call for proposals: TESOL Journal Special Issue 2019 An identity-oriented lens to TESOL teachers’ lives: From teacher education to classroom contexts

TESOL Journal Special Issue 2019

An identity-oriented lens to TESOL teachers’ lives: From teacher education to classroom contexts

Kristen Lindahl, University of Texas, San Antonio 

Bedrettin Yazan, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa

Call for Proposals

In the broader field of teaching and teacher education, teacher identity has long been established as a crucial component to both pre- and in-service teacher learning development, as well as integral to the ways they enact their professional practices in the classroom. Identity work, then, has become especially relevant to the TESOL field, as it pertains to educators in the various social, cultural, and political contexts of English language teaching worldwide. While extensive research has been conducted on language teacher identity as a research frame for understanding classroom phenomena, much less attention has been paid to the potential use of language teacher identity as a pedagogical innovation in teacher education and development.

Potential tensions may arise, though, with the use of language teacher identity work as a pedagogical innovation. While language teacher identity is framed as multiple, ever-changing, unstable, (often) contradictory, fragmented, and agentive, traditional methods of pre- and in-service teacher education tend to consist of isolated chunks of theoretical and practical knowledge delivered at various times during the career trajectory. Reconciling the dynamic nature of language teacher identity with the more static nature of teacher development has thus emerged as a crucial task for both TESOL practitioners and teacher educators. As such, additional investigation of the multiple identity options available to teachers, the ways in which they claim agency as TESOL professionals, and the pedagogical relevance of their identity negotiation to their students’ own identities as users of English is warranted.

Given the nuanced nature of teacher identity development, the present special issue seeks proposals of all submission categories highlighting perspectives that construct teacher identity as intersectional, multidimensional, and dynamic. The goal of the issue is to provide TESOL professionals with a lens to better understand teacher learning, professionalization, and ongoing negotiation / reconstruction of identities in multiple contexts of English language education across the world. The studies in this issue will explore how teacher identities may be used as explicit foci within the pedagogy of TESOL teacher education. Thereby, we specifically call for papers which explore identity-oriented practices in teacher education in relation to (non-)nativeness; intersectionality; critical language awareness; social justice; intercultural competence; self-narratives / autoethnographies; privilege and marginalization; positioning within communities; teacher agency, investment, and commitment; and teacher emotions, beliefs, and ideologies.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• The role of pre- and inservice teacher education practices in helping TESOL professionals develop intersectional identities (e.g., “NEST,” “NNEST,” monolingual, multilingual, translingual) within the dominant discourses of nativeness, nationality, gender, race, social class, religion, and community membership in their teaching contexts;
• The role of pre- and inservice teacher education practices in empowering TESOL professionals to assert agency over restrictive binary categorical identity options (e.g., “NEST” vs. ”NNEST”) with variable experiences of privilege and marginalization in glocal contexts of English language teaching;
• The role of pre- and inservice teacher education practices in providing discursive spaces in which TESOL professionals can cognitively and emotionally invest in agentive roles to negotiate their teacher identities;  
• The role of pre- and inservice teacher education practices in fostering identity options for critically reflexive teachers to use their identities as pedagogy that is invested in learners’ identity negotiation during the processes of language education;
• TESOL teacher educator identities as pedagogies of teacher education.

We are accepting submissions for feature articles and all other submission categories. Note that the acceptance of proposal does not guarantee publication. There will be a regular peer review process for all manuscripts submitted to the special issue.

Complete TESOL Journal author guidelines can be found at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/19493533/homepage/forauthors.html

Please submit your 200-300 word proposal to TJspecialissue2019@gmail.com  

Time Schedule

• Proposal submission due: September 15, 2018
• Notifications for inviting full articles: September 30, 2018
• Full manuscripts due: January 15, 2019