Crossing the Imaginary Boundary of "Foreign" and "Native": An Autoethnographic Exploration of Foreign Language Teachers' Identity in the Teacher Learning Community

• In Event: The Power of Teacher Learning Community in Foreign Language Teaching: Collaboration, Reflection, and Teacher Identity

Abstract

Objective: Although the teacher learning community has received much interest as a mechanism for studying knowledge building, implementation, and teachers’ professional identity, little has been known about how the teachers’ identities are constructed within the community. The purpose of this study is to explore life histories (Gomez, Allen, & Black, 2007) of three foreign language teachers to understand how teacher identity constructions emerge, grow, and change over time and space. We focus specifically on how the teachers build identity through discourse while “engaging in characteristic ways of thinking, acting, interacting, valuing, feeling, and believing.” (Gee, 2011, p. 28).

Theoretical framework: The theoretical framework of the study is drawn from Bakhtin’s dialogism (1981) that highlights all discourses - literature, written and spoken languages, everyday talk, and minutes which are dialogically constructed and represent an amalgam of multiple voices. While sharing these multiple voices, teachers interact with others who come from different teaching backgrounds and continue to develop identities and voices that originate from teachers’ life histories including personal experiences (as language learners, students, friends and family members), transnational teaching experiences and membership in a variety of academic organizations. We additionally employ Gee’s concept of identity (Gee, 2000) as an analytic approach to explore how teachers’ nature-identity, institution-identity, discourse-identity, and affinity-identity are formed, sustained, and negotiated in the teacher learning community.

Methods: Transcripts of semi-constructed interviews and written data from online reflective journals were collected and coded with a priori codes (Stake, 1995) that represent childhood learning and schooling experiences, family history, teaching experiences, and interaction with students.

Results: Preliminary analysis of the data has uncovered three themes:
1. Teacher identity was discursively constructed through discourse of particular transnational teaching experiences between Korea and America. By collaboration and reflection in the teacher learning community, the teachers created as “affinity space” (Gee, 2004, p. 77) in terms of content (teaching Korean as a foreign language in the United States) and of how the teachers interact with that content, which is closely related to teacher identity construction.
2. The teachers’ institutional positions and positioning are deeply rooted in social and cultural contexts which led them to rethink of culture, power relations, and institutional issues in the college-level language program. These institutional perspectives consequently were mediated by intersectionality including race, class, gender, religion, and family backgrounds.
3. Discourses on where the teachers belong and who the teachers are led them to the very essence of
the Bakhtin’s dialogism through which they viewed our native language and culture as a relevant tool in the classroom not only for passing on our knowledge of the language and culture in which they use and live, but for inviting students to cross the imaginary boundary of “foreign” and “native.”

Significance: This study encourages a shift in the ways teachers discuss and design foreign language teaching with their students. This study provides teacher educators with a deeper understanding of the multiplicity of teachers’ voices that are in dialogue in becoming a foreign language teacher in a higher educational setting.

Author

• Jieun Kim, University of Wisconsin - Madison