Going beyond boundaries: A collaborative autoethnographic study of three teachers’ negotiation of cognitive/emotional dissonances

Abstract

Teachers undergo various cognitive/emotional dissonances along their professional journeys. These dissonances may provide growth points for teachers to develop further if they receive responsive mediation, which guides them toward the higher levels of professional development. Thus, understanding how these dissonances interact with contexts along the axis of time and place plays an important role in charting teachers’ developmental trajectories and providing relevant mediation for them. Using collaborative autoethnography (CAE), this study delves into the cognitive/emotional dissonances of three teachers at different career stages across various geographic locations, and investigates what institutional, geographical, or socioeconomic factors facilitate or impede their efforts to resolve these dissonances. A thematic analysis of biweekly individual multimodal narratives and meeting transcripts over 16 months revealed three strands of cognitive-emotional dissonances involved in teaching practices, transnational movement, and institutional and socioeconomic precarity. The present inquiry provides three important lessons regarding the ways in which teachers in liminal spaces can receive relevant responsive mediations. First, it is necessary to build a network of teachers that goes beyond their immediate institutional environment. Second, teacher identity development needs to be understood as a dynamic nexus of domain-specific phenomena and a whole person enterprise encompassing multiple sociocultural dimensions along their lifelong journey. Third, CAE itself can be a way of (re)connecting with fellow teachers and function as a safe place for addressing contingent cognitive/emotional dissonances and encouraging mutual growth. This suggests that the mediation-enabling, space-making power of CAE needs to be examined further in various contexts, such as graduate training or professional development programs.