Chinese Self, Australian Other: Chinese as a Foreign Language Teacher Identity Construction in Australian Contexts

Research in the field of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) education has been increasing in the past decades. However, the number of studies on CFL teacher identity is limited. To bridge the gap, this study employed a qualitative method to explore Chinese CFL teachers’ identity formation and reformation in Australian contexts. A Chinese-Australian language program was studied to examine the challenges, struggles and developments of Chinese CFL teachers who came to Australia to pursue professional growth. Five Master’s theses and three interview participants were included to paint a picture of how Chinese CFL teachers interact internally and externally with a new environment. Guided by Mead’s theory of self and other, we found that Chinese CFL teachers’ identity formation and reformation in Australian classrooms are deeply influenced by their self-identification and their integration with others in the community. Cultural connectedness is a key for organizational attitudes in the relationship of self and other. Chinese CFL teachers were found lacking the wholeness of self in Australian contexts, which led to obstacles in teacher identity construction. Insufficient communication between self and other resulted in their positioning crisis.

Contributions of a Professional Development Course to Language Teacher Identity Development: Critical Incidents in Focus

Despite the widely recognized significance of critical incidents (CIs) in teachers’ professional learning, little research has investigated the role of CIs in language teacher identity development. This study attempts to fill this gap by exploring the contributions of a Telegram-based professional development course—framed around CI storying—to the language teacher identity development process of a group of teachers. Data were collected from 10 teachers before, during, and after the course. Data analyses indicated that, before the course, CIs negatively influenced the teachers’ agency and emotions. Participation in the course contributed, however, to the teachers’ enhanced agency and greater emotion regulation. In addition, the course afforded the teachers an opportunity to experience further professional socialization and collegial engagement. Our findings revealed that during the course, the teachers developed greater expertise in storying their CIs and discussed higher order issues relevant to the multiplicity of identity as connected to sociocultural-educational dimensions. These findings suggest that emotions and agency are two significant identity aspects that are profoundly influenced by and influence CIs. Our article closes with a discussion of the implications of embedding CIs in professional development courses to help teachers (re)construct their identities.

Researching Identity in Language Teachers – Current Challenges and Implications

Language teacher identity has been at the forefront of pedagogical research in recent years; this has become particularly important due to the demographic changes seen throughout the world since 2015; since then, there have been significant changes in the cultural landscape of schools in general and language teaching in particular, which presents unique challenges for teachers in their process of identity construction. This study aims to explore the transformative nature of language teacher identity in two settings: teaching in online classrooms in one’s home country, and teaching in online classroom abroad. The research will explore how cultural identity shapes an educators’ relationship with students, how one’s own cultural identity influences methodological and pedagogical choices, how these can improve literacy in the young adult classroom, as well touching upon the relevance of cultural identity is in a developing teacher. The findings revealed a general consensus on the need to gear pedagogigcal practices towards a student-centered approach; they further showed a general split in how teachers view the role that cultural identity plays in the classroom: while some felt that local cultures hindered their approach to teaching, others felt it helped build rapport and understanding between teachers and learners.

Edu-Crafting Teacher Identities

“Teacher identity” is a popular topic for discussion and reflection in teacher education. We ask pre-service teachers to consider cultural and personal images of teachers (as expert, caregiver, authoritarian, and so on) in order to accept or resist these images as they contribute to the construction of their own teacher identity. Discussed in theory and aspirational language, teacher identity appears to behave in a reasonably orderly fashion; however, once the novice teacher is introduced to the dynamic world of teaching, teacher identity can become an absolute mess to untangle. As an approach to research, posthumanism offers us a chance to see this mess as beautiful in its lively, evolving, and relational condition. This posthumanist project takes to heart that in order to understand concepts such as identity differently, we must also look differently. After Taylor (2018), who describes posthumanist research as “allowing oneself to be lured by curiosity, surprise, and wonder” (p. 377), I conduct a diffractive auto/ethnographic study of several teachers to find out what happens if I take seriously the value of play in research, wondering what can be gained, in terms of understandings of teacher identities, through cartomancy as a potential source of knowledge. Semetsky (2011) has introduced the use of tarot reading to education theory as a semiotic system that can be engaged with to transform education and heal the human psyche. In my own work, I have built a practice that takes cues from Semetsky and also departs from her work, in the spirit of research creation (Chapman and Sawchuk 2012), forging its own unique method and artistic path. Conducting interviews with five self-identified teachers through video conferencing, I host a dialogue between myself, the teacher, and the tarot cards; a combination of friendly discussion, formalized interview, and tarot reading take place. This unconventional approach to research allows me to give generous attention to these teachers’ identities by acknowledging their connections to other selves, other humans, and more-than-humans. I am particularly hoping to find an expanded sense of teachers' self-perception and an increased recognition of a teacher’s multiple, connected, changing, and changeable identities.

A Vocational English Teacher’s Professional Identity in Industry 4.0

The growth of technology in Industry 4.0 also gives an impact on education. Language teachers are not only consumers of commercial educational materials, but also must improve creativity in managing classrooms. They should find innovative instructional approaches, methods, and strategies. Therefore, the language teacher identity (LTI) becomes very important. The teachers should discover the contexts in which their designed practices are rooted and expelled to criticize their own personal and professional lives. The current article is a narrative inquiry that an English teacher of vocational high school in Indonesia began to experience over a period of two years during which she could see herself trying to find the best English learning for students that are ready to work in industry 4.0. Shimmering on self experiences and documenting the activities narratively made the teacher face with a number of teaching tradition that she wants to bridge education to world current development. With the development of technology, She began to see herself transforming from traditional learning into new learning that well matched for millennial students. These experiences become very challenging for teachers who are interested in self-inquiry research.

Language Teacher Identity Formation

Becoming a teacher is a process that underlies different aspects and purposes of social interaction and the construction of a professional identity. Student-teachers perception of themselves and their emotional states might differ from what is expected from them or even from their own goals. Therefore, this research attempted to investigate the development of teacher identity formation in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) students through their own perception of their professional identity. It was conducted as a case study ­and the participants were undergraduate students in the last term. An open-ended questionnaire was used to collect data. Practical activities related to teaching and contact with teaching contexts and with students had a positive evaluation on the part of student-teachers regarding the formation of their identity as teachers. This research demonstrates the importance of the practice in the context of teacher training for the establishment and maturation of teacher identity.