Language Teacher Identity and Emotions in a Duoethnographic Narrative: The Perspective of Teacher, Parent, and Teacher Educator

Abstract

Teacher identity building rather than learning teaching in terms of skills and subsystems has recently been acknowledged as a priority in future teacher preparation. Several teacher identity models have been offered, including the 3A Language Teacher Identity Framework (3ALTIF) (Werbińska, 2017a) in which teacher identity comprises affiliation (teachers’ willingness to teach), attachment (teachers’ beliefs related to their teaching) and autonomy (teachers’ agentive, reflective, and resilient powers). With hindsight, it seems that the 3ALTIF, which drew on other identity models available at the time of its conception, does not address the affective side of language teacher identity explicitly enough and therefore can hardly embrace the uniqueness of this profession. That is why we decided to explore the issue of emotions more deeply and conduct a lengthy duoethnographic narrative to consider the 3ALTIF’s ‘missing’ component for the future ‘improvement’ of the 3ALTIF. Duoethnography was chosen as a qualitative research method thanks to its novelty, its suitability for investigating identity issues and the opportunity it provides for us to explain and express ourselves. In our duoethnographic dialogues we focused on our own emotions from three perspectives: former school language teachers, language teachers as parents, and language teacher educators, all of which are the roles we have played. The findings reveal our experience of emotions that once affected us and also suggest that emotions are not only psychological constructs but have social dimensions as well.