Abstract
Engaging with recent calls to incorporate teacher identity as a central principle in language teacher education, this article aims to address practical ways to support teacher identity development in students in a graduate program for language educators. Employing duoethnography as a qualitative research approach and reflective practice, the two authors, who are instructors in the program, engage in conversation on coursework and activities that invite reflection on and negotiation of identities among participants in the program. The work we have been doing explores a variety of aspects to create a more holistic lens from which to support the development of teacher identity as connected to professional identities (educational beliefs, practices, and experiences) and personal identities (cultural background, ethnicity, language, gender, etc.). The idea that who we are is continuously evolving in a process of becoming is a metaphor guiding identity work in the program. This process of becoming and teaching who we are calls for teacher educators to consider in depth the impact of teacher education activities and processes on student teachers’ developing understandings of themselves as language educators in our globalized world.
Keywords
Introduction
The centrality of teacher identity (TI) in informing teaching practice has received considerable attention among scholars interested in language teacher education in the last several decades (Barkhuizen, 2017; De Costa and Norton, 2017; Varghese et al., 2005, 2016; Yazan and Lindahl, 2020). Yazan and Lindahl (2020) make the case that while the concept of language teacher identity (LTI) has brought forth the establishment of a framework to theorize complexities in learning to teach and teacher practices as tied to sociopolitical and cultural contexts, LTI needs to be explored extensively as a pedagogical tool to be employed in language teacher education programs, thus highlighting the importance to pedagogize LTI, i.e., to consciously and systematically incorporate in program curricula activities and/or discussions focusing on LTI development. Given the conflict-ridden and ecologically devastating globalized world we live in, we strongly endorse Yazan and Lindahl's view that “the implementation of an identity approach in language teacher education … can strongly contribute to the most-needed shift to critical language teacher education” (Yazan and Lindahl, 2020: 3).
This study employs the approach of duoethnography (Lawrence and Lowe, 2020; Norris and Sawyer, 2012), which entails two researchers engaging in a conversation as “a collaborative form of meaning-making” (Lawrence and Lowe, 2020: 13) “to articulate dialogue-based research” (Banegas and Gerlach, 2021: 3). Thus, this article will follow an understanding that “the duoethnographic method is not a fixed blueprint … but always emergent and uncertain” (Norris and Sawyer, 2012: 25), in which “literature is integrated as the need emerges from the conversation” (Norris and Sawyer, 2012: 34). Consequently, and given the limits in word count we have to observe, we offer below very brief references to some LTI scholarly works and to duoethnography as a research method and mention duoethnographies conducted by language education scholars. What follows next is an amalgamation of the conversations we held in working on this article, interspersed with some personal reflections each author wrote down as part of our self-study into pedagogizing identity in the program where we teach. We conclude the article with some implications for LTI pedagogizing, resulting from the duoethnography we conducted.
Context of the Study and Brief Engagement with Relevant Literature
Program Context and Perspectives on LTI
The understanding of LTI that grounds our reflections is one Varghese et al. (2016) shared in the context of their call to make TI the central organizing principle of language teacher education programs, i.e., teacher identities are “produced and discursively constructed within hierarchically organized racial, gendered, linguistic, religious, and classed categories and processes within teachers’ personal lives as well as in and through their teacher education programs, classrooms, schools, disciplines and nation-states” (Varghese et al., 2016: 546). This encompassing lens allows us to bring into our classrooms specific notions about TI development (e.g., we teach who we are; teachers are/can be agents of change) that connect to it in more visceral ways. We are two teacher educators in a Masters TESOL program with varied experiences in teaching English and teacher preparation. Our program is designed for international students only, focused on language teaching and learning in global contexts; most of our students come from China and Iran and have taught English in their home countries prior to coming to Canada. The program runs for four semesters and consists of coursework, “fieldwork” including observations and practical involvement in Canadian classrooms, and a capstone comprehensive examination, and invites students to negotiate their pre-program understandings of language teaching and learning with ideas and concepts presented in program curriculum from sociocultural and critical perspectives. As teacher educators, we have endeavored to engage in a more holistic approach to professional development that looks at educating the whole person. As a result, exploring teaching identity has been infused across coursework.
As students in this graduate program are multiracial, multilingual, global citizens whose lives have been shaped by a multitude of experiences and circumstances, to focus solely on one aspect of TI or one framing theory negates, or possibly contradicts, the whole of the experiences these teacher-students have lived/are living. The work we have been doing explores a variety of aspects to create a more holistic lens from which to support the development of TI. This lens addresses TI as connected to professional identities (educational beliefs and practices and experiences) and personal identities (gender, culture, ethnicity, language, political and religious affiliations, etc.) and is in line with Olsen's (2014) emphasis on the need to hold a “holistic view of teacher development [which] acknowledges the deeply embedded, situated ways that past and present, personal and professional experience fuse together in the complex, ongoing process of any teacher's professional development” (Olsen, 2014: 85).
While the volume of work on LTI has grown exponentially in the last two decades as acknowledgment of the importance of professional identity in shaping the knowledge base and practices of pre-service and in-service language teachers and teacher educators (e.g., Barkhuizen, 2017; De Costa and Norton, 2017; Varghese et al., 2005, 2016; Yazan and Lindahl, 2020), we will only acknowledge here what Yazan and Lindhal consider ten points that LTI scholars converge on in their theorizing of LTI. These points are as follows: professional learning always involves engagement in identity work; teaching practice involves continuous identity work; identity development is linked to the various communities of practice teachers are part of; as part of the certification process, teacher education programs introduce student teachers to the imagined communities of practice they seek to belong to; identity is both individually driven and contextually constrained; identity work involves engagement with narratives in revisiting and reconstructing past experiences and imagining future possibilities; professional identity construction is linked to individuals’ racial, cultural, sexual, and other social identities; TI involves constant tensions and emotional labor as part of professional growth; teachers’ identity is tied to one's enactment of professional agency; TI work involves the constant negotiation of contradictory sources of identity (Yazan and Lindahl, 2020: 2–3). Given the limited word count, we will not be elaborating on these points, but will make connections to some of them as we reflect below on the work we do in our program.
Duoethnography
We now turn to articulating briefly our take on duoethography. Norris and Sawyer (2012: 9) define duoethnography as a “collaborative research methodology in which two or more researchers of difference juxtapose their life histories to provide multiple understandings of the world.” Given that “each duoethnography will chart its own course” (Norris and Sawyer, 2012: 25) with duoethnographers not quite knowing “how the conversation will unfold” (Norris and Sawyer, 2012: 32), we came to realize that what we appreciated the most about this qualitative approach (with the self as the site of the research) was its open-ended nature with dialogue as its core. As Lawrence and Lowe (2020: 2) note, “[w]hen we engage in dialogue, we are not only communicating with our conversation partner, we are also communicating with ourselves and with the wider world. It is only through dialogue that we can come to understand who we are, what we do and why we do what we do.” Employing this “emergent form of dialogic inquiry” (Morgan and Ahmed, 2023: 5), we, like Rudolph and Matsuda (2023: 14), “were encouraged and empowered by our similarities, and we built on each other's stories to push our thinking forward.” Following commonly employed means to represent data in duoethnographic studies (Norris and Sawyer, 2012), we reconstructed our conversations in writing this article with, in italics, some excerpts coming verbatim from our Zoom chats and others being refined edits of themes we discussed in our conversations. In addition, reflective notes each of us wrote in the process of engaging with the topic of pedagogizing identity in the program where we teach are also part of the polyvocal text that follows.
Before moving on to the data, i.e., to our conversations and reflective writing pieces, we would like to acknowledge that duoethnography as a qualitative methodology has flourished in the field of language education in the last several years, attesting to its power in opening up spaces to engage productively with issues such as critical language teacher education and teacher educators’ identities (Banegas and Gerlach, 2021), affect and citizenship in EAP programs (Morgan and Ahmed, 2023), or negotiations of personal–professional being and belonging (Rudolph and Matsuda, 2023). We found especially illuminating the edited book by Lawrence and Lowe (2020), which introduced duoethnography “as a method of research, reflective practice and a pedagogical approach in the field of English language teaching” (Lawrence and Lowe, 2020: 2). As will be evident from the conversations and notes we share below, our use of duoethnography has been for us a powerful tool for reflective practice that has brought change in how we understand the work we do in the language teacher education program where we are instructors.
Reflections on Infusing Identity Development into Coursework
I have always known that delving into the work students do as part of their fieldwork courses would allow me to get a better sense of their becoming teachers holistically. So here comes the impetus for this article. I felt that its main purpose would be to showcase the work Rhonda does as their instructor in these courses and invited her to be the first author for this piece. The idea was that we would start with Rhonda reflecting in writing some vignettes on the work she does and, in our conversations, I would be there to make sure the points she wants to make are clear for an academic audience unfamiliar with our program and connected to existing literature in language education scholarship on TIs.
It is lovely that you have written all these different vignettes and for me it's more like having to choose a few of those. And I see my role more as working on the literature review for duoethnography and teacher identity, and responding to your writing in this piece.
Do you see this as more about highlighting the activities I do in my classes around developing teaching identity? Do you want me to continue honing the vignettes?
Yes, can you add more specificity in terms of your examples?
And the teacher identity ideas or theories, do I need to revisit them in those vignettes?
We can figure that out as we go along. It's similar to how you ask students to write their fieldwork papers, so write it as a reflective practitioner. It has to come more as a flow, a conversation, with you being the main voice and me kind of chipping in here and there.
As a teacher educator I have noticed that on completion of teacher education programs, new teachers often felt that they had “arrived” and that they could now identify as “the teacher.” Although true in terms of certification, I have come to understand that TI development is much more layered and nuanced, continuously evolving over many years, and I agree with Wenger (1998: 215) that learning “is not just an accumulation of skills and information, but a process of becoming,” an idea discussed in LTI literature, which Yazan and Lindahl (2020: 2) summarize as: “teacher professional learning involves teachers’ engagement in identity work.” Moreover, as Britzman (2003: 31) articulates it, “[l]earning to teach—like teaching itself—is always the process of becoming: a time of formation and transformation, of scrutiny into what one is doing, and who one can become.”
When working with international students in this program, I have discovered the idea of developing a TI, or identity work, was unfamiliar territory. Most had been taught methodology, theory, and techniques, but had never explored “selfhood, [a] sense of this ‘I’ who teaches” (Palmer, 1998: 10) in “becoming” a teacher. Yet, “[p]art of language teacher identity is a sense of self and the reflection of that self against one's own biography and a normative expectation of what an ideal language teacher might be” (Banegas and Gerlach, 2021: 1).
Considering the above ideas, I have decided that on a journey toward developing teacher identities, my students need to first explore their personal identities. I see this as a continuum of ever-unfolding examination and recreation—in a sense, a peeling back and adding to the multiple layers that create a TI. In reviewing my course curriculum and the curricula for the two-day pre-program orientation, I can say I adopt a holistic approach where students could begin by acknowledging and unpacking their personal identities and beliefs and then explore how this identity is inextricably intertwined with their developing teacher identities and how all these identities play out in teaching practice. I refer to this as a holistic approach (see Olsen, 2014) because the identities of the whole person are considered and continuously infused into all my coursework and teaching practice.
For me, the holistic idea is that it's not just about your teacher identity, and then there's this personal identity, but there's this culminating of the two that informs both.
I really liked what you said in the vignettes. Like going from the personal to the professional, there is scaffolding there that's happening, right?
That's an important piece there, that moving. We start out the program with the personal in orientation and really build on that and then it just continues all the way through, adding layers to it as I’m going through my courses.
We Teach Who We Are—Identity Bags
The two-day orientation helps students prepare for graduate work and begin building an inclusive cohort community. Within these days are woven activities that set the stage for identity work. Prior to the orientation, students are asked to read a chapter by Parker Palmer (1998) and consider how his ideas resonate with their own personal identities. They are also asked to bring 3–5 objects that represent who they are in what I call an identity bag. Objects range from photographs to hiking boots to precious items brought from home or from their teaching. I am always surprised at the choices students make when selecting items to share. Some speak briefly about each item while others make connections to their lives. In sharing these objects, students recount narratives that reveal chosen aspects of their identities, in line with understandings in LTI literature that identity work involves engagement with narratives (Barkhuizen, 2017; Yazan and Lindahl, 2020).
In the first class of my fall semester fieldwork course, I build on these ideas of teaching who we are to further explore how personal beliefs and identities are closely connected to teacher identities. Students bring a quote from Palmer that resonates with them. They come prepared to discuss why it resonated with them and how quotes are connected to their personal and/or professional identities. From here, Palmer's ideas are holistically woven into my coursework, discussed as a way of revisiting personal identities and better understanding how these connect to teacher identities.
I remember now that you have them put on a moustache, is it? It's in the beginning, right? What's this about?
It's my first class with them. Before they do the identity bags in orientation, I ask them to read Palmer's article, ‘cause it's a really good framing for everything. And so, I start my first class with a bit of a twist on Palmer, “If you’re not teaching [as] who you are, then you must be teaching in disguise.” Then I give everybody a mustache, but you have to find the other people with the same mustache and that's your group to have the discussion about this topic.
That's a fascinating way to do grouping, but what I really find very powerful is that having them use the mustache as a prop in that session makes them experience the self in a different light and maybe begin thinking of the kinds of different selves we display in different contexts and perhaps truthfulness and disguise as linked to one's beliefs and understandings of the world, education, etc.
Exploring Educational Beliefs—Reflective Writing and Model Building
Students are asked to further test and hone their beliefs by exploring Freire's (1970) ideas about banking and problem-posing education. After reading a chapter by Freire, students work in small groups to build a model to represent banking education and then how systems can transition to problem posing (see Appendix 1—Photos 1 and 2). Although a fun activity, the model itself is less important than the discussions that ensue while students negotiate how to represent individual interpretations, beliefs, and ideas. Stories from personal and educational experiences emerge and are included in an eclectic and organic manner. When sharing their models, students engage in conversations with each other, leading to a deeper understanding of how our own teacher and personal identities, beliefs and experiences are intertwined. I find Freire resonates with most of the students in my class as they often have parallel personal or educational banking education experiences. This becomes a moment of revelation for them as they see how their own teaching practice is influenced by both their personal experiences and the political systems in which they were educated and taught. This sociopolitical and sociocultural “aha” activity is often a turning point for many, and they begin to more deeply reflect and question what it means to be an educator in complex systems. This activity aligns well with LTI literature highlighting connections between individual experiences and specific sociopolitical environments and discourses as shaping identities and practices (Varghese et al., 2005; Yazan and Lindahl, 2020).
And I give them the most bizarre materials to use because I don’t want them to focus on the models or whatever they’re building. I do this because I want them to focus on the discussion of how they’re building the model and what it represents. And it's always so fascinating to me. Like the conversations they have around Freire and when they’re building a model out of marshmallows and pasta and cereal. It's super interesting what they come up with and they have to draw in their own experiences and they have to layer those with other people's experiences because they’re working in a group. They have to really think about how they’re going to represent this, bring all the voices into one model. I think, like you were saying, it just brings in this other layer.
The whole idea of bringing in understandings through multimodal means, the fact that you bring so much of that, have them do stuff not only in reading and writing and presenting just a paper, because it makes them think about something from a much more of a holistic perspective than just a cognitive process to make sense of things. This is key, allowing for a more holistic representation of what they believe, what they experience, where they’re going in terms of their ideas around their identities in the future as educators.
For me it's another way to access your understanding, you are not limited to just one way of accessing that understanding. For example, the conversations that the students have when they’re doing something more kinesthetic is so amazing.
I don’t know that many people draw on multimodal means of representation to bring in the notion of teacher identity.
Sometimes people balk at it and they think they’re just doing crafts in my class until they see the depth of the discussion. People put so much thought into how they represent themselves. And then they go, “oh, there's a lot more here than we thought. It's not just taking a bunch of crazy objects that [Rhonda] gives us to make something.”
Identity Project
That last piece just comes full circle. It's not just taking a bunch of crazy objects that Rhonda gives us like, pieces of fabric and ribbon and whatever and putting something together that's pretty. It's about really thinking about what that ribbon means in this particular piece, it's really powerful. So much more so than I ever thought it would be. Interestingly, this final visual piece isn’t always about teaching. It is also about students’ journeys along this continuum that will lead to the kind of teacher they’re becoming. They talk about their fears, their hopes and about how their personal identity and their teacher identity are so intertwined.
As students shared their visual identity pieces, I was overwhelmed and touched by the conversation and the deep reflection on identity. Students talked about how this activity allowed them to reflect on different aspects of their identities, how they could express their beliefs in new ways, develop a greater understanding and compassion for diversity and diverse learning, move from authoritarian to being more relational and empathic. They spoke about revealing more parts of their identity to students and about a greater awareness of teaching practices and how those could be changed. They said they had learned to be proud of sharing their unique individual and sociocultural identities and could now show their students how to be proud of their own, and how exploring racial and ethnic identities means a pathway has been forged for their future students. One student coming from an authoritarian political environment expressed that she will now share all her colors with her students regardless of the context in which she teaches and that all parts of our identities shape the teachers we are becoming. Overall, students all agreed that teacher identities do not need to be shaped by the views and opinions of others and that identity is continuously under construction, and that this is okay as they navigate this journey. These revelations confirm students developing an understanding noted in LTI scholarship that professional identity is tied to one's various social identities and is a never-ending process of negotiating different sources of identity.
Students always reflect on changes in their identities in the end-of-program portfolios they produce as part of their comprehensive exam and make connections to what you do in the fieldwork courses. I remember one student mentioning that the most precious thing she gained in the program was awareness of identity issues, which benefits her not only as a student or teacher, but also helps her navigate her life as one constantly moves from one context to the next. She ended her portfolio with the following line: “As the saying goes, ‘we teach who we are,’ it can be inferred that we act who we are.”
Personally, I’m not very much a kind of person who brings materials and objects, it's more about finding the moment in the class when they’re really wondering what they can do as teachers. I just bring it whenever I’m doing a reading with them that I feel has important messages around being an agent of change. One thing that I keep catching myself doing in the classroom is whenever there are some questions around practice related to a reading we are doing, I ask questions that have to do with agency. Pretty much, that's my way of doing it, “what could you do as an educator, who could you be as an educator?” In a way, let's think about your own belief systems. Very often they say, “But this works maybe in an environment like Canada, but in a place like China where the focus is so much on assessment, how can I bring that?” And I tell them that it all comes down to what they believe. And if they believe that this is something important to do, they can find space and time. It doesn’t have to be a lot of time. It could be a couple of minutes here, just asking a question there, bringing something small in the classroom, and then it makes a difference. For me change in the system happens with thinking about it, the cracks. I keep telling them, “Change can’t happen overnight and don’t feel overwhelmed by the fact that there is this big system that you have to face, think about the cracks, the moments where you could make a difference and it doesn’t have to be planned.” I understand that planning ahead for something in the classroom is a good thing. But I don’t see this being a very common opportunity within very fixed systems so it's more about just be on the alert all the time, and find the moment in the classroom where you could bring that point that you really strongly believe in.
Concluding Thoughts
When we started talking about doing this article, right away I thought it isn’t just about teaching/pedagogizing teacher identity. It's intertwined with all of our stories that we bring with us that shaped it. And I really want whoever reads it to understand where we’re coming from. It's not, tick a box for teaching teacher identity, it's, like you said, you constantly weave it in and then the students start weaving it in for themselves, over time. I can see that you do that and I think probably a lot more than you might realize.
I certainly pinpoint that and we have conversations around who you can be as a teacher, primarily in discussing readings. It's more this academic thought process than the hands-on stuff; I can’t think of doing that in a way.
This is good because we’re not advocating that everybody should change their teaching approach, it's not a cookie-cutter thing. And here's your teacher identity and my teacher identity, right?
This is why I needed to write a little bit about who I am as an educator so our audience can understand more what we bring; it's not only me kind of working with you on clarifying what you wanted to say, but it's also where I’m coming from.
That is so important, this is where the duoethnography approach fits in. The article started out looking like it was going to be mostly about what I do in my classroom, but when we got talking, actually, we’re demonstrating that there are different ways of entering into this conversation and that what you’re doing is just as valid as what I’m doing. You’re weaving it into their consciousness all the time so that they start to think in a different way, right? I might bring in a bunch of fun activities and objects because that's who [Rhonda] is, but it doesn’t mean that the result is going to be any different. This would be a really important message that there is no one recipe for pegagogizing teacher identity and we don’t want people to think that. But if we can get you thinking about who you are as a teacher and how you can weave identity in, then we’ve done what we wanted to do, right?
That's great for a conclusion, I think.
So, if we can spark an interest for teacher educators to engage in a conversation with other educators, then they are going to get more excited about their own practice and maybe they’ll realize that they do already pedagogize identity in their teaching.
Reflecting on one's own personal and professional identities and inviting students to do the same through various activities that, given a teacher educator's lived experiences, dispositions, and convictions, make sense, seems to us a fruitful way to delve into the sociocultural and sociopolitical nature of TI and pedagogize it in language teacher education programs. We end this conversation with deeper understanding of our own teacher identities and practices and even stronger conviction that explicitly focusing on TI helps student teachers “feel more empowered and agentive to chart the contours of their identity development” (Ustuk and Yazan, 2023: 25) or becoming in the complex globalized world we live in.
