Losing Identity or Regaining Confidence? A Collaborative Autoethnography on Teachers' Self-Efficacy

Abstract

This collaborative autoethnography analyzes the role of self-efficacy within our teacher identity crisis. As English teachers in training, we have experienced situations inside and outside the classroom that motivated a professional identity crisis and led us questioning our efficacy as teachers. Through this study we explore the intricacies of our very own selves as prospective English teachers. We blended storytelling and analysis through a set of data generation procedures that included collaborative witnessing, written personal narratives and semi-structured interviews, which allowed us to co-construct our stories. Our findings reveal three main themes that display the roles of self-efficacy within the teacher identity crisis, its shapers, and an internal discomfort because of the other two themes. We also put in evidence that these three aspects do not have their implications on the crisis as isolated matters, but they are intertwined complementing each other. With our study we concluded that there are internal and external factors that influence the teacher identity crisis, weakening it at the same time it is regulated.