I’ve been invited to write a book chapter on the development of my professional identity. This is not area in which I’m specializing but given my relatively complex (and hopefully interesting) cultural and linguistic background, I gladly accepted the invitation. The title of the chapter is From ESL Student to Teacher Educator: Reflections on Transnational and Transcultural Professional Identity Development. Having crossed national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries on several occasions, the idea is to narrate and reflect on my journey from initially being an English language learner to becoming a teacher educator and, at the same time, to make sense of my professional identity construction with the goal of contributing to the understanding of effective language learning, pedagogy, and teacher education. To keep things manageable (and within the given word limit), I explore three specific time periods that have had a profound impact on my developing professional identity from a number of perspectives and lenses, including key events, people, and formative experiences: (1) studying ESL in New Zealand, (2) learning to teach English in Japan, and (3) being a graduate student in Canada. The second part of the chapter then brings everything together and discusses implications for teachers and teacher educators.
I’ve just completed a first full draft and there’s still a lot of editing left to do, but I really enjoy working on this chapter. It gives me the opportunity to think about my 20-year journey and who and what influenced me along the way. It also allows me to reflect on who I am as an educator and makes me examine my positionality in English language teaching and Applied Linguistics while connecting the narrative to current literature and research on identity formation. This has been an enriching process which has led me to a renewed realization that being an educator is a privilege and that the process of becoming one is not stale or linear but dynamic and complex. I hope that future readers will find the chapter useful. If it inspires a few educators to engage in some form of reflective writing to better understand themselves and improve their pedagogy, I’ve done my job.
0 Comments
|
Author
I am a Senior Lecturer in TESOL at the University of Wollongong in Australia. This blog is a reflection of my journey as a researcher, L2 teacher educator, and language teacher. Archives
June 2021
|