In This Issue

Abstract

If the commitment to identity is not just a metaphysical proposition but a serious recognition that our work as teachers shapes and is shaped by the very mode of our being, then thinking about the formation of our identities is crucial for all of us in education. (Clarke, 2009, p. 186) These narratives, and thus our journeys as language teacher educators (LTEs), are illustrative of Clarke's (2009) argument that “… engaging in ‘identity work’ is indispensable” (p. 186) in our desire to “exercise professional agency, and thereby maximize [our] potential for development and growth” (p. 187) as we continue our commitment in various contexts in which we work. These narratives also serve the purpose of touching on the highlights of our scholarship in this area: Varghese's research on the formation of bilingual teachers' professional identities (2006, 2008), on religion and English language teachers (Johnston & Varghese, 2006; Varghese & Johnston, 2007), and her work with colleagues on theorizing language teacher identity (Varghese, Morgan, Johnston, & Johnson, 2005); Motha's on English language teachers' racialized and colonized identities' (2006a, 2006b, 2006c, 2014, 2016, in press; Motha, Jain, & Tecle, 2011); Park's on nonnative speaker teacher identities specifically focusing on the intersection of nonnative-English-speaking (NNES) teacher identities and gender, race, and class (2009, 2012, 2015); Reeves's work on teacher investment in learner identity (2004, 2009); and Trent's research on native speaker teacher identities outside an inner circle English-dominant country (2012, 2015). These narratives additionally demonstrate how unexpected observations and experiences have made the concept of LTI compelling for us, as it has been compelling for many in the field and as evidenced by the sheer number of submissions—123 abstracts—from all over the globe that we received for this special issue. We have been deeply influenced by a substantial body of work as we have conceptualized and theorized LTI as individual scholars and as we developed and considered the framing for this volume as an editorial team. We now turn to a selection of this body of work and organize it around two interconnected essential questions: How do we define language teacher identity? What do we see as the value of studying language teacher identity in (multi)lingual education? The research in language teacher identity builds partially upon a tradition of teacher identity research in the broader discipline of mainstream teacher education, which predicates itself on a particular understanding of teaching and teacher education. One significant proposition is that who teachers are and what they bring with them, individually and collectively, matters in what and how they teach and thus, to students, families, communities, and institutions. In a seminal article from as far back as 1985, Lampert discusses the role of a teacher as “dilemma manager, a broker of contradictory interests, who builds a working identity that is constructively ambiguous” (p. 178). Using case studies of two teachers, Lampert put forth the argument that the practice of teaching involves teachers in dilemmas that they have to settle externally (with students and others), but also internally within themselves. This understanding of teacher professional identity as a process in which individuals negotiate external and internal expectations as they work to make sense of themselves and their work as educators is also echoed more recently by the highly cited work by Beijaard, Meijer, and Verloop (2004). The value of teacher identity as a concept is closely linked to the body of work on learning to teach, especially the development of teaching selves (Danielewicz, 2001) as teachers go through professional development in their school contexts and in relationship with students' social and academic lives and outcomes. This learning-to-teach research offers some defining elements for the concept of teacher identity. Although in reference specifically to the theorizing of language teacher identity, Varghese et al. (2005) propose a useful heuristic in their widely cited article that categorizes these theories as identities-in-practice and identities-in-discourse. This heuristic can be used to categorize definitions of teacher identity. Following a model of identities in practice, Beijaard, Verloop, and Vermunt (2000) define teacher identity in terms of how teachers perceive themselves as teachers, whereas Olsen (2008) looks at the construct from a sociocultural perspective and uses the term to refer to “the collection of influences and effects from immediate contexts, prior constructs of self, social positioning, and meaning systems” (p. 139). On the other hand, models of identities-in-discourse draw on poststructural perspectives on learning to teach and teaching selves, which highlight the salience of teacher identity, and ask us to challenge categories that have been fixed a priori and to embrace the contradictory, dynamic, and embodied (re)fashioning of identities (in some cases, highlighting race, sexual identity, gender, and social class) (Alsup, 2006; Britzman, 2003; Danielewicz, 2001; Evans, 2002; Miller-Marsh, 2003). Making visible these contradictions has also been deemed helpful in supporting developing teachers' understandings of themselves, their contexts, and the discourses surrounding them more authentically than in relationship to ideal(ized) versions of teachers as white, middle class, heterosexual, inner circle speakers of English. a useful research frame because it treats teachers as whole persons in and across social contexts who continually reconstruct their views of themselves in relation to others, workplace characteristics, professional purposes, and cultures of teaching. It is also a pedagogical tool that can be used by teacher educators and professional development specialists to make visible various holistic, situated framings of teacher development in practice. (Olsen, 2008, p. 5) Both of these elements LTI as a research frame and as a pedagogical tool, are salient in the following examples of monographs devoted to language teacher identity: Tsui's (2003) use of narrative inquiry to investigate the professional identity formation of a teacher of English as a foreign language (EFL) in mainland China, Clarke's (2008) study of preservice teachers' construction of teacher identities and community in the United Arab Emirates using sociocultural theories, Phan's (2008) work on the fashioning of their contradictory language teacher identity by Vietnamese teachers of English as an international language (EIL), and Menard-Warwick's (2013) exploration of teacher identity work on the discursive faultlines of English language teaching in the United States and Chile. LTI research and pedagogical frames are further explored in innovative ways in the forthcoming Modern Language Journal special issue, Transdisciplinarity and Language Teacher Identity (De Costa & Norton, forthcoming). In addition, in this special issue, three books on LTI are brought together for a comparative analytical review by Miguel Mantero through the lenses of theory, narrative, and teacher preparation. They are Cheung, Ben Said, and Park's collected volume Advances and Current Trends in Language Teacher Identity Research; Nagatomo's presentation of three narrative studies of Japanese university English teachers, Exploring Japanese University English Teachers' Professional Identity; and Kamhi-Stein's examination of processes of identity construction through six autobiographical narratives, Narrating Their Lives: Examining English Language Teachers' Professional Identities Within the Classroom. While teacher identity has lost some of its purchase in mainstream teacher education because of growing attention to standardization and accountability, leading to what may seem like an exclusive focus on pedagogy and practice (and a lack of attention to the connection between practice and teacher identity), this has certainly not been the case in language teacher education, as demonstrated in the scholarship we have described thus far. In addition to Freeman and Johnson's (1998) call for a reconceptualization of the language teacher knowledge base with a more enhanced perspective of context, more recently the very underpinnings of the profession itself have been called into question. This has also been a result of much debate around the “ownership” of English and of other languages in relation to the identities and pedagogies of language teachers. Motha (in press), for instance, observes that language teacher identity is a construct that wields tremendous conceptual power in shaping the disciplinary base of the profession. This is all the more true of English teacher identity. She notes that the concept of English learners is predicated on a construction of English teachers that serves not only as an imagined endpoint for the learners, but also as a juxtaposition, most clearly illustrated by the mutually co-constructed nature of the constructs (and challenge to the constructs) native speaker and nonnative speaker as they are applied to language learners and language teachers. She therefore sees teachers' identities and teachers' bodies as important, with the English language and its associated ideologies of race and empire becoming an identity, becoming literally embodied in its teachers and helping to create the logic and the value for the profession. Because English is situated within a complex racialized history, one in which the language has been transmitted primarily from speakers coded as White and colonizers to learners considered non-White and colonized, we have been left with a legacy in which constructions of English and ownership of and authority over English are dependent on unequal racial, linguistic, and colonial formations. An important charge of language teacher education, then, is to support an explicit understanding of language teacher identities, and particularly of the ways in which teachers' racial, colonial, and linguistic identities shape the logic for the profession and underpin it (Motha, in press). These teacher identities interact with discursively and situatively constructed student identities (Morgan, 2004) which are predominantly racially and linguistically marginalized. As such, the advocacy and agentive elements inherent in much of language teacher identity is undeniable, especially when juxtaposed with the identities of teachers of other subject matter (Cahnmann & Varghese, 2006; Johnston, 1999; Kayi-Aydar, 2015; Tellez & Varghese, 2013; Varghese, 2006). Hawkins and Norton (2009) claim that language teachers are key in addressing inequality in education both “because of the particular learners that they serve, many whom are marginalized members of the wider community, and because of the subject matter they teach—language—which can itself serve both to empower and to marginalize” (p. 32). Although there are a number of rich and innovative ways that the scholarship in LTI could be featured in a special issue, we sought to feature articles that would provide us with examples of novel ways to understand the meaning and value of LTI by further theorizing LTI, conducting empirical work in LTI, and establishing connections between LTI and language teacher education. We now turn to how the articles in the special issue speak to each of these themes. Contributors to this special issue articulate novel and powerful ways of theorizing language teacher identities (LTI) of preservice and in-service English teachers in a range of linguistic and institutional contexts. Across this work, LTI is represented as complexly (re)constituted and (re)negotiated as teachers traverse multiple contexts, cultures, and discourses and interact with cognitive, sociocultural, and ideological forces in the TESOL field. Throughout this special issue, authors do not adopt a consistent set of terms (such as native, multilingual, English-dominant) to describe linguistic identity. The pieces in this special issue employ inventive contemporary theoretical lenses, challenging us to imagine what it would mean to think about LTI as separate from the categories the field has employed historically. Geeta Aneja, for instance, conceptualizes identity as performed and discursively constructed rather than merely emergent from porous-edged identity categories. She presents teacher identity not as situated within a network of identity classifications but rather draws our attention to a set of discursive processes she terms (non)native-speakering, and she demonstrates through a study of four preservice teachers how language teachers' subjectivities can be produced, negotiated, or contested, shifting our attention from the definitions of native or nonnative to the processes and possibilities of (non)native speakering within dynamic sociopolitical contexts. She conceptualizes native and nonnative as mutually constitutive subjectivities that manage to simultaneously reify and resist dichotomized notions of nativeness and nonnativeness dominant in the field. Elizabeth Ellis, too, thinks beyond traditional language identity categories by formulating LTI in terms of languaged lives, that is teachers' linguistic histories, experiences, and biographies rather than merely identity categories and the connections among these. As part of an ongoing larger study of Australian TESOL teachers' experiences and classroom practices, Ellis explores the ways in which the language biographies of “native-English-speaking teachers” shape and inform their identities as learners, users, and teachers of English and consequently their classroom practices. Finding no single theoretical lens adequate for her investigation, she knits together connections among various bodies of theoretical work and demonstrates how the bodies of literature on teacher cognition, bilingual lifewriting, plurilingualism, and the influences of first language (L1) in second language (L2) learning can be used together to allow us to understand and make sense of language teachers as multicompetent plurilinguals with rich and complex repertoires of experiences. Several contributors reshape and expand current LTI conceptualizations and accompanying terminology. Ellis extends the notion of multilingualism, which she conceptualizes as multiple monolingualisms, to the profoundly contextualized theorization within the context of teachers' experiences of plurilingual competence, “the repertoire of varieties of language which many individuals use” (Council of Europe, 2011), which can “encompass a wide range of abilities and gaps in an individual's repertoire.” Gail Sue Kasun and Cinthya Saavedra offer us a similar invitation to move outside the linguistic categories in which the TESOL profession has been historically steeped by drawing upon indigenous approaches to teacher education. In a 4-week immersion program in Mexico, they encourage 8 in-service teachers from the United States to decenter their own identities, to unpack and critique epistemologies that have come to be associated with settler logic, and to rethink their identities in local and global contexts (p. 684). Other theoretically innovative approaches to LTI live within the pages of this special issue. In reading the contributions, we are supported in theorizing the power of narrative knowledging in allowing teachers to construct their own identities and consequently pedagogical philosophies and goals (Gary Barkhuizen) and the instrumental role played by teachers' emotionality in the formation of their identities (Juyoung Song). The five South Korean teachers in Song's study experienced complex emotional reactions to the advanced language skills of their secondary students who had returned from study abroad experiences in English-dominant contexts. Song examines the ways in which teachers' emotional lives are constitutive of their identities, particularly focusing on vulnerability and the “emotional rules” tacitly enforced in schools that limit teachers' ability to acknowledge their anxiety and insecurity. By positioning emotionality as the outcome of social forces rather than produced solely within an individual, and identities as shaped by emotions, Song joins other TESOL theorists (Benesch, 2012; Ben Said, 2015; Motha & Lin, 2014) in carving out a solid space for considering emotionality within theorization of LTI. Song places emotion at the center of earlier questioning about identity performance, asking how idealized constructions of teachers' linguistic identities serve to shape teachers' emotional responses to their work. A focus on the connections between teachers' identities and their environments is particularly highlighted in this special issue. For instance, we see the importance of supporting a specific awareness of the ways in which teachers' environments engender teachers' identities, sense of power, and resilience in order to open up possibilities for teachers to negotiate ecological constraints and affordances (Emily Edwards and Anne Burns). We are encouraged to reconceptualize our ideas about agentive action, rethinking the core notion of a job by taking a job-crafting perspective on teacher identity—that is, supporting teachers as they actively craft the goals, meaning, and content of their work in relation to their identities, specifically their personal beliefs, interpersonal power dynamics, and institutional context (Mari Haneda and Brandon Sherman). A focus on the material dimensions of teaching and emplaced identities allows us to think differently about the processes that define teacher identity—what teachers do with their bodies or who they are in a physical sense, and how the places, objects, and materials they come into contact with are used to make them teachers and to construct their identities as teachers (Curt Porter and Shannon Tanghe). Prescriptions for teacher identity also emerge from documents describing requirements for the accreditation processes, which frequently cite advocacy as a desirable practice. Previous work has underscored the importance of teachers being supported in developing identities as advocates (Tellez & Varghese, 2013; Varghese, 2006), raising the question of what advocacy can mean and how institutional practices can push teachers to inadvertently relinquish agency in shaping their identities of advocacy. Reflecting within this theoretical terrain, Brian Morgan problematizes messages telegraphed within a set of policy documents used in provincial accreditation, revealing to us how these documents can manufacture the domestication of dissent, constructing teacher identities of advocacy by permitting or even appearing to promote insignificant “gestures” of dissent while actually furthering a neoliberal agenda. Throughout the pieces in this special issue, we see work that extends the field's theoretical engagement of LTI in unexpected and creative ways, by pushing through a wide, rich, and sometimes unexpected array of theoretical boundaries. In this special issue, authors have utilized, adapted, and created a variety of research methodologies and analytical tools in pursuit of a better understanding of language teacher identities. Expansion and revision of our understanding of LTI is matched by concomitant adaptation of the tools researchers of language teacher identity might employ in their work. A common thread in much of the work featured in this issue, for example, is an imperative for our field to embrace and explore the complexities of teacher identity and see through overly simplistic notions of identity such as the all-too-common dichotomy of (non)nativeness. This thread, among others, comes from and calls for new, borrowed, or adapted research methodologies. In this section, we take a closer look at the research methods and analytical tools used by our contributors to uncover finer nuance in identity construction and open new avenues for theorizing about language teacher identities. Metacommentary, participants' talk about their own linguistic identity, is used by Aneja in this issue to build narrative portraits of four preservice language teachers' identities. By attending to how the teachers themselves talked about and labeled their linguistic identities, rather than fitting the teachers into a priori categories such as native-English-speaking or nonnative-English-speaking teachers, Aneja conveys the dynamic and agentive nature of teacher identity. Analysis of participants' metacommentary exposed the performative aspects of their identities. “[I]ndividuals are not native or nonnative speakers per se, but rather are (non)native speakered with respect to different characteristics, through different institutional mechanisms, individual performances, and social negotiations” (Aneja, 2016, this issue, p. 576). Aneja's metacommentary data collection tool prized teachers' own words in analysis of their identity construction, offering insight into the push and pull of identity work from participants' perspectives and in participants' own words. Narrative knowledging through short story analysis, employed by Barkhuizen in his longitudinal study of the English teacher Sela, also foregrounds teacher participants' own telling of their identities. Barkhuizen and Sela interactively co-constructed her narrative of teacher identity development by looking back on Sela's imagined teacher identity at the outset of her career. From a lengthy interview with Sela nearly a decade later, Barkhuizen pulled short stories, which are cohesive stories or anecdotes taken from a large text, in this case from the interview transcript. After presenting the short story, Barkhuizen provided interpretation and analysis of the story, and then invited Sela to respond to both the short story and Barkhuizen's analysis. Sela's response was included in the short story presentation. Short story analysis “serves as a heuristic for the systematic, thematic analysis of the content and context of narrative data …[which] explicitly directs analysts to focus on specific content dimensions and scales of context during the process of analysis” (Barkhuizen, 2016, this issue, p. 661). In order to analyze Sela's narrative thoroughly, Barkhuizen developed the analytical tool of story, Story, STORY, where each iteration of story represents one of three interconnecting spheres at play in teachers' lives: personal (story), interpersonal (Story), and wider community (STORY). The story, Story, STORY analytic also highlights the decreasing power of teachers' agency from story, where agency is generally strongest, to STORY, where it is generally weakest. Much research into language teacher identities has explored minoritized/marginalized teacher identities. But, what about privileged teacher identities and the researching of those identities? Roslyn Appleby's exploration of white, male, center-circle English-speaking teachers' identities in Japan generated ethical dilemmas for the researcher. In her study, Appleby found that language teachers with personal and professional privilege (linguistic, racial, and gender privilege) in the Japanese EFL context did, in fact, perceive some of their privilege. However, participants also perceived themselves to be marginalized by some of those same identity markers (e.g., being non-Japanese) or by the low status of English teachers in general, and frustration over this marginalization eclipsed their view on the privilege that precipitated their employment. Appleby's study not only adds nuance to our conceptualization of teacher identities as shifting continua (rather than a dichotomy) of privilege and marginalization, but also uncovers the micro-ethical dilemmas of researching privilege that are heretofore rarely addressed in language teacher identity research. “We might ask how the researcher can respect and protect the interests of the individual participants and, at the same time, be frank in our reporting to the academic community on critical findings that may cast the participant/s in a poor light” (Appleby, 2016, this issue, p. 760). Toward answering this question, Appleby offers researchers some guiding thoughts for researching privilege in language teacher identity. The LTI research in this special issue is often overtly concerned with participant control over and participation in the research process itself. We see this is Barkhuizen and Sela's co-construction of Sela's narrative, and also the participant action research of Kasun and Saavedra's study of a decolonizing teacher education program. This concern for participant collaboration in LTI research follows Motha's (2009) privileging of data she gathered during afternoon teas with her participants (where four new ESL teachers told their stories to one another) over observational data of the participants. “For me, the afternoon teas were a marvelous educational research tool because they allowed teachers to be the authors of their own experiences, a departure from a format in which researchers wrote teachers' lives” (Motha, 2009, p. 108). In addition to making participants the co-authors of their own stories, such methods also hold the potential to open spaces for language teachers of privilege to recognize their privilege through, for example, a decolonizing study abroad program, as detailed by Kasun and Saavedra's eight white, female, center-circle English-speaking preservice teachers. Within this new framing of participants as co-constructors and researchers as (co)participants, Kasun and Saavedra find a promising path for language teachers of unearned privilege (e.g., linguistic and racial privilege) to actively engage in decolonizing pedagogy. And the role of the traditional researcher, that writer of other peoples' lives, similarly shifts to cotraveller in the exploration of language teacher identity. The last theme that deserves to be highlighted in this special issue is that of making LTI central in the creation of a language teacher education (LTE) program and the sets of experiences for student teachers and teacher candidates in such a program. Writing about teacher identity more generally, Beauchamp and Thomas (2009, p. 176) state that “gaining a more complex understanding of identity generally and teacher identity in particular could enhance the ways in which teacher education programs are conceived.” In the field of LTI, Varghese (2006) asks that professional development for bilingual teachers address and formulate what teachers should become rather than solely what they should know, and Kanno and Stuart (2011) “argue for the need to include a deeper understanding of L2 teacher identity development in the knowledge base of L2 teacher education” (p. 249). Although this seems to be a straightforward proposition to many, it is rare if not impossible to actually find a teacher education program, let alone a LTE program, that makes teacher identity its central organizing principle. And even if the production of a beginning language teacher through an engagement with teacher identity could be the end goal, what might that mean and what kinds of classes, structures, and experiences would serve that goal? One goal for an LTE program that engages with identity work could be to disrupt or at least question the identity categories that teacher candidates come with as well as in what ways such categories are privileged and/or marginalized. According to Miller (2009), one of the ways this can be done is through critical reflection, “which takes account of identity and related issues, of individuals in specific contexts, and of the role of discourse in shaping experience” (p. 178). Several of the articles in this special issue respond to this need, describing how existing relations of power and structures are created and sustained and how these power relations can be negotiated and potentially reconstructed. Critical teacher reflection has also been described by Pennycook (2004) as problematizing practice, that is, “turning a skeptical eye towards assumptions, ideas that have become ‘naturalized,’ notions that are no longer questioned” (p. 799). In doing so, the authors force us to confront what is meant in TESOL research and practice by privileged identities such as native English speaker, teacher, white, or male as well as our understanding of categories such as empowerment and resistance. Kasun and Saavedra's article actually invites us into a language teacher education program where critical reflection is used to gently challenge eight U.S.-based ESL teacher candidates' understandings of their whiteness and shift their perspectives, if not their worldviews. The student teachers are asked to engage with indigenous ways of knowing, showing how such knowing forged cracks between worlds (Anzaldúa, 2002) that resulted in the participants rethinking their teacher identities as White, North American, and English-dominant in local and global contexts. These categories, especially in terms of binaries, are also partly questioned in the teacher education program in which the four candidates that are the focus of Aneja's article, and, in engaging with the experiences of Song's teachers, it is difficult not to wish that they could have had such experiences in their LTE programs where not only their pedagogical expertise and their multilingualism could be seen as resources (Pavlenko, 2003; Samimy & Brutt-Griffler, 1999), but that the very racialized, linguicized, and imperialistic assumptions of what was meant by a “good” English language teacher were challenged. Although an end goal for LTE that takes LTI more centrally into account may be to push back on a priori assumptions and categories that serve dominant modes of thinking and being, equally important for language teachers is developing a sense of advocacy and agency as they experience