The dialogical self in becoming a teacher : Chinese volunteers' experiences of enacting and constructing a teacher identity in discourse and practice

Abstract

In the 21st century, the internationalisation of education, expansion of China, increasing Chinese student mobility and world-wide interest in Mandarin constitute a fertile landscape for the development of international partnerships to promote the teaching and learning of the Chinese language and culture. Partnerships that incorporate student volunteer programs have the potential to increase the supply of suitable candidates for initial teacher education as Chinese language teachers in countries such as Australia. The investigation of teacher identity within international student volunteer programs is an unexplored area of research, which this study addressed. This research was a case study investigating teacher identity through the experiences of 15 international higher degree research students participating in a NSW-China partnership implemented through a model of Research Oriented School Engaged Teacher Education (ROSETE), the case. ROSETE required these students from mainland China to volunteer in primary and secondary schools to support the teaching and learning of Chinese (Mandarin) language and culture. Teacher identity, the theoretical framework for this case study, was informed by concepts of becoming and I-positions, the latter a contribution of Dialogical Self Theory (DST) (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010). The focus of investigation was on how the participants enacted and constructed a teacher identity through weekly engagement in Australian schools. Data collected through semi-structured interviews were interrogated using Gee's (2011, 2014a) approach to descriptive discourse analysis as well as the coding and identification of categories and themes. This study found that participants engaged in a dialogical process of continuously positioning and repositioning different I-positions, or voices within the self (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010) in response to their emotional states, school contexts and relationships with significant others. Enacting and constructing a teacher identity emerged as an interwoven, inseparable element of participants' experiences as becoming teachers, involving discourse and practice. They used language to enact multiple I-positions as a kaleidoscopic experience particular to each individual. Their accounts of practice illuminated their teacher identity construction as a process of learning how to teach in Australia, realised through skills development, increasing confidence and exercise of agency. A professional learning network, theorised using Wenger's (1998) notion of a community of practice, provided support and dialogical relationships that enabled participants to identify with the local community of teachers. Participants responded to new, unfamiliar and confusing educational contexts in Australian schools by mobilising their personal-cultural and linguistic histories to achieve coherence in their identity experiences. Moreover, their discourse emerged as a powerful, agentive learning process through which cognitive and cultural dissonance between past and present experiences and understandings of education were confronted and understandings transformed. This study makes important contributions to knowledge about the dynamic and idiosyncratic processes that becoming teachers experience within the context of innovative models of international teacher education. The in-depth analysis of teacher identity in the lived experiences of ROSETE participants provides rich context-dependent knowledge to underscore the value of the ROSETE Model as a preliminary phase of initial teacher education in Australia. Furthermore the findings illuminate the potential contribution of international partnership programs to expanding the supply of suitable teachers of Chinese (Mandarin).

Date of Award	2018
Original language	English