Inclusion or exclusion?: A narrative inquiry of a language teacher’s identity experience in the ‘new work order’ of competing pedagogies

Abstract

This paper investigates how an EFL teacher negotiates her identity to adapt to the ‘new work order’ in an English education department at a university in China. From a narrative inquiry perspective, it aims to illuminate the complexity of teacher identity in the context of a reform where teachers must reconcile conflicting selves in order to contend with a workplace in which liberal and traditional pedagogies coexist. The findings show that teachers need to shift their identities to survive change. Exclusion from the workplace community of practice can be seen as an alternative form of participation in the reform practices.

Introduction

Along with the rapid development of globalization, wide-ranging educational reforms have been taking place in many countries in the developing world. A common situation that characterizes these reforms is that pedagogies from the west are imported and adopted, but in actual implementation, these foreign theories and practices are often met with resistance from the local community. In the transitional period, therefore, it is common to see the local and imported pedagogical systems operating simultaneously, creating a ‘new work order’ (Gee & Lankshear, 1995) in the workplace. This phenomenon, which is referred to as ‘one community, two systems (Liu & Fisher, 2010, p. 180) in this paper, highlights a common problem that transcends national boundaries and has sparked global concerns from researchers who face the same problem in different nations such as Pakistan (Shamim, 1996), Thailand (Segovia & Hardison, 2008) and United Arab Emirates (Clarke, 2008). The present research is situated within such “a world turn” in education (Hamilton & Clandinin, 2010, p. 1128), featuring an English language teaching (ELT) reform in a university department in China. The reform advocated a participation-based model of language teaching, emphasizing meaning in language communication, student-centeredness and an interactive way of teaching. This new system operated parallel with the traditional transmission-based system in that department which focuses on language grammar, textbooks and a teacher-fronted way of teaching (see also Bernstein, 1996, Clarke, 2008). The situation of ‘one community, two systems’ inevitably creates new challenges for teachers² in the workplace. To understand how teachers deal with these new challenges, it is argued, we need to examine how they “form sense of themselves – identities – in relation to ways of inhabiting roles, positions, and cultural imaginaries that matter to them” (Holland & Lachicotte, 2007, p. 103).

In the social sciences, there has been revived interest in the experience of the self in cultural, historical and political contexts, and identity has become a common concept for investigation in research literature in recent years (Block, 2007). In education, the concept of teachers’ identity first emerged in the 1980s (e.g. Cherryholmes, 1988) as an analytic notion for studying teaching and teacher education. In general education, research on teachers’ identity has been fruitful, producing a wide range of research foci and methodological approaches (see review, Beauchamp and Thomas, 2009, Beijaard et al., 2004). In TESOL, however, the research on language teachers’ identity has not received much attention until recently (e.g. Clarke, 2009, Tsui, 2007). This paper, which looks at how an EFL teacher named Hui (a pseudonym) negotiates her identity to adapt to the ‘new work order’ of competing pedagogies in a university department in China, seeks to contribute to this small body of research. From a narrative inquiry perspective, it aims to illuminate the complexity of teacher identity in the reform context where teachers must reconcile conflicting selves in order to contend with a workplace in which liberal and traditional pedagogies coexist.