Incorporating teacher emotions and identity in teacher education practices: affordances of critical autoethnographic narrative

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recent research has studied teacher emotions vis-à-vis teachers’ learning, practice, and identity development and called for teacher-learning practices to include an intentional focus on emotions. Responding to this call, I designed a teacher-learning activity called ‘critical autoethnographic narrative’ (CAN). I coached teacher candidates (TCs) to narrate and analyse their experiences with the use, learning, and teaching of languages in order to explore their own identity construction and corresponding emotional responses. In this study, I draw data from my CAN implementation in a Linguistics course with MATESOL students at a large southeast US university. I specifically analyse a TC’s (Rachel’s) case to explore how in the guided and iterative process of writing CAN, she made sense of teacher emotions in her storied experiences to understand her language teacher identity. I found that as Rachel moved forward in writing CAN, she began discussing her emotions and identity in relation to meso- and macro-level ideologies. Reflecting the iterative process of the CAN writing, she also went back to earlier emotional experiences and re-interpreted them with her developing teacher lens. The paper presents her emotions in learning and using languages, navigating the university institutional landscape, and teaching and learning to teach English.