and
techniques. Even though Tania went through a difficult time during her first months
working at CLTAL and struggled while giving her first lessons and writing the
certification’s essays, her tutor at the certification course she was taking became not
only a living ideal teacher self who Tania intended to emulate, but a continuous
source of motivation.
Tania: The [certification’s] instructor, I felt she was something huge, huge. I enjoyed
her classes a lot […] and the way she taught, I mean, the way she used consciousness
raising, I liked that […] I started like, trying and trying and trying. Even though the
school didn’t ask for lesson plans I started writing them because that made me focus.
Nobody asked me to do that! But I liked to do that because I wanted my students to learn
and I wanted to be a good teacher.
Daniela’s experience of taking a language teaching certification at the beginning of
her language teaching career was so positive for her that even now she continuously
brings her tutors’ voices alive in order to reflect on her current teaching practice.
Daniela: Yes! [smiles] I always listen to their voices inside me [laughs]. Yeah, because I
remember that they said things like “Are you doing well?” “How do you feel?” “Is it
ok?” “Why did you do this?” I always remember to do it, when I’m teaching I always
ask myself “Why did I do it?” or “What went wrong in this activity?”
Contrastingly to what Daniela and Tania valued from their teachers, Alejandra and
Raúl focused their attention more on the kinds of values that teacher educators
displayed while teaching. Alejandra’s teachers’ attitudes and personalities were a
source of reflection for her. This enabled her to reevaluate what was worthy and
what was unworthy in language teaching.
Alejandra: A teacher that I remember a lot was teacher Perlita because she is very
human, very transparent […] and I remember that sometimes she didn’t know how to
pronounce a certain word and she used to say “How do I pronounce this word? Because
I can’t, I really can’t.” How could she say this? She’s supposed to be professional,
because teachers here are supposed to know everything and I said “Wow, how can she
do it? Dare to say that!”
Far from judging her teacher harshly, this attitude made Alejandra admire her more
to the point of being able to reshape her teacher self. Alejandra understood that
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being “human,” accepting that “you can make mistakes” and “sometimes you don’t
do well” is a very healthy way of having a closer relationship with students.
In contrast to the above, the words of another of her teachers were a big
disappointment for her since they contradicted one of Alejandra’s most important
teaching maxims, which was to respect and care for her students.
Alejandra: Patty said “I don’t remember my students’ names or their faces” and I said
“Oh my goodness!” that is very important for any teacher and she said ‘I’m not good at
remembering faces or names’ and I thought “How can she say this? It’s wrong.”
Patty’s words acted only to the detriment of her image of a professional to
Alejandra’s eyes. We can even see that the noun “teacher” is missing before her
teacher’s name. In this context, it is very common for learners to place this noun in
front of the teacher’s name as a sign of respect. This is a sort of localized use of
English that has developed in the area. Through her words, Alejandra is letting us
know that Patty is not so worthy of respect.
In a similar vein, the values that underpinned the teaching style of many of Raúl’s
teachers at his undergraduate programme in applied linguistics enabled him to
incorporate critical thinking skills as another central value in his professional life as
a student teacher.
Raúl: Teachers there, well, most of them have this, uh […] not Mexican culture of things
[…] in the teaching area. We have learned a lot to be critical and not to just keep what
the teacher says [laughs] […] there is always something more behind; and mostly
because they do it that way. [They say] “Ok, I won’t tell you, you find it out and then
you come and tell me and we discuss it, just to check what you understood.”. And this is
what most of them do and it is like a good way to work because you get to understand
and maybe the teacher will say something as he or she understood but the way you see it
is very different, yeah? So if you enter in a discussion with him it will be worth
something, maybe to get his ideas or to reject them. And as I said, we don’t keep the
teacher’s mentality; we get our own mentality towards all these things.
The types of learning opportunities that Raúl was having in this undergraduate
programme were now enabling him to develop his own ideas regarding teaching and
learning. He did not conceive his teacher self simply as a reproducer of knowledge;
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he was aware that knowledge could be co-constructed between student teachers and
teacher educators. This had an impact on his teaching practice.
Raúl: I have the idea now that students need to take responsibility for their own
learning. It is not easy [laughs] mostly because of the culture we have here. “You’re the
teacher; you’re going to tell me, why I should do it and how to do it. Do not just tell me
‘you’re doing well;’ you have all the answers and I want them.” And, with language it is
not that way.
Teachers meant to participants mainly a source of ideal teacher selves who they
intended to emulate. In most of the cases, language teachers and teacher educators
displayed behaviours that participants considered valuable for their professional
practice and they consciously made an effort to incorporate such behaviours into
their teacher selves. Even though the teachers and teacher educators with whom
participants had come into contact were not perfect, they opted for focusing on their
teacher’s qualities rather than on their negative features in order to reshape their
teacher selves.
The role of colleagues
The teachers who participated in this study were continuously seeking opportunities
to improve their teaching practice. They enrolled in a diversity of courses where
they had the opportunity to meet new colleagues. The interaction between them
proved to be highly meaningful for the formation of their personal and professional
identities. However, it was notable that none of the participants spoke about their
colleagues in their workplaces. The most influential colleagues who they met seem
to be those with whom they shared formal language teaching experiences.
Daniela shared the experience she lived when she decided to enrol in a B.A.
programme in English. This programme had a distance learning mode and lessons
were delivered through a videoconference system. Most of her classmates were very
experienced language teachers and they rapidly formed affinity groups, which were
basically determined by their institution identities (Gee, 2000-2001).
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Daniela: We were having lessons only on Fridays and like for us it was like […] like our
happy Friday, because we were in groups: the group from [school A], the group from
[school B], the group from [school C] and the talkative group, in which I was with my
other mates [laughs]. Well, you know that the teacher was not there so we could talk and
the teacher didn’t see us, so we could talk. But we were talking about the same, about
what I told you, ‘I have a problem with this guy or’ […] the lessons’ topic started the
conversation.
Daniela and her classmates gave themselves the opportunity to learn from each other
by sharing their experiences and beliefs. The influence even reached their personal
identities and the interrelationship among student teachers in this programme served
to create not only an inter-institutional teacher network but also a strong friendship
network:
Daniela: In the beginning we didn’t know each other, but in the end [...] for example the
colleague that invited me to take the B.A. was only my colleague at the beginning of the
course but now she’s like my sister, and others like her that I met in the course. It was
very different from any other studies. One person died when we were just about to finish
and I got pregnant again; we lived together two deaths and three pregnancies.
Alejandra similarly lived highly meaningful experiences with her colleagues in the
B.A. programme.
Alejandra: That was a very […] select group; a lot of experienced teachers were
studying there. The most valuable […] I think that their experience, the strategies that
they taught me. I also started to get job offers from them and that made me feel
important.
The classmates who Laura met in the Bachelor programme in English were very
influential for her.
The B.A. […] that was a very interesting group [smiles] I remember my classmates, they
were really experienced. Some of them were like native speakers, some of them had like
20, 25 years or more of experience, some had lived abroad in an English-speaking
country, so it was, it was like “oh, wow!” I learned a lot from them. I learned to observe
how they handled their comments [in class sessions], how they, they defended what they
thought. And for example the ideas about teaching as well, they were just, they seemed
to be very creative and very confident.
However, from Alejandra’s words in the following extracts, it seems that the role of
her colleagues in subsequent teacher training courses was not as positive as in the
B.A. programme.
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Alejandra: Ah! My classmates were, they were trying to […] trying to copy my essays!
[laughs] They were like “Can you give me this paper?” and I thought “Oh, no. That’s
not fair!” They were my friends but they didn’t have the preparation […], I didn’t learn
too much from them. I had to observe some colleagues [teach] as well but I have not
really learned much from observing them, no, because I tend to be really, I am a very
critical person. I consider myself as very critical I try to make my students feel
comfortable with me. That’s the way I am, I demand a lot from the teachers. I sometimes
don’t like the way they speak, the way they treat students.
Making students feel comfortable while learning became a central value for
Alejandra’s early on in her career. This central value later constituted the lens
through which she observed and evaluated her colleagues’ work. Any teaching that,
in her eyes, was not informed by these values was not good quality teaching.
Three years after graduating Laura enrolled in a certification in language teaching.
This course, which Laura considered more “hands-on,” enabled her to learn new
teaching techniques and become more critical while observing colleagues. However,
the most important lesson that she learned there was again not related to the course
contents.
Laura: I think that there were different groups within the course. The ones that were
very interested in really grow up and learn and gain more experience with the course
and there were other teachers that didn’t seem to be that interested because they had
more experience than others, you see what I mean? Some of them were really
experienced so they didn’t seem to care; maybe they just wanted a paper or something
like that. But on the other hand there were other teachers that were really experienced
and really interested in […] maybe not in learning more but in sharing what they
already knew.
The power of teacher networks and close friendships is evident in Laura’s teacher
self story. The particular way in which she brought her colleagues close to her life
enabled her to gain new friendships and more opportunities for professional
advancement.
Paulina: Did you make any special friends in the course?
Laura: Yeah, with the people from Central City! [laughs] They came here to take it, so
we had a chance to get to know each other and that’s why I started working here
[CLTAL]. Every month that they came to South City to take the course I always offered
them a ride back to the bus station. That was really helpful for them because they were
really tired and they had no money for taxis. In December they were going to have like a
lunch or dinner at a restaurant with their boss and they invited me there. That person
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was my teacher in the B.A. and he asked me if I was interested in joining the language
center in here.
The relationships that participants established with their colleagues served as a
strong teacher support network that helped them to find new friendships, enhance
their language teaching skills, and find new professional opportunities. This support
network seemed to have emerged naturally in spaces where language teachers had
the opportunity to interact with each other for long periods of time.
The emerging student teacher identity
When participants initially entered formal teacher education programmes, they
spoke about having feelings of insecurity and inadequacy since their peers seemed to
know a lot more than they did. Gloria mentioned feeling “really strange because the
rest of the teachers [in the course] seemed to know a lot;” Daniela talked about
being “like a […] black sheep! [laughs] because all the teachers were very
experienced teachers from [names several prestigious bilingual schools];” Laura
recalls being “a very quiet student. I was sometimes hiding behind my books when
the teachers said that they were going to ask randomly.” Finally, Tania noted that
during the teaching sessions “everybody seemed like they knew what she [the course
tutor] was talking about and I didn’t know!”
In contrast to the rest of the participants, Alejandra and Raúl felt more secure in their
student teacher roles. This basically responded to the fact that they felt they were
achieving an important goal in their professional lives. When Raúl spoke about his
first undergraduate programme in international relations he placed strong emphasis
on “not feeling like me.” However, the programme in applied linguistics “was more
what I wanted for myself.” Alejandra had always held the dream of going to
university very close to her heart and this is how she felt when she could finally
achieve this goal.
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Alejandra: I enjoyed really being in the undergraduate programme. I felt really that I
was dreaming, I was learning a lot of things from my teachers and from my classmates. I
felt like I was an important person, I felt that I was fulfilling my dream, because I
wanted to be a […] a professional.
Gradually, participants began to feel more comfortable and confident in their student
teacher roles when they began to perceive the positive impact that formal education
had in their teaching practice as Gloria narrates in the following lines.
Gloria: It was really useful for me because it improved my class, so that my students
could be more interested in it […] I really tried to apply everything that I learned; I tried
to give more structure to my lessons; to do this activity in the beginning and to this other
thing for them to practice later. I improved little by little and in the end I got ‘merit’ in
teaching.
Tania discusses a similar issue, but placing more emphasis on the process of
incorporating new knowledge into the student-teacher identity to later become part
of the teacher self.
Tania: When I started the certification I think it was more like uh […] it was more like
shaping the way I was teaching English. In the beginning I was like “ok, I get it, yes, but
according to the book it is impossible to do this, so how should I do it?” And […] I feel
like it was disconnected, but then […] it had […] more form.
Daniela mentioned that during one of the most important certifications that she took
she “learned everything, everything, because I didn’t know anything about English
teaching” and that even though she “kept feeling bad” she had “to finish only to
learn.”
Reflexivity and teacher self formation
Reflexivity, which entails using existing knowledge or theory as transformative
forces for teacher selves (Schön, 1983, 1987) appeared to be a central issue
regarding the impact that formal learning opportunities had on teacher self
formation. Daniela summarises this process very clearly when she recalled her
tutors’ words.
Daniela: They [Daniela’s tutors] said once ‘You’re going to take like a year to
understand all this because you know it is like a lot of knowledge in very short time’ […]
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and yes, now I know that it is right because it took me a time to do this, to apply it […]
because first you have the school, the regulations of the school where you are working
and then you, you as a teacher because maybe you cannot or, I don’t know, you are
afraid or […] you are afraid to change; and other, the students. Some of the teachers,
experienced teachers, didn’t finish because maybe they were like, you know, as I said
before, afraid to change and they quit.
Learning is not a simple straightforward process; it implies reflection and
willingness to change our teacher selves. Daniela clearly described all the influences
that make learning more complex and may explain why changes should be gradual
and go hand in hand with dialogue and reflection. This reflection process was again
present when Tania lived intense learning experiences, her Master’s Degree
programme.
Tania: I was puzzled; I was feeling like […] insecure in some way, not confident. Uh, I
tried to get the whole picture in the beginning and then go in detail, but I wasn’t able to
put all the pieces together […] trying to connect the assignments, the readings, connect
this reading with the class, it’s like they don’t fit it’s like I have to read again, I have to
remember what the teacher said or read the notes yeah, but if something is missing I
cannot connect them so I have to read like ten times and read many sources and then Ah
ok, I got it! I realized when I was doing my master’s that I learn in that way. Sometimes I
don’t want to stress myself and I leave it aside for a while, but it is in my mind trying to
find the solution, till I find it.
Not understanding, not finding a logic in new arguments, needing to re-read, to
recall teacher’s arguments during the lectures, and leaving things aside to find a
space to reflect are signs that deep changes are occurring in Tania’s teacher self; it is
being transformed and reshaped by this intense learning experience.
This reflection on learning enabled participants not only to reshape their teacher self
conception but also to become more critical of subsequent learning experiences.
When talking about the first of these learning experiences Daniela said the
following.
Daniela: Now I feel like that it was like a copy of any teacher’s guide book, it was like a
copy of that. I see that because now I am in another level but in that time it was like a
new thing for me. I didn’t know anything about how to teach it, of course I didn’t know.
So the course for me at that time was good because of that.
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Similar views were held by Alejandra regarding a language teaching certification
that she took a couple of years after completing her undergraduate programme.
Alejandra: So I started the [international certification] course, I didn’t like it because I
thought it was kind of old-fashioned. The tutors that I had were just teaching us how to
teach a class. I used to have different opinions and I used to tell the tutor “Well, I don’t
agree” and she went “You don’t agree, why Alejandra?” And I gave my arguments. She
then went “Yes, but you have to consider that blah, blah” and she recited the kinds of
arguments that come from the books and oh, there she goes again! [laughs].
In contrast to Daniela’s and Alejandra’s experiences, who were critical of certain
aspects of teacher training courses due to their previous knowledge and experience
in the area, Raúl felt that his lack of subject-matter knowledge and expertise
prevented him from taking full advantage of an academic stay in the United
Kingdom as part of an exchange programme.
Raúl: It was great, I learned a lot […] I would have liked to do it now because I had like
eight months of experience teaching and working as an assistant at the SAC. So now that
I look back to it I realize that I didn’t take advantage of the experience in its entirety as I
would have liked ‘cause I didn’t know many things that I know now that I could have
learned at that moment. It was an experience which I think that was not like for me in a
kind of way because teachers who go there are able to take uh, Master’s degrees classes,
so I was a second semester BA student so I wasn’t taking advantage of that. So I said
“ok, maybe that was not the right time for me to do it.”
The participants’ opinions regarding their formal learning experiences seem to
suggest that an essential issue to consider in formal teacher education is students’
previously lived experiences. Not knowing what student teachers think or who they
are may leave teacher educators performing in a vacuum where what they are
intending to teach may not be significant for student teachers. Previously lived
experiences constitute an important aspect of who teachers are and influence the
kinds of reflections in which language teachers engage. Reflection is a central factor
that fosters or constrains learning and teacher selves’ transformation.
Strengthening of agency
Another important aspect of teacher self construction is the capacity to act and
influence society and context, what the literature refers to as agency (Biesta &
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Tedder, 2006). This capacity was highly developed by Alejandra during her
undergraduate studies. She felt empowered enough to resist and challenge what she
considered impositions from her teaching context, as she tells in the following
extract:
Alejandra: Whatever I learned every [class session] I tried to apply it in my classroom;
for example, the exam designing lessons. The exams here unfortunately have a lot of
importance. We have different grading criteria, but the exams are always very the most
important aspect and that is not fair because there are many factors that affect the
students when they are doing the exam; they can feel bad, they can be sick and then the
exam is not well designed […] I changed the way I did my evaluations, I began to use
alternative assessment.
Alejandra had sufficient confidence in herself as a professional language teacher to
challenge assessment practices that, according to her, were not appropriate.
However, she felt that she was not being listened as her superiors, who did not have
the necessary academic preparation to take an informed decision. Since Alejandra
found resistance to her ideas, she began implementing changes inside her own
language classroom. Her students reacted positively towards the change and began
feeling more engaged with the lessons:
Alejandra: I started to ask my students to make projects to do more group work, not only
individual work and different kinds of assignments. I remember that I talked to my
students and I said “We’re going to do a project but in class and I want you to work in
groups, I’m going to supervise you and I want you to work here in the classroom.
Everybody has to do something and then we have to prepare a report.” And yes, they
agreed on that and they liked my classes I remember and I didn’t ask for homework.
They said “Oh, teacher you’re very comprehensive” or “Are you going to be our
teacher next year?” those were nice comments that showed I really understood them.
Alejandra decided to focus on what mattered most for her: students’ learning. Her
current understanding of teacher self directed her to concentrate all her newly gained
knowledge and energies inside the classroom and avoid conflicts with her
colleagues. This attitude proved to be highly rewarding since she found the support
she was looking for in each of her students.
Similarly, Raúl began to implement deep changes in his classroom as a result of the
learning experiences he had lived in his undergraduate programme in applied
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linguistics. He thought that autonomous learning was a skill that would not simply
be useful for students to learn a second language, but also serve as a lifelong
learning skill.
Raúl: I have the idea now that students need to take responsibility for their own
learning. So it is something that I am trying to do, help students to be responsible for
their learning; they need to know what and why they are learning and I am working on
this because it is part of my BA also. I had this autonomous learning class so now I
know that it is very important for learners and language learners to be responsible for
their learning. Because if they don’t want to learn, they won’t learn even though they
take 50 years of lessons.
Formal learning experiences appeared to be an important source for empowerment.
After engaging in reflection, most participants were able to exert control over the
events in their language classrooms and in their lives as language teachers. Gaining
new knowledge enabled participants to reconstruct their teacher selves through
reflection and enact these newly reconstructed selves through agency.
5.2.4 Evolving views of teacher self
When participants began their language teaching careers some of them had already
constructed a project for their teaching selves; an ideal teacher self. However, most
of them struggled to achieve their goals and felt insecure inside their language
classrooms. As time went by, the different life experiences that participants had
reshaped their teacher selves in unique ways. In this section we will observe how
participants’ views of their teacher selves evolve and are shaped and re-shaped
throughout life and experiences. We will similarly observe how language teacher
self formation is a never ending cyclical process throughout teachers’ professional
lives.
Emerging teacher self
Even though participants’ had just begun their lives as language teachers, they all
seemed to engage in continuous reflection and construct views of their selves as
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language teachers. Most of the participants seemed to feel apprehensive with their
performance as language teachers. The only exceptions to this were Raúl and Laura.
Raúl’s experiences as a language learner in CLTAL had a heavy impact on the
earlier stages of his teaching career; from the beginning he sought alternative
activities to those provided by the course book used in his professional context.
Raúl: I’ve always had this idea that “ok the language part, you can handle it, there’s no
problem there, let’s focus on the teaching area.” Yes? I had the idea that I needed to do
something besides just going with the book and teaching English to them. I knew I had to
do something like that because I know that this school has like this kind of reputation,
prestige for teaching. Like teachers have this really good level of English, they have like
really good teaching skill there. So I said “ok, this is a real, real work!” [laughs]
In contrast to other participants’ experiences, Raúl did not feel lost during the earlier
stages of his life as a language teacher. The most probable reasons were firstly, that
he was given sufficient time to reflect and exchange opinions with other novice and
experienced language teachers in his undergraduate programme; secondly, the
continuous opportunity that he had to familiarize himself with a broad diversity of
teaching materials during his hours as an assistant in the self-access centre; finally,
the language learning experiences that he had lived as a student in CLTAL. Raúl
rapidly developed his particular teaching pedagogy. Even though this was a very
early stage of Raúl’s teaching career he had already developed several key core
values that characterized his practice.
Raúl: I have learned to work with them [students]. I know how to give them the
confidence to ask me to help them and besides, I mean, I am young. Sometimes I have
students my age, so I am like a, just like a, like a… friend working. I mean, you ask me
because I know about these things, so let’s just like, let’s get together and study
together; that’s how I like to work. So, I enjoy this kind of experience because I can kind
of not be a teacher, but to work with them and teach them, see? It’s kind of like my
personality; I am not the kind of person that would say “ok, be quiet and pay attention,
we have to do this” I like to make jokes with everyone, I like to have fun. So because of
my personality I say “well, why should I be a strict teacher if I am not a strict student?”
Similarly, Laura’s teaching skills seemed to emerge very naturally when she first
started teaching kindergarten children.
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Laura: I was doing those things based on […] like following hunches […] yeah,
somehow because I had the annual plan so I had to work out all the activities out of the
lesson plan. We had to follow themes so […] well we just developed the theme according
to the objectives based on the students’ age. So, for example uh, twelve month children,
what are they able to do? So it was not only how to learn English but also how they
develop their fine and gross motor skills and how to combine those experiences of
having hands on with their language learning.
Not having a text book to follow for teaching English to kindergartners, far from
representing a difficulty for Laura gave her the opportunity to be creative and
develop activities that were suitable for her students’ needs.
Although Gloria held similar goals to those of Raúl, her previous learning
experiences did not provide her with the appropriate knowledge to achieve the
results she desired. The image Gloria held of herself as a language teacher was not
entirely positive and she felt dissatisfied with her performance as a teacher:
Gloria: When I began teaching what I wanted was for my students to learn and not to
get bored. That was what worried me the most. I tried to think of games and things like
that. I used to seek in the Internet what I could do, but I couldn’t find anything
appropriate to what I was doing. And to be honest, I think that during that first summer
[course] my class was really boring. I really don’t feel satisfied with what I did. I simply
followed the book, the instructions in the teacher’s [guide]. I didn’t know what a “warm
up” or a “lesson plan” were. I just went there and told them “open your books on page
X and answer the exercise.”
In the following extract, Tania recalls her job interview with CLTAL’s director,
where she talked about the kinds of goals that she would like to achieve as a
language teaching professional.
Tania: [During the interview] I said that I wanted to teach but I wanted to be more
professional, I want to study, I want to learn how to teach. She [CLTAL’s Director] said
“maybe we have the right thing for you; you can take [a language teaching
certification].” I was pretty excited because a couple of months before I was thinking of
doing something like that and she offered me this, and [I said] “Yes, of course I want
it!”
Even though Tania had been teaching English for a little longer than three years
when she began working at CLTAL, she could not feel comfortable with what she
was doing, neither as a student teacher, nor as a teacher.
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Tania: Of course my first class here at the university was following the book, I mean…
what else could I do? [laughs] When I was teaching, the first three months, I said “this
is not the right thing for me.” I mean, I was struggling with the [certification’s] essays
and I was struggling with the kids and I said “no, no, no, I can’t.” Actually I felt when I
was teaching that I wasn’t a very good teacher because I knew that there was something
else I could do and I didn’t know how to look for it.
Alejandra went through a similar stage to that of Gloria and Tania when she felt
dissatisfied with her results in the language classroom:
Alejandra: As I see it now I was really […] a very bad English teacher [laughs]. I didn’t
know how to teach, I didn’t know what to do. In spite of having taken the course I told
you, I didn’t know how to teach English. I just followed the book, read the instructions,
gave them exercises. I was working with children and I remember that I took them songs
I wanted to do it differently, but I didn’t know how or what to do.
We have observed in a previous section that all the participants of this study are
career changers. This means that, at the beginning of their language teaching careers
they were not only facing an identity change, but were also forming a new self, a
teacher self. If we add to this equation the fact that they were all rushed into
language teaching classrooms it is no surprise that they felt insecure and uneasy with
this new self. Additionally they were struggling to fully exercise their agentive
capacities due to the lack of subject matter knowledge and professional networks
that empowered them to be creative and implement a broader diversity of activities
from those proposed by the book.
These findings seem to suggest that participants at this stage of their careers might
be experiencing a survival mood (Huberman, 1989) by trying to exercise agency
through creativity and innovative activities but being unable to achieve their aim
because of the early stage in which their teaching careers were at that time.
Current views of teacher self
Throughout the second of our interviews I asked participants to provide a reflection
regarding the kinds of issues that were central to their professional practice. It is in
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these narratives where we can observe how the diversity of life experiences has
impacted on their teacher selves.
Daniela and Gloria narrated how their teaching practice had changed and the
benefits that this brought for their learners. In both accounts we can see how a
mixture of life experiences takes shape through reflection in order to transform their
beliefs regarding who they are as language teachers. Daniela used her experience to
develop innovative ways of teaching and enact the kinds of values that were central
for her as a language teacher.
Daniela: I started again in a kindergarten I learned a lot and a practiced some, you
know, theories, personal theories [laughs]. In the beginning they [her students] had
problems to visualize it [text] and to write it down but then they learned, and it was all
from my imagination. I think responsibility is important because what you do impacts
the others, in this case the students. If you say something and you do it, they know that
you are reliable. This is not very easy because first of all, we always have to study and
we always have to work, not only the working hours but we have to plan, we have to
imagine, we have to be creative, and it is a very difficult job.
Gloria described how her priorities as a language teacher had changed. Including
cultural aspects in her lessons was now something that she considered important.
Gloria: Even though now my priorities are more or less the same, I care more about
students’ learning, maybe because I’ve found the way to make my lessons less boring.
I’d like my students to feel satisfied with the class, to know that they liked it, and I also
want them to learn something from me. What I mean is that I don’t want to focus only on
the book; I try to include some cultural things in the class. It is not only a matter of
learning English, you also have to learn about culture in general, so I try to include
always something related to culture for them to learn a little bit more.
Tania and Raúl were now experiencing a strong change in their professional lives
since, in addition to continuing to perform a role as language teachers, they were
beginning to create a new identity as teacher educators. During the first of our
interviews, Tania narrated that shortly before she left overseas to start her Master’s
studies she was asked by CLTAL’s director to observe and evaluate her colleagues’
teaching skills. She mentioned that she was very strict while doing this and she
reported what in her view were “deficiencies” in their teaching performance. This
brought her into conflict with several of her colleagues. Similarly, as a teacher, she
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placed emphasis on the importance that grammatical rules and the use of accurate
and well pronounced language had in her classroom. Now, while reflecting back on
the values she previously held, she seems to know that the experiences that she has
lived will dramatically alter the way she relates to both her colleagues and her
students:
Tania: I feel different; I understand better my students because before I wanted them to
learn, I mean, I tried to do my best in order for them to learn, I was stricter. I realised
that if they don’t learn it is because it is a long natural process. I realized that we have
to expose our students to language, in all senses, I mean, not just grammar and the verb
to be and the auxiliary do. I mean, we have to expose them to language so that they can
take more advantage of our teaching. So that’s why I started focusing on more things. I
realized that there are different teaching styles, different learning styles, and that
everybody is different, we are not the same and that we […] have to understand
everybody’s situation, teachers, students, uh […] and I don’t know if this was part of the
MA programme or what, but I realized that, because I used to be more strict. I think I
became more human.
Raúl found a way to foster learning by developing a very unique teaching style due
to his youth. Even though he was a very young teacher, he was aware of his
responsibilities regarding student learning. He highlighted the idea that he could not
assume to either be the controller of the class or the one who holds all the
knowledge in the language classroom:
Raúl:I know I am the teacher; I am the person who is paid to teach them, yeah? And I
have this responsibility, if at the end of the semester they don’t know or they don’t have
what they are supposed to learn or something like that it would be like kind of my fault.
But uh as I said before I can’t be so strict and I can’t be the controller of and I can’t be
the person who knows everything… cause I don’t [laughs]
In addition to the above, at the time of the second interview, Raúl had recently
begun to participate in a mentoring programme which was giving him a great deal of
satisfaction. In the following extract we can see that Raúl was also beginning to his
professional life as a language teacher towards what he considers valuable in teacher
education.
Raúl: Lately I’ve been working on both sides, I mean, I’ve been doing both things, I’ve
been teaching and I’ve been working on the academic, teacher education side and I
think that that’s also very rewarding to work on that side. If you have a problem in the
classroom it is because of something outside of it, so maybe to see what is outside of it
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and then go inside the classroom to fix it. There is this other side, hearing teachers “oh,
you’ve developed a very good thing” or “you’re working with very good things” just
hearing that is very nice also.
Finally, Laura and Alejandra were now fully concentrated on creating a teacher
educator identity. An issue to highlight is the awareness that both participants have
of the importance of close engagement with student teachers in order to tailor their
advice to teachers and student teachers’ needs. When the second of our interviews
took place, Laura had recently been appointed as an academic coordinator in
CLTAL. She described how she felt in this new role and the kinds of educational
values that were central for her:
Laura: Now, for example, I go into a classroom and observe most of the teachers and uh
[…] and I really enjoy giving feedback because if somebody is going to observe you it
doesn’t mean destroy you. I give them support to become more professional but not only,
to be more professional in front of them but to give them [students] quality of teaching, a
good quality. [When observing]I always try to find the most interesting point to work on
and then try to develop a workshop on that. I think it’s the support I can give them; the
appropriate materials, suitable materials, for a variety of options that they can use
according to their needs.
For her part, Alejandra seemed really satisfied with her role as a teacher educator.
This satisfaction stemmed from the trust and freedom she was given by her current
coordinator:
Alejandra: Nowadays I feel good with what I have achieved so far; I’m really happy
helping students to become English teachers, and more importantly, being free to assess
my students’ learning my own way. Of course, I am constantly gaining experience; I am
constantly changing my methodology, based on previous “experiments.” I think that
each semester we get different students, with different traits and we have to be adapting
our way of teaching or approaching to them so we can have a profitable teaching and
learning environment.
Throughout every abstract of participants stories regarding who they are today as
language teachers, we can have a glimpse of their previously lived experiences, and
how each of these came to constitute an important aspect of their current teacher
selves.
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New ideal teacher selves
Most of the participants talked about their future plans. These were mainly informed
by the kinds of values that they had assumed as an essential part of their teacher
selves. Raúl and Tania were looking forward to exerting a positive influence on their
teaching context.
Raúl was the participant who devoted the most extensive section of his life history to
the narration of future plans. He appears to be profoundly enjoying all the
experiences that this profession is providing to him. What he is living as a student
teacher, as a professional and as a person appears to coincide with the values that
conform his teacher self. It is in the words of this young teacher who is beginning
his career where we can observe the centrality of this issue:
Raúl: Three years ago, I didn’t know what I wanted to do the day after and right now I
know what I want to do for like the following five years. So it’s really amazing and it is
mostly because I’m doing what I like. I’m working with things that I like to work with,
and I mean, international relations was definitively not my area at all I mean, I learned
a lot, I didn’t waste that time, but it was not me, I mean, I didn’t see my self, as doing
something like that, so I didn’t know what I was going to do the day after.
Raúl believes that lack of commitment is the source of many of the problems that
the language teaching profession suffers in his context. He believes that this attitude
is deeply imprinted in our cultural values and this is why it plays an important role
in many learners’ and teachers’ selves. He sees himself as an active part of the
solution to these problems that affect language learning and teaching in his context:
Raúl: There are a lot of things that we could adopt to work well. We need to be a bit
more strict to students and to teachers The students have to be taught how to be
responsible for their learning so we need to like […] fix things and say ok […] tighten
some knots, yes […] learning […] It is not easy [laughs] mostly because of the culture
we have here, yes?
In the following paragraph Tania reflects on the future activities that she would like
to perform in CLTAL and her plans seem to be illuminated by this new axiological
framework where respect and understanding are more salient values.
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Tania: I’d like to share the things that I know or that I can help with now. I’d like to
train teachers and I’d like to continue teaching, to help them discover things by
themselves. Because that’s the way I think I learned. Help them to understand that they
are different from each other; that they have different learning styles and that even
teachers have different teaching styles.
Just like Raúl, Tania felt that she was now in the position to be able to share
something valuable with her colleagues and motivate a positive change in her
teaching context.
Gloria discovered, through the values that her students transmitted to her through
their actions and ways of thinking, that language teaching was a worthy profession
in which she intended to remain. In the final part of the first of our interviews she
talked about her future plans for academic and professional advancement.
Gloria: To be honest, I think I want to stay in this. I like to teach students, but I cannot
only be just a teacher. I like a lot to be here, to administrate something, to coordinate
something, coordinate the teachers. I want to study a Master’s degree and if I finish it,
well, I would also like to make a PhD.
However, during the second of our interviews, Gloria avoided making reference to
her future professional plans as an institutional ELT coordinator in NESU even
though she had been in the post for a little longer than a month as can be observed in
the following stretch of talk.
Paulina: And what are your priorities now?
Gloria: Well, no, I have no […] I’m not teaching any course right now.
P: What are you currently doing at CLTAL?
G: Uh […] I do not work for CLTAL anymore […] […] well, I work here but not for
CLTAL […] I coordinate the institutional English.
P: English in each of the academic schools
G: Yes. Well, no, it’s not the same thing to work with teachers here in CLTAL that to
work with teachers in the academic schools. If I want to give them a workshop every
Friday, no! They’re gonna kill me! […] But I’m usually very active, I consider myself
very active. I always try to motivate my students telling them “I’m gonna give this cookie
to the one who finishes first!” [laughs].
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Gloria’s words seem to suggest that the new identity that she was beginning to form
as an academic coordinator presented her with many new and contradicting values
and roles and she still needed to engage in a deeper reflection process in order to be
able to voice any of her future plans as a coordinator. This new role in her
professional life might be positioning Gloria in a taking – stock/ self – doubt mood
(Huberman, 1989) where her teacher self is forced to be reshaped by the contextual
demands imposed on her.
Daniela mentioned that she intended to continue studying and her comment
confirms one more time how deeply intertwined the professional, personal and
student teacher identities are in teacher self construction processes:
Daniela: I would like to take a Master’s degree, but I don’t know where because now it
is more difficult because I have three children. The youngest is six and my husband and
my mother are going to say “Are you still going to study more?” [laughs] Because they
help me with my children and […] my mother helped me when I did the [international
certification]. My husband helped me when I did the BA “and now? What?” [laughs]
“You’re always studying!” [laughs] but I feel better when I am developing because I
don’t feel that I am only a housewife or something like that. I like to continue preparing
myself always.
Even though Daniela and Gloria wanted to continue pursuing professional and
academic advancement, they did not voice any future plans that involved exerting
positive influences either on their teaching context or their colleagues. In contrast to
Raúl and Tania, whose ideal teacher selves reflected the intention of exerting a
positive influence on colleagues’ lives and their teaching context, Daniela and
Gloria were fully concentrated on their own development as language teachers.
Alejandra’s plans for her professional future contrast with those of the rest of the
participants. Even though Alejandra felt truly satisfied with her current teaching jobs
a feeling of despair begins to emerge from her teacher self as she becomes a middleaged teacher. Alejandra feels she is at the twilight of her teaching career and begins
to make plans for retirement. The resentful feelings that accompanied Alejandra
throughout different difficult moments in her life seem to emerge once again.
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Alejandra: Sometimes my friends tell me “You’re very demanding Alejandra!” and I do
it because I think things should be different […] […] Now I understand that I started
late, I started teaching really late, I mean, when I was 31 and in that time because I
didn’t have a degree I couldn’t get for example a good teaching post […] I don’t plan to
work for long. My plan is to go, maybe to retire and not teach anymore. As a matter of
fact maybe I will stay in the profession one more year and that’s it.
Participants’ accounts regarding the direction they want to give to their teacher
selves are illuminated mainly by the values that have come to form an important part
of their axiological frameworks. A combination of subjective understanding of life
experiences and reflection seem also to play a central role in directing the
participants’ new ideal teacher selves.
Participants’ understandings of their teacher selves mirror what Huberman (1988)
has described in his professional life cycle of teachers. We can observe through
participants’ narration of their lives that Raúl and Tania are currently living an
experimentation/ activism phase where they have a strong desire for exerting a
positive influence in the lives of their students and colleagues. On the other hand,
Daniela and Gloria appear to be experiencing a taking – stock/ self – doubt phase
since, on the one hand, Daniela is totally focused on achieving her goal of studying a
Master’s degree, and, on the other hand, Gloria seems to be questioning many of her
roles a teacher coordinator. Finally, Alejandra is unfortunately experiencing a strong
self – doubt where she even envisages the idea of early retirement from her language
teaching career.
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6. Discussion of findings
This investigation’s main aim is to deepen the understanding of how personal,
professional, and student teacher identities impact on the creation and recreation of
the teacher self and to analyse the way in which axiological frameworks inform this
process. In order to achieve this aim, I set four objectives, which intended to
increase the understanding of:
 the way language teachers’ selves are developed;
 the role that personal, professional and student-teacher identities play in the
construction of teachers’ selves;
 the ways in which professional development initiatives can be supported
through a fuller awareness of teachers’ selves.
The initial analysis of the data suggested that teachers’ selves are not hermetically
compartmentalized into personal, professional, and student teacher identities. Each
of these identities are closely interrelated exerting influence on one another and
continuously shaping the teacher self. Thus, any life event that impacts one of the
teachers’ identities is very likely to have an influence on the other identities and on
the teacher self too. This is proof that a holistic rather than an atomistic
understanding towards teacher self formation provides a clearer view of how this
process takes place.
Subjectivity, that is to say, the unique understandings and interpretations that each
participant made out of their lived experiences, and reflexivity, the careful mental
consideration of life events, seemed to play an important role in shaping
participants’ teacher selves.
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However, during the initial analysis of the data, I was leaving aside an important
issue that permeated across this research’s main objectives: the role that teacher
emotions play in teacher self formation processes. Throughout their stories,
participants constantly made reference to a broad diversity of emotions that emerged
as a result of their life experiences and that were a crucial factor in determining the
different decisions that they took regarding their teaching practice and professional
development. Emotions, therefore, were a central aspect that, in combination with
the social context, participants’ subjectivity and reflexivity, which shaped and reshaped their teacher selves. Zembylas (2005) contends that there is a crucial link
between self formation and emotion, both of which are social as much as they are
individual. Although the role of the emotional dimension of teacher self formation
was neglected for many years by educational researchers, there is currently an
increasing awareness of the centrality of emotional understanding in achieving high
educational standards, colleagueship, and strong partnerships (Nias, 1996;
Hargreaves, 2000; Kelchtermans, 1996; Schmidt, 2000; Zembylas, 2003).
The purpose of this chapter is to provide a discussion on how the findings of the
present study can contribute to a fuller conceptual understanding of teacher-self
formation. It also aims at providing practical suggestions on different ways in which
a better knowledge of the teacher self can lead to working environments that can
foster higher degrees of commitment, collaboration and improved student learning
inside CLTAL. The present chapter is organized as follows. The first section
discusses how teacher selves are constructed in the context of CLTAL. The second
section describes the ways in which the participants’ axiological frameworks
influenced the formation of the teacher self. Finally, the third section highlights the
role that emotions play in teacher self formation and transformation processes.
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6.1 Teacher self construction, reconstruction in the context of
CLTAL.
Bloom & Munro (1995) contend that, although life histories are focused on the lives
of their tellers, and have many nontraditional elements, they tend to adhere to and be
shaped by cultural knowledge of society and context. There is a very important
interactive relationship between language teachers’ lives, their perceptions and
experiences, past and present events, and social context (Duff & Uchida, 1997). The
teacher self emerges as a unique amalgam of these issues. Throughout the
participants’ life histories we could see that, even though they were unique in many
ways, they were not disengaged from society and context. On more than one
occasion, participants made reference to different social and contextual issues that
were shaping their selves either consciously or unconsciously. In addition to the
above, when the narratives of all participants are brought together they reveal
important aspects of how the broader community - society and context - behaves and
evolves. This is similarly highlighted by Hayes (2008) study of Thai English
language teachers where he contends that fuller understandings of language teachers
social and cultural contexts may lead to balance the uneven the TESOL academic
production which currently exists between Anglo – speaking countries and the rest
of the world.
The strongest contextual influences in participants’ teacher selves could be classified
in two main categories: micro-social factors and macro-social factors. The former
include individual actors such as learners, teachers, family members, school leaders
and colleagues and the latter entail broader cultural, political and educational
environments such as the school ethos and the status of the profession and the
language in the society. For organization purposes I shall discuss how each of these
factors influence teacher self formation in separate sections; however, the fact that
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micro and macro-social factors are interrelated will be evident on more than one
occasion throughout this discussion.
6.1.1 Micro-social influences
The influence of micro-social factors on teacher selves appears from very early
moments of the participants’ lives. Tania’s and Alejandra’s childhood experiences
shaped important aspects of who they are as language teachers. In both cases, family
members were central players in the formation of their future teacher selves. This
kind of influence from family members seems to be atemporal; even though
participants went through these experiences in their early childhood years, these
continued to have a strong impact on the ways they enacted their teacher selves later
in their lives.
The impact that children had on language teachers’ selves was very clearly present
in Laura’s and Alejandra’s stories. However, this influence was bidirectional, in
contrast to that of childhood years. When, more than ten years after being “forced”
to become a secretary, Alejandra was able finally to fulfill her dream of going to
middle school and high school, she had the opportunity to reinvent the relationship
that she had with her sons since they began to live similar learning experiences.
Similarly, as a single parent Laura always tried to combine her life as a language
teacher and her life as a mother. Her constant desire for being close to her daughters
while working was what motivated Laura to become an English teacher. Throughout
every stage of her professional life Laura always prioritized her daughters’ needs
and the lives of these girls were negatively or positively influenced by Laura’s
working conditions.
This finding appears to suggest that language teachers’ past and present personal
private lives, in other words their life experiences outside the educational institution,
do play a central role in shaping who they are inside their workplaces. Hawthorn
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(2006) has highlighted that the transformation of the self is closely related to life
experiences and that this transformation is projected into people’s working lives.
She claims that life experiences may constitute a type of informal learning which
leads to the formation of a person’s professional self.
Learners were also a major influence in the formation of participants’ teacher selves
and shaped a broad variety of aspects of who participants were and who they
intended to become. Interactions with learners on some occasions contributed to
strengthening or affirming different aspects of participants’ professional identities,
while in others these interactions challenged participants’ identities and encouraged
identity change through reflection. Laura’s playful teaching style and Raúl’s friendly
approach to teaching were warmly welcomed by their respective students. This
served as a motivator for them to continue to display these kinds of behaviours in
their language classrooms. Contrastingly, Gloria’s learners’ reactions of boredom
towards her initial teaching style and the dialogue that Alejandra held with one of
her students about teachers’ interactions with students encouraged them to change
significant aspects of their teacher selves. Gloria turned towards formal education
and language teaching literature to modify her teaching style and Alejandra
transformed her conception of her students as simple learners and began to
understand them “as persons.”
The previous stories seem to coincide with Johnston’s (2003) claim that teachers’
and students’ lives usually have an engagement that goes beyond simply teaching
and learning. Raúl’s and Alejandra’s experiences with their students enable us to see
how ethical and moral values such as fellowship and friendship can constitute the
source of mutual understanding between teachers and learners. Both participants
narrated how the positive relationship that arose between them and their students
stemmed from sharing similar personal, cultural and educational values. The
equality and friendship relationship that emerged in Raúl’s and Alejandra’s language
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classrooms enabled these teachers to connect more deeply with their students and to
make the process of teaching and learning a second language a more enjoyable
experience. This type of relationship between learners and teachers is certainly
beneficial for both, since it enables them to transform their selves and exert a
positive influence on other selves by enacting the values that they consider
important for the well being of others.
Colleagues were another important micro-social influence for teacher self formation.
Even though participants’ narratives included very few accounts of their interactions
with colleagues at their workplaces, they narrated several stories in which they
highlighted the important role that their classmates in formal in-service teacher
education courses played in the transformation of their teacher selves. The kinds of
interactions that emerged in these courses were characterized by trust and a strong
emotional involvement that enabled Daniela, Laura, and Alejandra to transform their
professional lives inside language classrooms in order to foster students’ learning.
The participants’ accounts regarding the influence that school leaders have on their
teacher selves unveiled the great power that leaders have to direct not only language
teachers’ professional lives, but also their personal lives and those of their families.
Alejandra narrated how she felt the benefits of having coordinators who value
teachers’ opinions and are willing to provide guidance that is tailored to their needs.
In contrast to this experience, other participants, namely Gloria and Laura, and
Alejandra herself lived less satisfying relationships with educational leaders at
CLTAL where they could not establish a satisfying and harmonic relationship due to
a lack of appropriate communication.
The findings described above highlight the importance of dialogical exchanges and
discursive practices in shaping the teacher self. Giddens (1991) and Holstein &
Gubrium (2000) discussed similar issues placing emphasis on the role of society
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and, more importantly, on the role of interactions between selves in teacher self
formation and transformation. When the centrality of dialogical exchanges is
recognized, a step that should follow is to pay closer attention to the type of
dialogical interactions that are being encouraged inside educational institutions.
Participant’s accounts suggest that, when dialogical exchanges were characterized
by a fuller involvement of personal issues and emotions of trust and respect, they led
to positive outcomes such as higher levels of motivation and commitment,
meaningful learning, feelings of empowerment and sense of belonging to the
institution. Unfortunately, these dialogical exchanges were the exception rather than
the norm inside CLTAL. Therefore, a need remains to build a stronger professional
community inside CLTAL that encourages an active commitment towards a deeper
emotional and intellectual understanding.
In the same vein, the continuous dialogical exchanges that characterise studentteachers’ classrooms make manifest a broad diversity of values (Mangubhai, 2007;
Johnson, et al., 2002; Johnston, 2003). Participants narrated how they discussed with
their colleagues issues of concern for the well – being of their students, respect and
interest students’ autonomy, issues of what types of knowledge are valuable for the
profession and what constitutes real leadership. This ongoing contact with other
selves’ values undoubtedly exerts an influence on teacher self development. Teacher
educators should actively create opportunities for generating a discourse that enables
language teachers to feel empowered enough to continuously share what they feel is
valuable for them, for learners, and for the institution. This may be an important
strategy to motivate professional advancement and a sense of belonging to the
profession and the educational institution.
6.1.2 Macro-social influences
The broader context was an influence that was clearly present from very early stages
of participants’ lives. English is a language that enjoys a great deal of prestige in the
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area where this research took place and most of the participants were interested in
learning it early on in their lives. Macro-social influences were in several cases the
main factor that determined participants’ career choice, as was the case with Daniela
and Alejandra, who narrated how the broader context influenced their decision of
becoming English language teachers.
When participants narrated the stories regarding how they had entered the
profession, they all made comments with a note of sarcasm regarding the fact that
“since [they] knew English [they] could teach it.” This is an issue that has been
thoroughly discussed in several studies (Farmer, 2005; Breen, 2007; Richards, 2008)
and although in some teaching contexts the situation has greatly improved, there are
still CLATL teachers who do not have either undergraduate studies or language
teaching certifications and others who have an English language proficiency that
needs great improvement. This has a direct negative impact on what happens inside
the language classroom and the quality of the learning opportunities that students
have.
In addition to this, there are no institutional regulations that require leaders to clearly
display the procedures followed to hire new staff members or to grant opportunities
for professional development opportunities such as academic stays or postgraduate
studies in overseas institutions. We observed all these issues in Gloria’s story
regarding how she obtained her teaching post at CLATL, Laura’s experience of
being offered a scholarship and then, after two months, having this opportunity
withdrawn only to have it offered again three months later, Alejandra’s struggles to
understand why she had not been offered scholarship and why her suggestions were
never heard, and Raúl’s surprise at being offered a period of academic stay at an
overseas institution that was intended for postgraduate students when he was only a
second term undergraduate student.
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Stets & Burke (2003) have discussed how the influence that exists between self and
society is bidirectional. At this moment, we can see how language teachers’ lives
and selves are being shaped by the broader context. However, there is no evidence in
participants’ stories that an opposite event is taking place. It is therefore necessary to
encourage language teachers to reflect on how the social context acts in many cases
as an oppressive force that nullifies their teacher selves’ agentive capacities. When
such a reflection takes place, the oppressive circumstances may be re-interpreted as
opportunities for resistance, change, and empowerment.
6.2 Teacher emotions as transformative sources of the teacher
self
Zembylas (2003) and Hargreaves (2000) contend that the teacher self formation and
transformation process is filled with emotion and this entails a close connection with
issues of power and resistance. The social context and, in this case, educational
institutions, tend to label certain behaviours as acceptable or appropriate while
condemning others and judging them as inappropriate. This has an impact on the
kinds of emotions that teachers are allowed to experience and express through
discourse, and therefore, on the kinds of teacher selves that they develop throughout
time.
Participants’ narratives did not include any reference of leadership initiatives
towards fostering cooperation and collegiality among faculty members, which made
evident the little interaction that exists between language teachers and their
colleagues at CLATL. As it was observed in section 5.2.3 where participants
discussed the influence of fellow language teachers in their lives, they always talked
about the colleagues who they had met in formal learning opportunities. The
professional support and friendship networks that naturally emerged from a
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continuous interaction in a learning situation were formed by colleagues who
worked for different educational institutions.
This situation is positive and perhaps desirable; however, institutions such as
CLATL seem to be missing important opportunities due to the fact that these
teaching support and friendship networks are emerging outside the institution. The
absence of emotional discourse among CLTAL faculty members that is imposed by
power structures and leaders in this institution tends to deny recognition to language
teachers. This may lead faculty members to develop a demeaning image of their
teacher selves that decreases levels of commitment and compromises their
permanence in the institution (Zembylas, 2005). If the emotional discourses that
characterize formal learning situations in this teaching context emerged inside
CLATL, these may become a source of care for the teacher self through making
sense of emotional experiences while teaching (Hargreaves, 2000). This an issue
that needs further research in order to generate a fuller understanding of the impact
that support and friendship networks can have on educational institutions, teacher
self formation and students’ learning.
When educational and leadership policies are disengaged from emotions and
selfhood, as is the case in this teaching context, issues of professional development
are reduced to a set of desired behavioural practices with the sole purpose of
increasing accountability to the eyes of educational authorities. This may make
teachers feel disengaged from the educational institutions where they work, their
colleagues, and their leaders. A lack of “emotional understanding” (Denzin, 1984)
and an exclusive focus on cognitive standards may result counterproductive to the
achievement of the afore-mentioned goals.
According to Zembylas (2005) if teachers are encouraged to identify the kinds of
emotions that the current power structures are intending to control they might be
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more able to develop the necessary strategies that enable them to understand
oppressive power structures as opportunities for resistance and agency development.
The development of a critical emotional knowledge by encouraging language
teachers to analyse how the teaching context has made them regard themselves as,
for example, “professional” or “unprofessional”, “valuable” or “not valuable” to the
institution (Zembylas, 2005) may prove to be an important tool that can enable
teachers to understand power structures not only as oppressive, but also as an
element that brings opportunities for self transformation through subjectivity and/or
opposition strategies.
Harmonious and respectful relationships between teachers and coordinators must
entail emotional understanding and teacher self knowledge. According to
Hargreaves (2000), teachers’ capacities to use their emotions in ways that lead to
raising classroom standards, building collegiality and creating a sense of belonging
to the profession depend on what their institutions expect of them emotionally and
how human interaction is organized in ways that hinder or favour emotional
expression. This is an issue that deserves further attention since, according to what
the participants narrated, there is currently in CLTAL an absence of dialogue and/or
interaction that facilitates emotional understanding and teacher self knowledge.
Being aware of the real impact that leaders’ decisions have on teachers’ lives might
develop a more empathetic and ethical approach to decision making processes in
educational institutions.
Zembylas (2003) contends that everyday dialogical interactions between teachers
and students influence to a very large extent teacher selves due to the emotions that
are made manifest in these interactions. In contrast to what happens outside
classrooms, where teacher emotions and selves tend to be ignored by fellow
colleagues, leaders and power structures, language classrooms in CLTAL frequently
become sites of resistance where teachers and students have developed strategies
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that have brought them closer emotionally and lead to positive changes. By reading
learners’ emotional reactions effectively, these teachers were able to make changes
to improve their teaching practice that led to better learning. Emotions in these cases
served as instruments of freedom challenging the established institutional discourses
regarding teaching and learning.
The reactions of Laura’s and Gloria’s students to classroom activities served as a
source of motivation for them to improve their teaching practice. In Raúl’s case,
participating in an academic exchange programme in the United Kingdom provided
him with the opportunity to experience how the attitude towards learning is
understood by students in other countries. The degree of autonomy, commitment
and responsibility that he observed deeply impressed him. Even though Raúl lived
this experience more than two years ago, it continues to have an impact on his
current professional actions and future professional plans.
According to Zembylas (2003), the formation of the teacher self is contingent upon
how the social operation of power and agency influence emotion discourses. In one
of his stories, Raúl narrated how the dialogical interactions that characterized his
undergraduate programme in applied linguistics facilitated the negotiation of
subjectivity and emotion. Teacher selves and emotion proved to be extremely
powerful to reshape Raúl’s values and beliefs regarding teaching and learning and
those of his classmates. This is an issue that bears special importance for teacher
education programmes since opening spaces for discussions regarding emotions in
teacher self formation provides opportunities for resistance to the circuits of power
that constitute teacher selves. Fostering emotional understanding and bettering
teacher self knowledge creates opportunities not only for student teachers to learn
from each other and teacher educators but also for teacher educators to learn from
student teachers.
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6.2.1 The role of subjectivity and reflexivity in teacher emotions
In this piece of work subjectivity is understood in a Foucaldian way as a rational
consciousness that is continuously being negotiated and constructed in discourse. In
the same line, subjectivity appears to be pictured by the participants as non-unitary
always active and in the process of production (Holstein & Gubrium, 2001). When
narrating the stories of their lives, participants were able to reflect on how their
understanding regarding several social, contextual, or educational issues changed
throughout time. This is a signal that subjectivity can not be simply considered as a
fixed characteristic of human consciousness. Subjectivity is continuously being
influenced by society and discourse; life experiences impact on persons’
subjectivities and the reconstructed subjectivity that results makes them understand
these experiences in new ways. It is through this understanding in flux that the self is
continuously being reshaped.
Reflexivity is a process that similarly appeared to be central in the construction and
reconstruction of participants’ teacher selves. It is defined by Schön (1987) as the
use of knowledge as a transformative force for teacher selves. Reflexivity appeared
to follow participants’ subjective understandings of life experiences and, in many
cases, preceded action and/or reconstruction of the teacher self. Subjectivity and
reflexivity are naturally emotional processes, unique understandings of life events
and the transformative force that instigated teacher self reconstruction were
constantly related to emotion in the participants’ discourse.
Subjectivity and
reflexivity appeared to influence in two diametrically different ways the
development of the participants’ teacher selves and emotions may lie at the heart of
this issue. On some occasions these processes served as a source of development and
agency, while on others these appeared to induce stagnation and capitulation. The
responses from social actors and context to the effect of participants’ agency appear
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to be filtered through their subjective understandings in order to be re-interpreted
and act as shapers of their selves.
Daniela narrated a story that reveals why subjective understandings and reflexivity
can sometimes lead to development while in others it leads to stagnation. She related
how, on many occasions, external factors such as learners’ attitudes towards changes
in teaching techniques or classroom routines or restrictive school policies and
regulations prevent language teachers from learning and changing. However, she
placed more emphasis on being “afraid to change” as the most important factor to
determine either development or stagnation, highlighting with this the centrality of
emotions in teacher self formation and transformation processes. Her comments
enabled us to see how life experiences in general can become learning opportunities
and sources for change. However, as Biesta & Tedder (2006) rightly claim, learning
can also lead to a decrease in agency and constrain new learning, which induce a
stagnation of the teacher self. It all seems to depend on teachers’ subjective
understandings, on whether these understandings are filled with an emotion that
Daniela described as “fear to change” or not.
While telling this story Daniela highlighted an issue that is frequently overlooked by
teacher educators and educational administrators: change becomes more threatening
with experience. Learning implies change, not only at a surface level, but a change
that incites teachers to question their current selves and that forces them to be in
touch with their emotions. A teaching context that has downplayed the importance
of emotions and continuously places emphasis on competences and cognitive
standards may actually make teachers disengage from their emotions. This issue
might be an indicator that continuous opportunities to reflect on how power
structures make teachers experience certain emotions are an important tool to
construct their subjectivities and therefore, their teacher selves (Zembylas, 2005).
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Subjectivity and reflexivity as catalysers of emotions of empowerment
Biesta & Tedder (2006: 9) define agency as “the situation where individuals are able
to exert control over and give direction to the course of their lives.” Agency seemed
to emerge when the participants’ subjective understandings of life and learning
experiences tended to generate emotions of resilience. Participants in many cases
opted for understanding adverse life circumstances as opportunities for achieving
agency in order to prove themselves as professionals. Through their dialogical
interactions with society and context participants of this study were able to create a
counter discourse in order to influence, and change social events to gain control of
the direction of their professional lives.
One of the strongest examples of this process is provided by Laura when she
narrated the experience of being granted a scholarship to take a postgraduate degree
in an overseas institution and later having it denied. Initially, Laura felt disappointed
about this issue, especially because it was also having a negative impact on the lives
of her daughters. However, she opted for understanding her circumstances at that
time in a way that could not affect her teacher self, her relationship with her students
and her commitment towards her profession. Laura viewed the unequal power
relations to which she was subject as an opportunity to oppose resistance, exercise
agency and recreate a stronger teacher self (Foucault, 1984). Laura’s emotions
motivated her to understand teaching as something that belonged exclusively to her
and that no one else, in spite of their power in CLATL, could damage. Laura
continued committed to what mattered to her most, her students and their learning.
A second example of how subjectivity and reflexivity are key processes in teacher
self formation is present in Tania’s narrative. Tania describes how, every time she
engaged in formal learning opportunities, her understanding of what she was being
taught took some time to arrive. Tania described how, every time she was faced with
new perspectives regarding teaching and learning a second language she felt
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concerned because “things were disconnected.” However, after engaging in
continuous reflection, she arrived at an understanding that enabled her to “shape”
her teaching practice, and with this, influence her teaching context. The emotions
that Tania experienced as a result of her subjective understandings of dialogical
experiences in formal teacher education programmes preceded agency or action. The
outcome of this cyclical process is always a reconstructed or reshaped teacher self
(Hodkinson, et al, 2007).
When subjective understandings lead teachers to experience challenging life events
and local manifestations of power as opportunities for resistance, they tend to
develop their agentive capacities and, therefore, reshape their teacher selves in order
to influence the immediate society and/or teaching context. When this happens, the
teacher self develops positive images resulting in strengthening and empowerment.
Professional development and teacher self transformation, thus, become more easily
accessible.
As was discussed in chapter 1, in CLTAL there is a need to foster collegial work,
increase teacher retention rates and levels of commitment. Therefore, providing
language teachers with opportunities to engage in reflection regarding how their
teaching context makes them feel may facilitate the creation of strategies that enable
them to resist disempowering circumstances. Laura’s and Tania’s stories may serve
as a guideline for leaders and teacher educators to generate opportunities that enable
teachers to reflect in ways that lead them to understand the power structures that
govern their selves and emotions as opportunities for resistance and action. Biesta &
Tedder (2006) have argued that engaging in reflection can lead to changes in
identity and contribute to the achievement of agency. In a similar vein, Urzúa &
Vásquez (2008), Conway (2001), Heath (2000), van Lier (2004), and Wiley (1994)
have argued that engaging in reflection fosters the discursive construction of
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identities which leads to the establishment of future plans and, therefore, the teacher
self.
Subjectivity and reflexivity as catalysers of emotions of alienation
When subjective understandings of life events lead language teachers to experience
feelings of alienation in their work environments, they tend to destabilize not only
the possibility of development but also agency, resulting in the impossibility of
changing language teachers’ landscapes. This in turn seems to lead to a poor self
image that hampers professional advancement.
The effects of subjective understandings of life events and social circumstances are
not always positive as Alejandra’s story shows. During the period when Alejandra
worked for CLATL, two of her younger colleagues were granted a scholarship to
study a Master’s degree. Alejandra felt she was being discriminated against due to
her age and thought of the power structures that were limiting her professional
advancement as oppressive and disempowering, which made her leave her job. In
this case, her teacher self was hindered from growing and agency was not exercised
in a way that could influence society and/or context. This seems to suggest that
subjective understandings that result in feelings of alienation or disempowerment
prevent language teachers from fully exercising agency and their teacher selves from
being strengthened.
Alejandra told other stories that seem to suggest that every time she experienced
situations that reminded her of the feelings of alienation and grief that she
experienced when being forced to become a secretary, she opted for leaving her job.
Biesta & Tedder (2006) recently discussed that agency is three-dimensional and
comprises influences from the past, orientations towards the future and engagement
with the present. This might be the reason why Alejandra felt so disempowered
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every time she experienced a practice which she viewed as an imposition on her by
her superiors.
Alejandra’s life history serves to highlight the importance of profound
communication and dialogue for language teachers that enables leaders and
researchers to find out about their selves and their emotions. Teaching is an
inherently human profession filled with emotions. Something that is continuously
present throughout every episode that made Alejandra feel alienated is lack of
communication. Ben-Peretz (2002) reported similar findings in her study, which
explored the different ways in which retired teachers learned to teach. Ben-Peretz
found that experienced teachers considered that social interactions within their
workplaces, which are inherently filled with emotions, were a key aspect of how
their teacher selves evolved.
Urzúa & Vásquez (2008) have recently analysed the impact of discourse that is
generated in one-to-one meetings between novice language teachers and their
supervisors and/or mentors. They contend that, when this talk is oriented towards
reflection, it enables teachers to construct a sense of agency, and in turn, develop a
stronger teacher self conception. The search for opportunities where this kind of
counter-discourse could arise not only in one-to-one meetings, but also in more
informal dialogical exchanges between colleagues, would mean better opportunities
for teachers to develop strategies towards future-oriented actions that can affirm the
construction of a teacher self. This issue should not be overlooked by educational
institutions since it may play a fundamental role in the improvement of faculty
commitment, quality of learning experiences and professional development.
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6.3 Interrelatedness between teacher self formation, values and
emotions
The analysis of the data and relevant literature on the topic of teacher self formation,
axiological frameworks, and teacher emotions has enabled me to conclude that
moral intuitions are in close relation to emotions and self formation. We have
observed evidence of this in the participants’ life histories which suggests that the
social context tends to regulate language teachers’ emotions and with this alter their
values. In other words, language teachers negotiate their identities and emotions in
order to make sense of the values that the social context presents to them. This in
turn leads them to create/recreate their own axiological frameworks that either
generate new sets of rules and roles in the social and educational world or preserve
the current status quo. In other words, persons will always provide reasons for their
behaviours and emotions will always be found implicit in those reasons. The
emotions that emerge as a result of the struggles between contextual values and
personal values move language teachers to carry out specific actions that influence
their teacher selves and the context.
Taylor’s (1992) understanding regarding the intimate relationship that exists
between identity and morality is confirmed by Gloria’s story where we can see how
language teachers’ personal values influence their teacher selves. From very early
stages of her professional life Gloria is concerned about her students’ emotions and
she is interested in helping them to learn. Despite the apparent lack of institutional
staff development opportunities in her teaching context such as academic support, a
teacher network, or a mentoring programme, the values that are deeply rooted in her
axiological framework exert a powerful influence on her professional identity, and
therefore, on the teacher self that we see constructed in the story she narrates.
Despite the fact that
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According to participants’ stories, learners’ selves and personal values also exerted
an influence on their teacher selves and values. When Laura, Alejandra and Gloria
got to know their students better, they were able to understand and appreciate the
values implicit in learners’ emotions and life experiences and appropriate some of
these values as central aspects of their axiological frameworks. Laura learned from
one of her students with special needs the importance of resilience to face one’s
personal difficulties. Alejandra understood that a more humanistic teaching
approach towards learners could bring more harmonious relationships and more
commitment inside her classroom. Finally, Gloria’s learners influenced her
axiological framework at a more personal level. When she gave herself some time to
reflect on her students’ everyday personal experiences, Gloria realized that she had
been living an extremely privileged life without valuing it.
Discussions in TESOL literature regarding values tend to have a prescriptive nature
that does not discuss how learners’ and teachers’ personal values and selves are
interrelated and the impact that this relationship has for learners and teachers lives
(Johnson, Mescherschmitt & Vandrick, 2002; Johnston, 2003; Mangubhai, 2007;
and Christenbury, 2008). In addition, an essential aspect is being left out: the close
relationship that exists between values and emotions. When language teachers
engage in moral dilemmas and reflection, as was the case with the examples above,
they also engage in a deeply emotional process that can lead to agency or
capitulation. Therefore, there remains a need to re-orient TESOL practitioners
towards less prescriptive modes of action in order to foster actions that lead to
reflection. By enabling language teachers to reconnect with their teacher selves and
their emotions they may be able to generate a counter-discourse that challenges the
power structures that attempt to nullify the uniqueness of their teacher selves, their
emotions and their ongoing construction and reconstruction.
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Another important conclusion is the centrality that the exchange of ideas, values,
and emotions through networking has on teacher self formation. All the participants
of this study have been involved in continuous formal professional development
opportunities. However, when it comes to highlighting the most valuable lessons
learned from these experiences they rarely refer to technical aspects of the
curriculum that constitutes them. The experiences that in the end were so
meaningful that they later became an important aspect of their axiological
framework seem to come from their interaction with other teacher selves and to have
elicited strong emotions. This highlights the importance for novice and experienced
teachers to have a space where they can interact and learn from each other by
sharing their emotions, and challenging and questioning each other’s values and
beliefs.
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7. Conclusions and implications
This study has improved the understanding of how language teachers’ selves are
constructed in the context of CLTAL and NESU. Taking participants’ life histories
as the main source of data, we have observed how the process of teacher self
construction and reconstruction appeared as one that is filled with emotions. The
narrative self that emerged during the interviews generated an understanding that the
teacher self is a combination of social/contextual issues and personal
understandings. Throughout this process of living, understanding their lived
experiences and constructing their teacher self, participants experienced a broad
diversity of emotions. In a similar way to identity, emotions are as much a result of
societal power structures as they are the consequence of individual consciousness.
The above highlights an issue that has been previously discussed by Crotty (2003),
Giddens (1991), and Zembylas (2005): dichotomies only hamper a fuller
understanding of teacher self formation since this process entails a mutually
constitutive relation between the personal and the social, the public and the private,
and the emotional and the rational. Participants highlighted on more than one
occasion that going beyond simply interacting with fragmented selves, that is to say,
not only enacting their teacher or student-teacher identities, but projecting their
whole teacher selves in their workplaces, enabled them to improve their teaching
practice and to learn more from students, colleagues, coordinators, and teacher
educators. Transcending the barriers that a discourse focused solely on competences,
professionalism, intellectual growth, and emotional distance enabled participants to
shape their teacher selves in ways that were satisfying for them, their colleagues,
and their students.
The combination of emotions, values and subjectivity emerged as an important
process which can determine the extent to which language teachers are able to
transform their selves and strengthen their agentive capacities. Participants’
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narratives seemed to indicate that when emotions of resilience towards life
experiences emerged, they led to language teachers’ self transformation and agency
development. Contrastingly, emotions of alienation as a result of life experiences
may lead to stagnation and capitulation of language teachers’ selves.
Hargreaves (2000) and Zembylas (2003, 2005) contend that an important tool not
only for better teacher self knowledge but also for empowerment is the reflexive
processes that occur as the result of subjective understandings. Following both
authors, I contend that linking teacher emotions to teacher self formation can result
in the possibility of generating counter discourses that challenge the current
discursive practices that attempt to picture language teaching simply as a
competence-based practice. When participants recognised the important role that
personal identities played in learning and fostered a counter discourse that
recognized and respected the role of emotions in their language classrooms, they
were able to display the values that were central for them and those of their learners.
In each of these scenarios, a better knowledge of teachers’ and learners’ selves, their
emotions, and personal values was an important factor that seemed to increase
participants’ commitment to their profession and improve student learning.
Finally, through participants’ life histories it was possible to identify the kinds of
emotional rules (Zembylas, 2005) that govern CLTAL’s faculty. Emotions are
frequently downplayed and the discourse that characterizes the interaction between
faculty and colleagues and faculty and coordinators is mainly concentrated on the
technical and administrative aspects of teaching. The evidence indicates that the role
of dialogical exchanges between language teachers and individual social actors
appears to be a central aspect of teacher self formation. However, the most
important of these interactions are occurring either as subversive counter discourses
inside classrooms or with colleagues who work for other educational institutions.
The consequence for CLTAL’s faculty is an emotional dissonance where teachers
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feel undervalued and disengaged from the educational institution for which they
work.
Greater efforts to value whole teacher selves and not only fragmented teacher selves
(i.e. professional and student-teacher identities) that engage language teachers in
reflection should be made in order to make teachers realise the potential they have to
transform and empower not only their teacher selves, but their lives in CLTAL and
the learning lives of their students.
The use of a life history methodology has been invaluable in my efforts to develop a
better understanding of identity formation processes. Goodson & Sykes (2001)
contend that life history approaches provoke a messy confrontation with human
subjectivity that instills not only a methodological sidestep but also an important
political sidestep. The life histories of participants in this study are clearly making
an invitation to generate a better knowledge of the emotional cultures (Zembylas,
2005) that charachterise CLTAL’s teaching context in order to find out the extent to
which these impact positively or negatively on leaders’ decisions, students’ learning
experiences, and faculty’s desire to learn, improve their practice and remain in the
institution.
Life history methodology, through its attention to subjective understandings of
individual actors and the relationship that emerges among these actors should
comprise a central aspect of educational research and teacher education
programmes. In other words, any action that is aimed at improving attainment levels
inside educational institutions should place teachers’ experiences at the heart of this
process. Life history methodology has great potential to empower the people who
narrate the stories of their lives, in this case, language teachers, since it enables them
to recognise their teacher selves, the values that are central to their teacher selves,
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and the emotions that arise in their everyday struggle to become their ideal teacher
selves.
7.1 Implications for practitioners
A more detailed view of how language teachers’ lives impact on the formation of
their teacher selves has enabled us to better understand why language teachers in
CLTAL think in the ways that they do. Being an English language teacher in this
context implies much more than acquiring knowledge of appropriate teaching
techniques in different circumstances; it requires a continuous engagement with
individual actors and socio-cultural factors that motivate transformation through
reflection. This is why the following courses of action are suggested.
7.1.1 For teachers
Language teachers need to constantly remind themselves that learners not only pay
attention to teachers’ knowledge of the target language and the pedagogical
approaches that they use in the language classroom. Axiological issues are equally
important for learners in language classrooms. This is why it is so central for
language teachers to understand learners as whole selves with complex lives, and
not only take into consideration their learner identities. Values are implicit in every
action and comment inside the language classroom. According to participants,
students expressed their agreement or disagreement with their teachers’ values in
their conversations and their reactions towards language teachers’ behaviours. This
demands a continuous attention to these dialogical exchanges in order to develop
appropriate teaching behaviours that go in line with learners’ and teachers’
axiological frameworks that enable them to generate a pleasant teaching ambience
where dissonance of values can be minimized in order to facilitate learning.
Language teachers should also engage in reflection that leads to a better knowledge
of their selves as professionals since it may have a positive impact on the language
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classroom. This was observed by participants when they narrated how their students’
attitudes changed as a result of the changes they implemented after engaging in
reflection. This seems to have a boomerang effect since changes in learner’s
attitudes serve as a factor that leads to a better professional self conception. This in
turn leads to an increase in the levels of motivation to continue to better their
professional practice. When teachers are able to develop an awareness of their
emotional responses as one of their many ways of knowing and using the power of
emotion as a basis of collective and individual change, teachers can sort their
experiences, their anxieties, their fears, their excitements and learn how to use them
in empowering ways (Zembylas, 2002).
Teachers should also seek actively a closer engagement with their colleagues inside
CLTAL. The emergence of closer friendships with colleagues can help to build a
strong teaching support network that not only recognizes as valuable the emotional
aspect of language teaching, but that understands it as an asset to promote a learning
culture that empowers themselves and their colleagues.
Close friendships are
frequently characterized by a strong emotional bonding and trust. These
characteristics may encourage teachers to challenge their differences and question
the teaching practices that their context promotes in order to build a real sense of an
educational community in which teachers are able to learn from each other. It may
also enable teachers to find images of ideal teacher selves among their colleagues
that can inspire them to reshape their personal and professional values and/or their
teacher selves.
7.1.2 For teacher educators
As is the case with language teachers, teacher educators are under an ongoing
scrutiny of their teaching practice on the part of student-teachers. They not only pay
attention to subject matter issues, but also to the kinds of values that teacher
educators display through their behaviours; teacher educators have high probabilities
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of becoming role models. The behaviours teacher educators display in their
classroom on many occasions serve to develop in student teachers images of an ideal
teacher they want to become. This is why teacher educators should engage in
continuous self evaluation and reflection that enable them to realise the types of
values that they are promoting through their interactions with student teachers.
Relationships and collaboration are central issues in successful learning; this is why
teacher educators must create opportunities for student teachers to interact with their
peers. When participants narrated their stories regarding formal learning
opportunities we could observe the significant role that fellow classmates played in
the formation of their identities. However, it is important to bear in mind that these
interactions should not only take place between student teachers. Teacher educators
should always be looking for opportunities to engage in interaction with student
teachers that leads to a better knowledge of language teachers’ selves. By doing this,
teacher selves and axiological frameworks constitute aspects that underpin teacher
educators’ decisions in formal learning programmes. When this happens, change,
and, therefore, teacher self transformation and teacher learning will be more easily
achievable objectives.
Teacher educators must similarly assess the stage of development in which studentteachers are in order to find appropriate learning opportunities for them.
Experienced and novice teachers have different academic and professional needs
and this was expressed in the stories of their lives. When teacher educators are
aware of the real needs of the student teachers with whom they interact, they are not
only able to provide them with experiences that are tailored to student teachers’
needs; they also give themselves the opportunity to learn from student teachers.
Finally, the role of emotions in professional development and teacher self
formation/transformation should not be overlooked. All the implications described
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above entail a strong emotional response from both student teachers and teacher
educators since they demand care of the teacher self and a deep involvement of
axiological frameworks. Student teachers should be encouraged to understand the
emotional responses that emerge when they are presented with new challenges in
their lives as possibilities for empowerment and self-transformation. When a richer
understanding of language teachers’ selves, axiological frameworks, and their
emotions is fostered, a space is opened for resistance.
7.1.3For school leaders
An issue that becomes highly important for school leaders is to create institutional
spaces where teachers can interact with one another. Throughout participants’
narratives we observed how their teacher selves were strongly influenced by their
colleagues in other educational institutions. Continuous opportunities to learn and to
develop professionally are an important tool to prevent the fear of change from
growing inside teachers’ selves. By means of an ongoing contact with colleagues
whose selves and axiological frameworks are changing at a similar pace to our own
might make learning and change a less threatening and more empowering process
for our teacher selves. Giddens’ claims in his theory of structuration (Giddens &
Pierson, 1998) that selves are created and recreated by two major influences. One of
these is interaction with the social and educational context and the second one is the
reflection that emerges as a result of selves’ interaction with the context.
Dialogue with teachers appears to be a central issue for school leaders. Professional
identities are in many cases ascribed to language teachers and imposed on them by
higher-order authorities. Teachers, however, also play an important role in the
formation of their professional identities. Enacting a role identity is always done in
relation to a corresponding counter-identity. Each party is trying to enact a role that
meshes with the other; each has self-conceptions as well as conceptions of the other.
This implies some degree of coordination and compromise between individuals so
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that smooth role performances can be achieved. Research on the leadership role
identity evidences that when individuals cannot negotiate leadership performances
in a group that match their leadership identities, they become less satisfied with their
role and are less inclined to remain in the group (Stets & Burke, 2003).
Alternatively, when they can negotiate a leadership performance consistent with
their identity, they become more satisfied and more inclined to remain in the group.
This may explain why most of the participants in this study are no longer part of
NESU’s or CLATL’s English language teaching faculty. Perhaps they found no
open spaces for negotiation and the contextual values promoted by leaders clashed
with those held by the participants.
School leaders must also put an effort into finding out about the professional
pathways that faculty members have walked, since different experiences lead to
diverse teacher selves. According to what the participants’ narrated, most of their
academic, professional, and personal life experiences were dependent on only one
person’s decisions. Such a situation had, in many cases, a negative impact on
participants’ levels of motivation and commitment to the institution. This seems to
suggest that there is an urgent need to adopt a more democratic approach regarding
leadership practices in CLTAL: a leadership approach that bases decisions on
dialogical exchanges held with teachers in order to respect faculty members’
projects of the ideal teacher selves they intend to become.
7.1.4 For researchers
We have found that stories and story telling are important vehicles for learning from
one’s life. Therefore, researchers who are investigating teacher identity and/or
teacher self construction should continue to use this methodology in order to
encourage self reflection, including thinking about the role of identity formation in
the professional development of language teachers. I argue that the use of life
history methodology coupled with a researcher’s genuine interest in narrators’ life
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histories may help to develop a better understanding of who teachers are on the part
of both researcher and narrator.
Perhaps the most important research actions that follow this study should be oriented
towards the collection of a wide range of data that enables the construction of a
genealogy of context (Goodson, 1995). Goodson (1995) contends that this wider
range of local data makes it possible for the researcher and participants to focus on
stories in context. That is to say: to employ the uniqueness of a multiplicity of life
histories as a driving force for collaboration that fosters not only a better
understanding of the world of schooling but also the possibility for change that is
empowering for language teachers. The uniqueness of life histories can thus provide
us with the necessary knowledge to understand and question the social context in
which they are immersed.
7.2 Concluding remarks
Finally, this study is one more contribution for TESOL empirical research that uses
narrative inquiry to “present experience holistically in all its complexity and
richness” (Bell, 2002: 209). The results provided highlight the importance of paying
attention not only to language teachers’ selves, but also to values they hold and their
emotions. These three elements function in close relationship to one another and are
a central factor that determines empowerment or capitulation, change or stagnation,
commitment or disengagement, and success or failure in learning. I hope that this
thesis project may enable professionals to uncover the field’s political and
ideological underpinnings and rework them towards more progressive ends.
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Appendix 1 Participants’ profiles
Gloria: She has been teaching English at the LC for three years and she has recently
been named the coordinator of the institutional English language programme in the
University’s southern campus. She majored in engineering information systems and
intends to pursue a Master’s Degree in Applied Linguistics.
Laura: She has been teaching English for nine years and she worked in the LC for
four years, one of which she spent overseas with her two daughters in order to
pursue a Master’s Degree in Applied Linguistics. Laura holds as well a Bachelor in
English language. Since she began teaching English to young children she strongly
believes that “if you become a kid you learn, if you have fun in the class, you learn.”
She has recently quit to the southern campus LC’s academic coordination.
Tania: She has more than eight years of teaching experience. She has worked in the
LC for four years and holds a Master’s Degree in Applied Linguistics from an
English university. From the beginning of her language teaching career Tania was
very interested on becoming “a good teacher.” She has put a lot of effort into
becoming a professional and learning how to teach. Tania is currently one of the
academic coordinators in the LC’s southern campus.
Daniela: She holds a major in Chemical Engineering and a second one in English
Language. Daniela has been teaching English for eleven years and has worked with
young learners, teen-agers, young adults and adults. Daniela is currently in charge of
the Self Access Centre at the LC’s southern campus.
Alejandra: Her greatest dream was to be able to pursue a university degree, she
realized this dream when she was in her early thirties and began studying a Bachelor
in English Language. She has been teaching English for eleven years and this is her
third year as a teacher educator.
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Raúl: He is the youngest of the participants and is currently studying a Bachelor in
applied linguistics. He has been teaching English at the LC for four years. Raúl was
a student himself at the LC; when he was taking a high intermediate level he began
to think of English language teaching as the profession he would like to follow. He
spent six months overseas as part of an academic exchange programme teaching
Spanish to students of a language centre in a British university.
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Appendix 2 Administration approval request
Dear (Director of the LC):
I am contacting you to request your approval to undertake research in the CLTAL.
The research investigates the construction of language teachers’ selves. With your
permission, I will invite some teachers to take part in this study. Their participation
in this project will involve interview sessions.
Please be aware that the teachers will be given the choice of whether or not to
participate in the study and they may withdraw from it at any time without penalty.
They will be assured that there are no risks associated with their participation in this
study, and their responses will be treated in strictest confidence and no identifying
information will be passed to third parties.
Thank you in advance for your support. A copy of the completed research report
will be sent to you at your request and I trust it will be of interest to you.
Sincerely,
__________________________
Nelly Paulina Trejo Guzmán.
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Appendix 3 Informed consent form
Dear (name of participant),
I’m writing to invite you to participate in a research project as part of my doctoral
programme. The purpose of this study is to explore the ways in which previous life
experiences and early teaching experiences impact on the formation of language
teachers’ identity. Your participation in the study will involve an interview. It may
also involve further interviews to analyse in more depth certain issues identified in
your responses to the first interview.
Please be aware that your participation is completely voluntary and you may
withdraw from the study at any time without penalty. I would like to assure you that
your responses will be treated in strictest confidence and no identifying information
will be passed to third parties.
Thank you in advance for your support,
________________________
Paulina Trejo
I _________________________________ agree to participate in the study
undertaken by Ms. Paulina Trejo and I understand that the purpose of the research is
to explore ways in which previous life experiences and early teaching experiences
impact on the formation of language teachers’ identities. I acknowledge that (please
tick where appropriate):
1. [ ] the aims and methods of the study have been explained to me.
2. [ ] I voluntarily and freely give my consent to my participation in such study.
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3. [
] I understand that the results will be used for research purposes and may be
reported in scientific and academic journals.
4. [ ] Individual results will not be released to any person except at my request and
on my authorization.
5. [ ] I am free to withdraw from the study at any stage and that this will not affect
my status now or in the future.
Signature: _______________________
Date: _______________________
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Appendix 4 Example of interview schedule design
D: Because of my children. I am a… a chemical engineer but you know, because of
my [laughs]… my gender, a female, it is very difficult to become successful in this
career, a chemical engineer. I worked for five years more or less but when I became
pregnant, they said no, and they fired me. Yeah, and then I had my first baby and
then I felt frustrated because imagine your entire career, all your years of study and
you are only a housewife. 1 I know that it is not very bad but, for me it was; and
then I applied for another job in another company where I had been before, but… I
don’t know, the destiny [laughs] again played with me [laughs] uh […] then in those
years I became pregnant again and I said “Oh, my God, you are telling me
something” [laughs]. You are telling me that this is not the way. Then my older son
started kindergarten and you know, the home works and all those things, and I said
“Oh, what is that…? I don’t now.” That’s why I started studying to become like an
assistant for kindergarten English teachers […] well it is not a very good course, but
for me it was very good because I understood a lot of things about children. How
they learn with songs and by doing handcrafts and then I started working. I feel that
it was like a copy of any book’s teacher’s guide, it was like a copy of that. Now I see
that because I am in another level but in that, in that time it was like a new thing for
me. 2 I didn’t know anything, well, I knew English because I had learned English
since I was a child, but how to teach it, of course I didn’t know. So the course for me
was good because of that.
P: How did you feel about learning English when you were a kid?
D: Yeah, I have been always interested in studying English and when I was a child I
saw in my house a book in English, like those kinds of books that you use for the
courses, with pictures and then letters and I started to imagine what the dialogues
could say or what the people were trying to say. Using cognates, you know, some
words in English are similar in Spanish and I didn’t understand anything. I was like
168
8 or 9 years old. So I’ve always liked to read the newspaper since I was little and I
was looking at the newspaper once and I saw an ad from a school and it said “We
offer English classes for children, adults.” I told my parents “I want to be here” 3
because I was in a school that taught only Spanish.
1. Are there any other experiences where you can remember that your personal
and professional lives were so closely connected?
2. What kinds of personal and professional experiences have led you to think
this? Can you give me some examples?
3. Can you tell me a little bit more about this experience? What other things
motivated you so strongly to learn English?
169
Appendix 5 Excerpt from interview
P: I’d like you to tell me a little bit about how you became an English teacher. What
brought you to the profession?
A: If I want to tell you about that I have to go back to my childhood. I always liked
studying, I enjoyed studying, I enjoyed reading books. I remember that I wanted to
be a doctor since I was a child, but my mother told me “you havr to study to be a
bilingual secretary” so I was really disappointed because of that fact […] uh […]and
I said well […] at that time children didn’t use to say anything, disobey. We had to
say yes to everything that our parents told us to do, so what happened is that I
married a person that worked there, a lawyer. I was married when I was 18 and I
became a mother when I was 20 […] so I studied uh… business, a business…
associate degree yes. I remember that it was bilingual secretary and private
accountant; so when I was 16 I was already working in an office; I was very young
and very scared about the work because I didn’t have any brothers, I didn’t have any
contact with the, with the with the, other sex, with the other gender, only girls
because I studied in a primary school only for girls, the commercial career was only
for girls, so I was really very scared. I remember that they tend to make jokes about
different tings and I didn’t understand. I remember I was like oh, I want to go!, so I
couldn’t continue working to take care of her and I was a house wife, and I was a
happy housewife. Since I wasn’t working at that time I was really just doing what a
housewife does, doing normal stuff like taking my children to school, doing
housework […] […] I remember that I used to teach my children English in the
afternoon. I told you that for a long time I was a housewife but when I was30 my
husband lost his job, he was fired and he had a depression, it was very stressful, we
didn’t have any money. He didn’t want to work and I said I have to do something,
but I wasn’t easy, I was already 30 and nobody would like to hire a secretary of that
age… and I put an ad on the newspaper saying that I taught kids with problems with
170
English, so as I told you, I wanted to do something and I started teaching by myself
and that’s where I started. Uh, so I continued for a time giving this lessons and I
remember once that I saw an ad that if you wanted to certificate your studies and I
remember that I went to that place and they were offering like a […] it was like a
kind of COTE. It was a new school, like a language centre and they wanted to hire
new teachers so they were offering the preparation course so they could hire
teachers from that course. So I remember that I went and it was very expensive for
me, $2000 at that time so I said “I’m sorry, thank you very much, but I can’t afford
that.” “No, but first you have to take a […] a placement test and maybe you don’t
have the level” and I said “ok, is it free?” “Yes it is free” “right, I’ll take it.” I
remember that they called me and they told me “You have the right level but, uh
[…] and we can help you. Take the course with us and then you can pay us with
work” and I said “Well, I’ll take it.” I remember that I didn’t tell anything to my
husband because he as a lawyer would say “No! If they hire you they have to pay
you.” And well, I went and I learned a lot. I met a lot of people there; I remember
that I met [names two experienced and well known teachers in the region] was there
also, so I met very interesting people and then I started working for them, the
language centre that I told you about. From there I moved to different schools and I
have gained confidence on myself.
P: What did you feel then when you started working for that school?
A: As I see it now I was really… a very bad English teacher [laughs]. I didn’t know
how to teach, I didn’t know what to do. In spite of having taken the course I told you
I didn’t know how to… to teach English. I just followed the book, read the
instructions, gave them exercises. I was working with children and I remember that I
took them songs I wanted to do it differently, but I didn’t know how or what to do…
171
Appendix 6 Example of initial color-coding
I was studying international relations. I was not that interested in teaching. While I
was studying English at school I was always keeping my books, I was always
keeping my materials, I don’t know why. I didn’t want, or I didn’t know that I
wanted to be a teacher but I always kept my materials, I always had everything
organized from a basic level to an intermediate, everything organized. Without the
idea of being a teacher or thinking that some day I would teach. But then by the
second year of my major in international relations I knew about the job offers that
they had in primary schools. They were asking for teachers “Programa de ingles en
tu escuela primaria.” So I said “I don’t have a job, I need money, well, I sort of need
money…” and I said what everybody says “so I know English, so I can teach.” So I
went there, asked for a job, made an exam and they said “ok, you have the level.”
Time passed by and they didn’t call me, they just called me to cover a teacher that
was pregnant and I entered and I covered her for like two months and…
P: How was that experience of working there?
R: Well, it was the very first time I had ever taught, it was interesting. I was relaxed
because I was teaching children, I mean, I would say anything to them and they
would believe me. So it was mostly using the language with them. Uh, the thing is
that this programme is very easy for new teachers to work with because they give
you everything. The give us a lesson plan for the week, for the whole year and they
even tell you what you have to ask for homework. So it is really easy for a teacher to
go there and just start working with them and use the language. Read the
instructions and follow the book, that’s all you have to do. That was three months,
and then I got sent to the office to do some administrative work and then they sent
me again to cover some other teachers and they just fired me, bah! They said “we
don’t need you anymore, we don’t have the space, we will have to let you go…” and
bye. After this happened I noticed that I was really enjoying it. I always liked to
172
learn it; I kept my books and all that. I always liked to learn languages; I even
studied French for a while. So, the language thing was there, that’s why I entered to
international relations because I could kind of relate it to the use of languages but…
Experiences as learner
Entrance to the profession
Beliefs about teaching
Teaching as a vocation???
173
Appendix 7 Example of identification of emerging themes
Beliefs about teaching
Views of teacher
self
Tania: Of course my first class here at the university was following the book, I
mean… what else could I do? [laughs] When I was teaching, the first three months,
I said “this is not the right thing for me.” I mean, I was struggling with the
[certification’s] essays and I was struggling with the kids and I said “no, no, no, I
can’t.” Actually I felt when I was teaching that I wasn’t a very good teacher
because I knew that there was something else I could do and I didn’t know how to
look for it.
Alejandra: As I see it now I was really […] a very bad English teacher [laughs]. I
didn’t know how to teach, I didn’t know what to do. In spite of having taken the
course I told you, I didn’t know how to teach English. I just followed the book, read
the instructions, gave them exercises. I was working with children and I remember
that I took them songs I wanted to do it differently, but I didn’t know how or what
to do.
Raúl: Well, it was the very first time I had ever taught, it was interesting. I was
relaxed because I was teaching children, I mean, I would say anything to them and
they would believe me. So it was mostly using the language with them. It is really
easy for a teacher to go there and just start working with them and use the language.
Read the instructions and follow the book, that’s all you have to do.
Laura: I was doing those things based on […] like following hunches […] yeah,
somehow because I had the annual plan so I had to work out all the activities out of
the lesson plan. We had to follow themes so […] well we just developed the theme
according to the objectives based on the students’ age. So, for example uh, twelve
month children, what are they able to do? So it was not only how to learn English
but also how they develop their fine and gross motor skills and how to combine
those experiences of having hands on with their language learning.
Daniela: I started again in a kindergarten I learned a lot and a practiced some, you
know, theories, personal theories [laughs]. In the beginning they [her students] had
problems to visualize it [text] and to write it down but then they learned, and it was
all from my imagination. I think responsibility is important because what you do
impacts the others, in this case the students. If you say something and you do it,
they know that you are reliable. This is not very easy because first of all, we always
have to study and we always have to work, not only the working hours but we have
to plan, we have to imagine, we have to be creative, and it is a very difficult job.
Gloria: Even though now my priorities are more or less the same, I care more about
students’ learning, maybe because I’ve found the way to make my lessons less
boring. I’d like my students to feel satisfied with the class, to know that they liked
it, and I also want them to learn something from me. What I mean is that I don’t
want to focus only on the book; I try to include some cultural things in the class. It
is not only a matter of learning English, you also have to learn about culture in
general, so I try to include always something related to culture for them to …
174
Focusing on who she
WAS as a LT
Negative evaluation
Evaluating who
WAS as a LT
she
Negative evaluation
Understanding of early
T self
Positive
Understanding of early
T self
Positive
Describing who she IS
as a LT – Current T
self
Positive
Current T self
Positive
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