Age, Gender and Language Teacher Identity: Narratives from Higher Education

Abstract

This qualitative study, which uses a narrative inquiry approach, presents data from in-depth interviews with participants teaching English in higher education in Japan. It adopts a poststructuralist lens, conceptualising age as socially constructed, and uses this framework to analyse four cases. It reports on the social construction of their teacher identities, in particular how their gender identities influence the enactment of their age identities. This enactment takes place both in and out of classrooms. The central thesis of the article is that age identity was constructed differently for the male and female teachers and was constructed to the disadvantage of the female teachers throughout their professional lives.