Understanding teachers’ professional identities and their development is key to unpacking teachers’ professional lives, the quality of their instruction, their motivation and commitment to teach, and their career decision-making. This book features a number of scholars from around the world who represent a variety of disciplines, scientific paradigms, and inquiry methods in researching teacher identity. By bringing these chapters together, this volume initiates active scholarly conversations and extends the boundaries of teacher identity research and practice. This collection of chapters provides significant insight into teacher identity and will be essential reading for pre-service and in-service teachers, teacher educators, school administrators, professional developers, and policy makers at various levels.

Understanding Teacher Identity: The Complexities of Forming an Identity as Professional Teacher introduces the reader to a collection of research-based works by authors that represent current research concerning the complexities of teacher identity and the role of teacher preparation programs in shaping the identity of teachers. Important to teacher preparation, as a profession, is a realization that the psychological, philosophical, theoretical, and pedagogical underpinnings of teacher identity have critical importance in shaping who the teacher is, and will continue to become in his/her practice. Teacher identity is an instrumental factor in teachers’ and the students’ success. Chapter One opens the book with a focus on the development of teacher identity, providing an introduction to the book and an understanding of the growing importance of identity in becoming a teacher. Chapters Two–Nine present field-based research that examines the complexities of teacher identity in teacher preparation and the importance of teacher identity in the teaching and learning experiences of the classroom. Finally, Chapter Ten presents an epilogue focusing on teacher identity and the importance, as teacher educators and practitioners, of making sense of who we are and how identity plays a critical role in the preparation and practice of teachers.

Before today’s teachers are ready to instruct the intellectual leaders of tomorrow, they must first be trained themselves. Every teacher experiences an induction process that can make their early years as an educator nerve-racking. Focusing on this period of time in a teacher’s career can lead to greater teacher retention and success. Examining the Teacher Induction Process in Contemporary Education Systems addresses the construct of teacher induction through theoretical and empirical research. It also provides an in-depth conceptualization of being a novice teacher through micro-political realities of teaching in different geographical and cultural regions. While highlighting topics including adaptation challenges, mentor-mentee interaction, and teacher retention, this book is ideally designed for school administrators, early career teachers, educational researchers, educational professionals, and academicians seeking current research on early career educator adaptation and practices.

This book presents the latest research on understanding language teacher identity and development for both novice and experienced researchers and educators, and introduces non-experts in language teacher education to key topics in teacher identity research. It covers a wide range of backgrounds, themes, and subjects pertaining to language teacher identity and development. Some of these include the effects of apprenticeship in doctoral training on novice teacher identity; the impacts of mid-career redundancy on the professional identities of teachers; challenges faced by teachers in the construction of their professional identities; the emerging professional identity of pre-service teachers; teacher identity development of beginning teachers; the role of emotions in the professional identities of non-native English speaking teachers; the negotiation of professional identities by female academics. Advances and Current Trends in Language Teacher Identity Research will appeal to academics in ELT/TESOL/applied linguistics. It will also be useful to those who are non-experts in language teacher education, yet still need to know about theories and recent advances in the area due to varying reasons including their affiliation to a teacher training institute; needs to participate in projects on language teacher education; and teaching a course for pre-service and in-service language teachers.

Reflections on Language Teacher Identity Research is the first book to present understandings of language teacher identity (LTI) from a broad range of research fields. Drawing on their personal research experience, 41 contributors locate LTI within their area of expertise by considering their conceptual understanding of LTI and the methodological approaches used to investigate it. The chapters are narrative in nature and take the form of guided reflections within a common chapter structure, with authors embedding their discussions within biographical accounts of their professional lives and research work. Authors weave discussions of LTI into their own research biographies, employing a personal reflective style. This book also looks to future directions in LTI research, with suggestions for research topics and methodological approaches. This is an ideal resource for students and researchers interested in language teacher identity as well as language teaching and research more generally.

Addresses the various types of discourse within the process of professional identity development. This work emphasizes that the intersection of the personal and professional in teacher identity formation is more complex, and accents the need for teacher educators to take steps to facilitate such integration.

The author examines who language teacher educators are in the field of language teaching and learning. This includes a description of the different types of language teacher educators working in a range of professional and institutional contexts, an analysis of the reflections of a group of experienced English teacher educators working in Colombia and enrolled in a doctoral program to continue their professional development, and an exposition of the work that language teacher educators do, particularly in the domains of pedagogy, research, and service and leadership (institutional and community). All of this is done with the aim of understanding the identities that language teacher educators negotiate and are ascribed in their working contexts. The author emphasizes the need for research to pay attention to the lives and work of language teacher educators, and offers forty research questions as an indication of possible future research directions.

This edited volume, envisioned through a postmodern and poststructural lens, represents an effort to destabilize the normalized “assumption” in the discursive field of English language teaching (ELT) (Pennycook, 2007), critically-oriented and otherwise, that identity, experience, privilege-marginalization, (in)equity, and interaction, can and should be apprehended and attended to via categories embedded within binaries (e.g., NS/NNS; NEST/NNEST). The volume provides space for authors and readers alike to explore fluidly critical-practical approaches to identity, experience, (in)equity, and interaction envisioned through and beyond binaries, and to examine the implications such approaches hold for attending to the contextual complexity of identity and interaction, in and beyond the classroom. The volume additionally serves to prompt criticality in ELT towards reflexivity, conceptual clarity and congruence, and dialogue.

This book addressed teachers’ necessity to be able to respond to the new needs and demands caused by an ever-evolving educational system, as recognized in the national and international policy and research literature. The book proposes an analysis of the features that shape the journey of the teacher profession and professionalism, a journey which needs to be collaborative, agentive and dialogical: • Collaborative in changing the personal and professional teacher development from an individual and solitude process toward a joint discovery with mutual enrichment and shared directionality; • Agentive in the ability to activate internal and external resources for an individual, productive and communicative transformation; • Dialogical in the ability to enrich the personal narrative with the voices of others and opening spaces for dialogue and listening. The seven chapters are structured in a way that gives flow and pace to the unfolding story of the developing teacher identity and is informed by a whole range of research and literature. This book serves as a reference point for teacher-students, in-service teachers and teacher educators who are interested in their professional development and looking for new perspectives. It also offers some helpful insights for administrators who need to make ICT decisions on course development in teacher education.

This volume draws on empirical evidence to explore the interplay between language teacher identity (LTI) and professional learning and instruction in the field of TESOL. In doing so, it makes a unique contribution to the field of language teacher education. By reconceptualizing teacher education, teaching, and ongoing teacher learning as a continuous, context-bound process of identity work, Language Teacher Identity in TESOL discusses how teacher identity serves as a framework for classroom practice, professional, and personal growth. Divided into five sections, the text explores key themes including narratives and writing; multimodal spaces; race, ethnicity, and language; teacher emotions; and teacher educator-researcher practices. The 15 chapters offer insight into the experiences of preservice teachers, in-service teachers, and teacher educators in global TESOL contexts including Canada, Japan, Korea, Norway, Sri Lanka, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This text will be an ideal resource for researchers, academics, and scholars interested in furthering their knowledge of concepts grounding LTI, as well as teachers and teacher educators seeking to implement identity-oriented approaches in their own pedagogical practices.