Innovating My Thinking and Practices as a Language Teacher Educator Through My Work as a Researcher

Abstract

The innovation presented in this chapter represents how my research on language teacher identity using the concept of identity-in-activity transformed my instructional practices as a language teacher educator. I first describe two of Vygotsky’s (1987) concepts, everyday and academic concepts, that are crucial to my practices as a teacher educator and researcher. I demonstrate how my writing up of research on one teacher’s identity served as “narrative as externalization”, enabling me to use the academic concept of identity-in-activity as a psychological tool that informed the way I integrated teacher identity into my instructional practices. I then detail how identity-in-activity functions within my Vygotskian grounded theoretical approach to teacher education through a prototypical case of a teacher. I hope to demonstrate how by intentionally incorporating language teacher identity-in-activity into professional development practices, beginning teachers can use identity-in-activity as a psychological tool to articulate the teacher identity to which they aspire, develop instructional practices aligning with that identity, apprehend the discourses shaping their identity-in-activity, and thereby gain increasing control of their teaching worlds. I also hope this will contribute to language teacher educators’ ways of knowing by making what we do and why we do it explicit, as well as providing a window on the impact of what we do on teachers’ development.