Work

Two TESOL Teacher Educators' Identity Work Through Transnational Collaboration to Pedagogize Identity in a Practicum Course

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: In our study, we used self‐study of teacher education practices (S‐STEP), which helps teacher educators examine dimensions of their practice and offers implications to improve how they teach teachers in their professional context. Our study addressed this research question: How did we engage in identity work through transnational collaboration to design a new identity‐oriented TESOL practicum course during the global pandemic? We drew on the data we generated in the fall semester of the 2020–2021 academic year, which was a time of absolute flux and precarity under the shadow of the global pandemic. Our data consisted of meeting recordings, seven bi‐weekly reflective memos, and artifacts (i.e., identity‐oriented activities, syllabi, and institutional documents). We used Bourdieu's (1977) Theory of Practice to make sense of our practice and identity work in this transnational collaboration. Our findings demonstrated that (1) the pandemic urged us to renegotiate our pedagogic habitus during the implementation of an identity‐oriented TESOL practicum; (2) our practice involved navigating identity tensions that emerged in the time of flux, and those tensions mostly resided at the interface of our habitus and the field. Those findings offer implications for colleagues who plan to incorporate identity as an explicit goal in teacher education or want to engage in similar S‐STEP in their professional contexts.

Source: TESOL Quarterly

DOI: 10.1002/tesq.70000

Authors: Özgehan Uştuk, Bedrettin Yazan

Institutions: Hong Kong Polytechnic University, The University of Texas at San Antonio

Language: English

Topic: Teacher Education and Leadership Studies

Subfield: Education

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Quality education

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $2,850