Tensions in an Identity-Oriented Language Teaching Practicum: A Dialogic Approach

Abstract

In this study, we examine how teacher candidates navigate the tensions in their identity work as they complete the activities in the TESOL practicum course in Turkiye. Using the Bakhtinian approach to teacher identity, we conceptually maintain that identity work inevitably involves tensions that teachers encounter during their professional lives. We use a qualitative case study design to explore how two teacher candidates (Erdem and Murat) experience and understand identity tensions through dialogic engagement in an identity-oriented practicum course. We collected data from a series of identity-oriented activities that promote a dialogic space for teacher candidates to negotiate and enact their identities. We found that although their attempts to deal with the tensions varied, both teacher candidates made use of the self and community dialogues constructed through identity-oriented teacher learning activities. Pushing back at authoritative discourses of language teaching prevailing in the university program and the practicum school, they engaged in identity work by constructing their internally persuasive discourses which guided their practice. Facing the contextual demands, Erdem raised doubts about his ideal way of teaching he tried out in the practicum, whereas Murat went beyond the past and the present by foregrounding his imagined identity which served as a liberating aspiration.

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