Identity transformation among returnee language teachers in China : a multidimensional analysis of the transformative process

Abstract

Identity transformation has emerged as an increasingly significant research focus in the field of teacher education, including considerations relating to who teachers are and what they can/should do in a particular educational context. The sociocultural epistemology (Freeman & Johnson, 1998) proposes to study teachers as learners who develop their pedagogical knowledge through their teaching processes that are interdependent with the school context. At the background of education globalization and multilingualism, more language teachers are involved in overseas education and then work as returnee or mobile teachers. A study on these particular participants hopes to expand the intellectual space of teacher identity research. With social-ecology as the overarching framework, this research explores complexity in identity transformation of returnee language teachers (RLTs) as a form of organic change in an educational ecology. It addresses three interrelated agendas: 1) identity as an intra-personal perception; 2) identity transformation as a complex process embedded in spatial-temporal evolution; and 3) identity transformation as an active process of the ongoing interrelationship between human agency and the surrounding context. This thesis depicts RLTs as learners seeking to understand their identity as teachers within their teaching community. Three social learning theories are employed to analyse these dimensions. In addition, complexity theory is employed as the overarching theoretical framework governing the methodologies, data collection and analysis, and categorisation and interpretation of findings. As an ethnographic narrative inquiry, this cross-case qualitative research studied 17 returnees following their participation in an Australia-China language teacher education program. They are all teaching Chinese or English language in different institutions and were recruited using snowball sampling. Three categories of data were collected: purposive conversational interviews; school observations during interviews; and relevant documents including participants' theses and related educational policies from public media and websites. The multi-theoretical and multi-dimensional research findings relating to RLTs' identity transformation led to a holistic reinterpretation, from the perspective of complexity theory. The findings demonstrate that RLTs' identity transformation embodies features of a complex system: dynamic, emergent, self-organising, nonlinear, self-similar, and interdependent.

Date of Award	2021
Original language	English