Uncovering Language Teacher Educators' Collective and Individual Identities in Times of Change: Engaging With the Affective Turn

Abstract

As the world experiences drastic revolutions in technology usage, hyperconnectivity, and extreme political orientations, critical reflexivity in teacher education appears more crucial than ever. Particularly, it is extremely relevant to explore the ways in which teacher educators' individual identities intertwine with collective identities where these revolutions add up to an uneven world—a world with systemic and enduring issues like socioeconomic inequality, violence, and despair. In this article, we uncover three ways through which we constitute our collective and individual identities. They include: (1) How we position ourselves concerning the role of privilege and power dynamics in our countries and throughout our careers; (2) how we have transformed our own teaching practices to accommodate or engage in culturally responsive curricula and educational proposals; and (3) how we have engaged in politically relevant activities to counteract hegemonic practices concerning language education and biases. Broadly informed by the affective turn in language education, our study posits that belonging to a collective is the profound realization that knowing who you are individually contributes to self-reflection, self-critique, identification, and understanding the purpose and challenges of a group. Thus, our study is conceptually nested in well-being and positive psychology. The affective turn highlights the pivotal role of emotions in identity construction and the dynamic interplay between teacher educator identity and their praxis. To capture the complexities and the nuanced nature of our experiences and their implications, we adopt a collaborative analytic autoethnographic approach. Analytic autoethnography is an artistic demonstration that allows us to reflect on how we came to know, name, and interpret our personal and cultural experiences. Its power rests on its potential to help us leverage our experiences to engage ourselves, others, culture(s), politics, and social research to confront the many tensions between ourselves and the changes taking place around us. As such, our endeavor will highlight the value of understanding the intricacies that arise when language teacher educators grapple with individual and collective identities to transform conventional ways of teaching into pluralistic, purposeful, and inclusive educational spaces.