Advances and Current Trends in Language Teacher Identity Research

Yin Ling Cheung, Selim Ben Said, Kwanghyun Park, Yin Ling Cheung, Selim Ben Said, Kwanghyun Park

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317686514
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book presents the latest research on understanding language teacher identity and development for both novice and experienced researchers and educators, and introduces non-experts in language teacher education to key topics in teacher identity research. It covers a wide range of backgrounds, themes, and subjects pertaining to language teacher identity and development. Some of these include

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• the effects of apprenticeship in doctoral training on novice teacher identity;
• the impacts of mid-career redundancy on the professional identities of teachers;
• challenges faced by teachers in the construction of their professional identities;
• the emerging professional identity of pre-service teachers;
• teacher identity development of beginning teachers;
• the role of emotions in the professional identities of non-native English speaking teachers;
• the negotiation of professional identities by female academics.

Advances and Current Trends in Language Teacher Identity Research will appeal to academics in ELT/TESOL/applied linguistics. It will also be useful to those who are non-experts in language teacher education, yet still need to know about theories and recent advances in the area due to varying reasons including their affiliation to a teacher training institute; needs to participate in projects on language teacher education; and teaching a course for pre-service and in-service language teachers.

PART I Theoretical orientations

1 Teacher identity as dialogic response A Bakhtinian perspective

Heidi L. Hallman

DOI: 10.4324/9781315775135-4

Identity, as a theoretical concept, has been discussed in the research literature as fluid and complex, as well as inherently “social” (e.g., Alsup, 2006; Britzman, 1991; Gee, 1999, 2001). Holland et al. (1998) discuss the premise that “identities, the imaginings of self in worlds of action, [are] . . . lived in and through activity and so must be conceptualized as they develop in social practice” (p. 5). This chapter explores how teachers construct themselves as “particular types of professionals” (Zembylas, 2008, p. 124, italics in the original), and take up their teacher identity as a project of continuous “becoming” (Gomez et al., 2007) over time. Furthermore, teachers mediate their stories of self with the cultural and institutional expectations of what it means to be a teacher. In addition to being constructed as particular types of professionals, teachers must locate their process of “becoming” within a specific context, time, and place, and negotiate this identity within multiple learning spaces (Danielewicz, 2001). Though identity formation is a personal process, researchers (Alsup, 2006; Brouwer and Korthagen, 2005) have stressed that teacher preparation programs can influence prospective teachers’ identity formation.

Yet, teacher identity must be theorized in a reciprocal relationship to others’ identities, as teachers form their narratives of self as responses, in part, to the students they teach, the administrators they work with, and the university-based faculty responsible for teacher training, among others. Early twentieth-century Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1990) understanding of the relationship between “self” and “other” provides a framework for understanding the impetus for teachers’ questioning of “self” in relationship with “other,” and tenets of a Bakhtinian perspective can illuminate important considerations in researchers’ ongoing understanding of teacher identity.

Conceptualizing teacher identity through a Bakhtinian framework is premised on a dialogic approach to studying the relationship between “self” and “other.” A dialogic approach bridges the self/other divide and views all iterations of “self” as response to an intended “other.” Bakhtin’s work (Holquist, 1990) employs tools that consider the relationship between speaker/writer, text, and audience and the theoretical tools that Bakhtin presents are helpful in understanding the “fluid and complex” nature of identity itself. Throughout this chapter, the following questions are explored: The premise behind the development of teacher identity is the urge to action. Teachers shape their identity in order to act – on themselves, on others, or on their practice. Bakhtin (Holquist, 1990) believed that we, as humans, are always intimately connected to the spatial and temporal contexts in which we live and these connections are how we articulate who we are, as well as our relationship to others.

• In what ways can we understand teacher identity as dialogic, meaning that it is always situated in response to an intended “other”?
• In turn, how does a Bakhtinian conceptual framework assist in illuminating tenets of teacher identity as dialogic?

Through elaboration of a case study of one prospective teacher, Veronica Wheelock (pseudonym), I explore the ways that Veronica’s Teaching Philosophy statement, written near the completion of her teacher preparation program, provides a forum for investigating how one beginning teacher negotiated her teacher identity. Drawing on the text of Veronica’s Teaching Philosophy statement, I highlight the following Bakhtinian concepts as important to investigating teacher identity: dialogical rhetoric and the relationship between self/other; heteroglossia, or the “many-voicedness” of teacher identity, and genre and the role it plays in articulating an identity.

Teacher identity as “text”

Throughout this chapter, I also situate the concept of identity within a sociocultural lens of literacy and learning (Gee, 1999, 2001). This means that identity is viewed as constructed through interactions between people and identity work is accomplished by individuals staking claims about who they are in relationship to others. Identity is intimately tied to literacy, as literacy is positioned as a vehicle by which individuals can make such claims. Further, one’s identity is always connected with one’s use of Discourses (Gee, 1999), which act as “ ‘identity kits’ and come complete with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to act, talk, and often write, so as to take on a particular role that others will recognize” (Gee, 2001, p. 526). Discourses become conceptual forums from which individuals assert their affiliations and undertake identity work. Through such a view, one’s “self,” or identity, does not exist as an individually created entity, but rather is formed within a nexus of social relationships and affiliations. Moreover, one’s identity, because of being situated within a social context, is subject to change over time. As contexts and affiliations change, so does one’s identity. Identity, as Hall (2000) asserts, is something which is “not already ‘there’; [but] rather, . . . a production, emergent in process. It [identity] is situational – it shifts from context to context” (p. xi). As a consequence, identity work is undertaken as a fluid process – one is never finished with constructing his or her identity.

This understanding of identity creates the possibility for teachers’ identities to become “texts” in which teachers author themselves and others are positioned as “readers” of the text. Identity, inhabited by Discourses, becomes a performance and also becomes visible, therefore giving rise to the possibility for multiple interpretations by readers. In crafting identity as “text,” teachers create a portrait of “self.” This portrait is created through a variety of means, including teachers’ actions, teachers’ interactions with others, and teachers’ writing.

This chapter looks specifically at how a written text that a prospective teacher authored supports her ongoing identity development as a teacher. Though it is possible to study teachers’ performances in the classroom as identity texts in a similar fashion, situating a discussion of identity within the description of one prospective teacher’s Teaching Philosophy statement assists in explicating how tenets of a Bakhtinian framework can illuminate facets of teacher identity. To begin, I provide an overview of Bakhtin’s conceptual framework and then move forward in illustrating how this framework can support a discussion of teacher identity.

A Bakhtinian conceptual framework

First, Bakhtin’s (1990) understanding of the relationship between “self” and “other” helps us understand the impetus for teachers’ questioning of “self” through a relationship with “other.” Bakhtin (1990) believed that the “self” always resides in two spaces at once: the space that is “I” and the space that is “other.” These two spaces are always in relation to each other and are continually referenced in the creation of “self.” Bakhtin referenced this when he said:

in order to see ourselves, we must appropriate the vision of others . . . I see myself as others might see it. In order to forge a self, I must do so from outside. In other words, I author myself.

(Holquist, 1990, p. 28)

In a Bakhtinian sense, then, teachers involved in the teaching act must author themselves as future teachers, in part, through authoring the relationship they have with the “other” – stakeholders in the teaching act. Teachers create reciprocity in relationships with others that allows them to continually negotiate who they are in the moment.

A Bakhtinian conceptual framework is synonymous with what many have come to know as dialogism, or the premise that “utterances” (Bakhtin’s term), are always responsive in nature. Dialogism is primarily concerned with the idea that all language is produced as response to other language. Thus, a central tenet of viewing text as dialogic highlights the “action” utterances within one text make in relation to other texts. Nystrand et al. (1997) articulate a dialogic view of text and utterances as:

fundamentally different from the common view that utterances are the independent expressions of thoughts by speakers, an account that starts with thoughts and ends with words and verbal articulation. Rather, because they respond to at the same time that they anticipate other utterances, they are “sequentially contingent” upon each other.

(p. 10)

Nystrand et al. (1997) emphasize the responsive, and therefore, dialogic quality of all text. The responsive nature of utterances situates all language in a chain of response, and focuses on the contingency of all utterances. Bakhtin (1986) notes this when he asserts that “the single utterance, with all its individuality and creativity, can in no way be regarded as a completely free combination of forms of language” (p. 81). Utterances, then, respond to and adhere to various language forms, or genres, and at the same time, remain active agents in re-shaping these genres.

Dialogical rhetoric

Dialogical rhetoric, as a concept, is an umbrella term from which to consider all text as interactive in nature. Though Bakhtin’s statements concerning the term “rhetoric” are, at times, not wholly positive, as they link rhetoric to an Aristotelian tradition laden with formality and epideictic speeches (1981, pp. 271), Bakhtin urges an understanding of a dialogic view of rhetoric. Bakhtin’s analysis does not discard the term rhetoric, but reconsiders how rhetoric is conceptualized, cautioning against rhetoric’s tendency to become a merely abstract, formal, logical mode of analysis. The larger context in which Bakhtin situates his discussion of rhetoric suggests rhetoric as dialogic. Reinterpreting rhetoric as dialogic recognizes that all discourse occurs within a complex arena of human interaction. Dialogical rhetoric, then, is conceptualized by Bakhtin to be not merely about a speaker’s intentions, but about the exchange between speakers. This focus on interaction situates rhetoric itself to be a dialogue between conversants.

Bakhtin understood that individuals are persuaded by conversants who have “authority” – whether these authorities are in the form of another individual or the larger society. He refers to these normalizing discourses as producing internally persuasive discourses, thus establishing a dialectic between oneself and intended “other.” Bakhtin (1981) notes the shared sense of discourse between individual and conversant by stating, “The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with one’s own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention” (p. 293).

Heteroglossia

Bakhtin’s term, heteroglossia, means “many-voicedness,” and recognizes that all language is ideologically saturated and stratified. Heteroglossia describes the push-pull between an author and intended “other” and Bakhtin (1981) writes that heteroglossia is alive as long as language is alive. He states:

But this occurs in the midst of heteroglossia, which grows as long as language is alive. Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear. The processes of centralization and decentralization, of unification and disunification, intersect in the utterance; the utterance not only answers the requirements of its own language as an individualized embodiment of a speech act, but it answers the requirements of heteroglossia as well; it is in fact an active participant in such speech diversity.

(p. 272)

Language exhibits heteroglossic characteristics; this quality is not a dissonance, or unnatural, but a part of language. As language references the multiple layers of contexts in which a speaker resides, it is normal that these contextual spheres are overlapping, and, at times, conflicting with each other. Recognizing this heteroglossic quality of language assists us in understanding that all language is responsive, and responsive to multiple audiences.

Genre

The term genre becomes a key concept in attending to the nature of local-level influences, as genre refers to not just the forms of texts, but the work these texts actually do in discourse communities. Disposing of a notion of genre as merely form and text type, and instead embracing a new conception of genre – a newness that Devitt (1993) calls the “dynamic patterning of human experience” (573) – shifts the notion of genre. This moves the conception of genre from a focus on the formal features of a text to the sources of those features. Text and textual meaning are no longer objective and static, but forme...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Expanding the horizon of research in language teacher identity: an introduction
• PART I Theoretical orientations
• PART II Negotiations and reflexivity
• PART III Tracing identity through narratives
• PART IV Teacher identity and responding to changing times
• Author index
• Subject index