Teachers’ professional identity: Contributions of a critical EFL teacher education course in Iran

Abstract

This paper is a report on contributions of a critical EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher education course to Iranian teachers’ professional identity reconstruction.22My preference for the word reconstruction rather than construction is inspired by the constructivist belief that student teachers, pre-service and in-service, bring prior experiences and personal values and beliefs to teacher education programs, and, thus, their professional identities have already been partly constructed. Pre-course and post-course interviews with seven teachers, their reflective journals, class discussions, and the teacher educator’s reflective journals were analyzed as guided by grounded theory. Three major shifts were observed in their professional identities: from conformity to and romanticization of dominant ideologies to critical autonomy, from no orientation or an instrumentalist orientation to a critical/transformative orientation of teaching, and from a linguistic and technical view to an educational view of second language education.