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Chapter 6: EPILOGUE－ A REVIST TO TEACHER IDENTITY IN TESOL
Reflecting on Issues of Language Teacher Identity in Marcel’s Stories The study is a research process that documented and re-presented a teacher’s (Marcel) life storis in relation to the people he met, the experiences he encountered, and the place in which he carried out his work (a commercialized profit-oriented language center), illuminating the complexity of teacher professional identity construction prior to, during and after a TESOL master’s program. Providing a venue for witnessing such complexity, the study has also shown that Marcel took on and rejected certain identity options through the struggle for dialogical recognition, in which competing and multiple discourses intersected. These discourses both enabled and constrained the affirmation of his teacher identity, and his identity was further translated into his pedagogy (Morgan, 2004;
Richardson, 1994).
Marcel’s struggle for recognition, however, raises a few questions that deserve further attention in TESOL teacher education. Arranging the following section around the concept of “Bound by recognition18,”I will present two important issues, though not exhaustive, in relation to teacher identity development in TESOL. Finally, I will suggest how these issues can be addressed in TESOL teacher training through the concepts of Identity Construction through Enhanced Identity Options and Identity Reflection through Narrative.
When teaching, Marcel constantly referenced to his personal encounters with his foreign friends and his mentor’s discourses, including actions, beliefs, and attitudes to illustrate how language should be taught and learned, justifying the reasons why he chose to teach in certain ways. Marcel’s story illustrates that identity is the product of interaction
18 The term is taken from a book entitled “Bound by recognition” by Patchen Markell.
Markell, P. (2003). Bound by recognition, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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with others, since “identity is at once a complex matter of the social and the individual”
(Clarke, 2009, p. 189) and that it is only meaningful in relation to “the social world of other people” (Jenkins, 1996, p. 20). These significant others, serving as Marcel’s discursive models (Alsup, 2006), enabled Marcel to develop relationships that supported the expression of his voice. Similarly, studies have demonstrated the positive impacts of critical friends, or significant others, on teachers’ initial identity development (Akkerman
& Bakker, 2011; Alsup, 2006; Kelchtermans, 1993; Rijswijk, et al., 2013; Rots, 2010;
Sugrue, 1997; Tripp, 1994). However, is it possible that we are so engaged in our private bonds with those who are personally meaningful to us that, though we are consciously aware of their influences, we tend to overlook the consequences (whether positive or negative) of these influences and are bound by their recognition, losing our way of voicing ourselves? Phelan (2010), referencing to Heaney (2009), put forth such an ambivalent attitude that recognition bears “the promise of one’s independence while underscoring one’s reliance on the other (and the other’s terms of reference)” (p. 318). Similarly, as Bruner (2002) maintained,
A self-making narrative is something of a balancing act. It must, on the one hand, create conviction of autonomy, that one has a will of one’s own, a certain freedom of choice, a degree of possibility. But it must also relate the self to a world of others—to friends and family, to institutions, to the past, to reference groups.
(p.75)
This overreliance on social recognition may possibly lead to the loss of autonomous judgment and the refusal to engage in critical reflection, since, as Aslup (2006) argues,
“admitting the existence of contradiction and ideological beliefs [between a teacher and his significant others] …will result in vulnerability and admitting the imperfection of her [his]
most revered model” (p. 110). Marcel’s reaction about his mentor demonstrates this
tendency, as he put, “when other people do not recognize me, she does, and her recognition
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tells me that I am doing the right thing (…) I cannot think of one instance [on which I disagree with her].” Similarly, when talking about one of his Asian friends, “Maybe white people speaking English don’t think my friends are speaking good English, but I think they are good,” Marcel responded. Marcel engaged in micro critical reflection in his teaching materials based on his immediate situated context (e.g., students’ reactions in terms of teaching materials and native-like pronunciation). But like most, if not all, teachers, Marcel seldom involved himself in macro critical reflection; that is, how his larger social network may have influenced and shaped his beliefs and values assigned to his teaching. Marcel’s personal engagement/relation with his mentor and his Asian friends, to a large extent, impacted his views about how language ought to be taught and learned, especially his view of nativelikeness.
Another issue involves Marcel’s resistance of certain identity options. First, as a member of TESOL, Marcel identified himself as a legitimate language teacher. With the knowledge he learned in the TESOL program, he experimented different ways of teaching by incorporating theory into practice. Marcel, with his strong commitment to professional knowledge and training by taking up the discourses of TESOL, refused to and resisted taking up the identity that was assigned to him, in the case of being a teacher with an entertaining persona and a teacher with a business mentality, as he said, “I have no problems being that [humorous], but I just choose not to.” Second, Marcel regarded the identity option as a near-native English speaker to be the ultimate goal of learning English.
Marcel’s seemingly absolute devotion, to certain extent, constrained and limited not only his but also others’ possibilities of (re)imagining other ways of being a teacher and a learner.
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TESOL Education as a Platform for Identity Construction and Reflection
Identity Construction through Enhanced Identity Options
“We know what we are, but not what we may be.”
— (Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 5, Page 3, William Shakespeare)
As Marcel’s story reveals, recognition can dazzle but can also blind (Phelan, 2010).
Pavlenko (2003) urged that teacher education programs should address the need for offering “identity options that would allow teachers to imagine themselves and others as legitimate members of professional communities” (p. 253). This appeal reflects the paucity of literature addressing the issues faced by language teachers pertaining to what identity options are offered and limited both within and outside teacher education schemes/training. It is therefore crucial that language teacher educators provide chances for expanding a range of subject positions, or identity options, in the preparation of language teachers. From a critical perspective, it is argued that teachers should be aware of learners’ positioning and their relations to the larger social world, thereby enabling them to “disrupt potentially harmful and oppressive relations of power” (Hawkins &
Norton, 2009, p. 32). We must acknowledge that this concept also applies to the
preparation of teachers. To do so, language educators must play a transformative role by responding to the needs of future language teachers without assuming that they are preparing future teachers to function only in the context of mainstream education, given that Marcel is one of those teachers working in the emerging commercialized
profit-oriented language schools (Johnston, 2003). For example, this issue can be addressed by introducing different discourses surrounding language teaching to the classroom. This is similar to what Johnston suggests, “raising my [his] students’ awareness of the
sociopolitical dimensions of work in ELT and by making available to them information
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and resources regarding this aspect of the job” (p. 138). As a case in point, Marcel’s encounter with the news on language teaching can be a source of discourse in creating space for enhancing, examining, and even challenging certain identity options, since the media has the power to make some identity options invisible, backgrounded, and
foregrounded (Allan, 1999; Bell, 1998; Hall, 1992). More practically, by inviting teachers who work in different social spaces as a guest speaker to the teacher education course room, student/pre-service teachers have better chances to understand what it is like to teach in context other than mainstream schooling. Opportunities such as these can thus be given to sensitizing, or introducing, teachers to the diverse social spaces in which they may be situated. By introducing different discourses to the classroom, language teacher educators would not only open up possibilities for teachers to re(present) themselves, but more importantly, provide chances for teachers to better self-position themselves in response to the diverse social spaces in which they may be situated. By bringing new or alternative discourses into the classroom, language teacher educations are creating possibilities for envisioning new identities options for teachers and new ways of thinking about language teaching.
Another issue that language teacher educators should bear in relation to the
development of teacher identity involves an understanding of how teachers linguistically position themselves in the process of asserting themselves as competent language
teachers; that is, their perceptions of being a nonnative speaker English teacher. In Marcel’s story, his experience as a language learner, his initial teaching experiences, and the encounter he had with the mentor and foreign friends made him believe that being recognized as nativelike was the ultimate goal of language learning. In addition, he also admitted that he had problems providing colloquial slangs/idioms and certain types of frequently used vocabulary. However, this does not imply that Marcel was not an effective
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and competent language teacher. In fact, to challenge what he called the “native speaker fallacy,” Phillipson (1992) argues that native speakers may be able to make instinctively better grammatical judgments, but they may be at a disadvantage explaining or providing scientific construction on the use of language. Many studies making the similar point have demonstrated that nonnative teachers are equally effective. For example, Medgyes (1992, 2001b) lists several assets that nonnative teachers are capable of and that native teachers are not, including that nonnative teachers provide more information about English to learners, nonnative teachers are more likely to anticipate learners’ learning difficulties and therefore may be more empathetic to their learners, and that nonnative teachers have a far superior metacognitive knowledge of English grammar. This parallel understanding of nonnative teachers can also, for instance, be referenced to Paikeday (1985), Rampton (1990), Braine (1999), Cook (1999), and Kramsch (1997, 2003), who share that the concept of native speaker is rather an ideological myth, since it is difficult to be operationally and
conceptually defined, and therefore, being native is both “a matter of self-ascription as well as a matter of objective definition” (Han, 2004, p. 169). It is, therefore, important for language teacher educators to make visible the positive aspects of being a nonnative speaker teacher to teachers that they play equally important roles in the contribution to the language teaching enterprise. One may of course argue that each teacher, who is also a language learner, has his own goal of and conceptualization about language learning;
however, it is language teacher educators’ responsibility to help teachers uncover their beliefs and leave the ultimate decision to them as both language learners and teachers.
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Identity Reflection through Narrative
“Reflecting deeply on our own experiences and those of our students, we discover that explicating and exploring dilemmasis of itself a way of knowing.”
— (Swartz, 1994, p. 101) Marcel’s story shares Taylor’s (1995) claim that “we define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in a struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us” (p. 230), providing language teacher educators food for thought when engaging with teachers’ identity development in TESOL. Marcel’s story is not an intent to deny the importance of significant others, since human is inherently social, but rather, it is a caution to show how we might have been influenced without being aware of these influences.
These influences can be articulated, re-experienced, and re-examined through narrative understanding of teachers’ sharing of their stories (Connelly and Clandinin, 1994). The connection between narrative and teacher development is justified by a plethora of theoretical understanding and empirical studies addressing narratives and beliefs and knowledge (Connelly & Clandinin, 1986; Johnson & Golombek, 2002;
Johnson, 2007), narratives and practice (Goodson & Cole, 1993; Johnson & Golombek, 2002), and narrative and experience as well as construction of self and other (Gomez, Walker & Page, 2000; Witherell & Noddings, 1991). Johnson and Golombek (2000) argue that teachers’ narrative has the power to bring to the surface the “how they know as well as what they know” (p. 10), providing an avenue, either through writing or talking, for teachers not only to know more about their current practice, their difficulties, their professional growth but also how they have come to where they are right now.
To facilitate, language teacher educators should assist teachers in the process of this exploration so as to make students understand that narrative is both descriptive, as well as explanatory and analytical (Elliotts, 2005; Mills, 1959; Parker, 1998;). In so doing,
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teachers’ narratives can then serve as prompts for language teacher educators to pose questions, perhaps enabling teachers to experience cognitive dissonance (Galman, 2009;
Raffo & Hall, 2006) and providing the potential to assist them to confront and interrogate their beliefs and assumptions about language teaching. Through narratives, teachers can understand how their own identities may intersect with a variety of subjectivities and discourses surrounding language teaching. This process includes, in Marcel’s case, unraveling how and in what ways significant others have shaped his teaching and subjecting them to critical reflection.
Limitations and Suggestions for Future Research Limitations
Even though I was trying to be as mindful as possible when carrying out this research, some limitations were outside my control. For example, the participant’s Facebook posts were employed as data source to generate subsequent interview questions. As important as it is to serve as a platform for identity construction, the information flow such as posts responding to Marcel’s original post, and Facebook’s own news feeds were so fast that, considering research practicality and doability, it was impossible to capture and examine everything relevant posted. Future research employing Facebook posts as a source of data collection should bear this in mind. Moreover, since the identity struggle Marcel
experienced was examined only in his oral accounts, future studies exploring teachers’
experiences can benefit from classroom observations followed by interviews. The combination of the two could offer additional insights into the relationship between pedagogy and the enactment of teacher identity, especially how teachers conceptualize the discourse they take on and translate it into teaching practice.
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Suggestions for Future Research
Many of Marcel’s life experiences, especially those he undertook after leaving the TESOL program, exerted impacts on the crafting of his teacher identity. These impacts, in fact, were no less influential than those from his professional training in TESOL. This is not to say that TESOL education plays a less important role in fostering teachers’
professional identity, but the truth is that, compared to the general time duration of a master’s TESOL program or relevant professional training schemes (usually ranging from few weeks to two years), teachers spend far more time in their personal and private life, which is beyond the monitoring and caring of language teacher educators. Such
understanding can be both a challenge and hope to language teacher education. The challenge is to accept that teacher development should not be viewed as a result of short-term intervention from teacher education programs. Rather, it should be conceived as a career-long process in which continuous exploration rather than sudden
transformation might be a more realistic goal (Olsen, 2008). The hope is that helping language teachers develop awareness of the interplay between their professional and the personal is the first step for language teacher educators to acknowledge and accept this challenge. Marcel’s story serves as a cue for language teacher educators to first look at teachers’ identity development both within and beyond the situated context of teaching.
Second, with regards to the implication mentioned earlier, future research is encouraged to understand how language teaching is conceptualized in different social spaces so that different discourses surrounding language teaching can be introduced to teachers. This call is based on both Giroux (2004) and Bourdieu’s (2000) proclamation that we, as intellectuals/educators, must deliberately engage ourselves in conversations with other disciplines and different types of audience without being so consumed with our own academic fantasies. In many parts of Asia such as China, Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong,
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and South Korea, tutoring/cramming industry, for instance, is one such social space. This is not suggesting that language teacher education should teach humor or to equip teachers with the cultural capital of a business mentality, but it is important that teachers are made aware that language teaching could be conceived differently. For example, in the case of private/cramming industry, more research can be devoted to the perspective of
gatekeepers who make decisions on hiring teachers. This line of research is of supreme importance, since with the declined birthrate in Taiwan since 2001 (Department of Statistics, Ministry of the Interior, 2001) and the issue of surplus teachers in formal schooling (Hsiao & Hsiung, 2010; Huang, 2009), more teachers may have to work in private education sectors such as LC if they consider teaching a career.
Finally, to recall, Marcel wanted to challenge the nativeness myth so that he could be recognized as a competent English speaker. However, he did not do so by claiming his identity as such but by buying into the native-speaker fallacy, the power that he originally wanted to fight against. It seemed that this act actually downplayed the identity he wanted to claim. Similarly, Marcel wanted to be recognized as a creative and unique teacher, but by completely subscribing to what the mentor said to him, the identity he wanted to claim as a different and creative teacher was inhibited. Can struggling for recognition secure one’s understanding of self but at the same time also inhibit it? More specifically, how is struggling for recognition itself an effect of power despite that simultaneously it is a way of struggling against power? Identity cannot be understood without reference to how power is played out in the process (Norton, 2000; Tsui, 2007). By understanding how power works in teachers’ struggle for recognition, we are able to assist teachers to develop voice to argue for themselves.
To return to Giroux and Bourdieu’s argument, as both a member in the professional TESOL field and a teacher in private tutoring/cramming industry, I am brining to the front
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some issues that both sides can greatly benefit from engaging healthy conversations. As a TESOL member, we should be open-minded to the fact that practice of language teaching in certain social spaces does not necessarily parallel what we think it should be, and the private tutoring/cramming industry ought to understand that teacher development does not take place through experiences only, and that it requires teachers to understand, explore, and reflect on, both theoretically and practically, the situated nature of teaching and
learning. The industry can certainly benefit from introducing teachers to in-service training so that teachers can reframe the familiar and explore the troubling aspects of their teaching (Freeman, 1989; Jarvis, 1992; Ramani, 1987).
A Postcript
This research journey has been reflective and ambivalent. It is reflective in that through uncovering Marcel’s story I begin to reflect on my positioning in LLC and how I will have to do to envision my life with possibilities. Specifically, I have become more
This research journey has been reflective and ambivalent. It is reflective in that through uncovering Marcel’s story I begin to reflect on my positioning in LLC and how I will have to do to envision my life with possibilities. Specifically, I have become more