“You are Here”: Transnational Teachers’ Becoming Between Symbolic and Sociomaterial Spaces

Abstract

To understand the interplay between the “conditions” in transnational English teachers’ identity development, the present study used a textographic approach to analyze the implementation of a culminating activity as part of 13 participants’ transnational graduate education in a US institution. The study aimed to move beyond the “textual bias” that has influenced teachers’ identity education, to understand the interplay between the macro, meso, and micro factors in their practice. The results showed that the student-teachers situated themselves in changing external conditions. Their identities were thus dependent on the shifting circumstances around them, specifically in the relationship between translingual material realities in the world and the more fixed world of academia. They saw their journeys of transformation as unfinished opportunities for “becoming” in relation to others and multiple external agents. Emotions and affective work were agentively involved in the internal work the teachers undertook, shaping their evolving identity-becoming processes. The study ends with suggestions for engaging teachers with the material world more directly in teacher education programs.