Convertirse en profesores-investigadores: identidades de los profesores de inglés en un programa de maestría

Abstract

This study sought to understand the ways teachers shape and negotiate their identities as teacher-researchers at a graduate program in a public university. This resulted from my interest to explore the intricate paths teachers traverse to become teacher-researchers and to problematize the growing interest in teacher research in the framework of a neoliberal panorama. The study adopted a poststructuralist perspective on identity that revolves around the works of Barkhuizen (2021), Norton & Early (2011), and Rudolph et al. (2018) to understand the contingent, ongoing, fluid, and ever-changing nature of identities present in teachers’ life stories. In the same vein, this perspective opened the scope to analyze external and internal elements (Borg, 2010; Edwards & Burns, 2016) intersecting teachers’ identities while they learn about research (engagement with) and conduct research (engagement in) (Xu, 2014). Through a narrative lens, this study analyzed nine teachers’ meaning of their lived experiences while storying their trajectory in being and becoming teacher-researchers. Findings revealed that teachers construct initial ways of being and becoming while they learn about research and conduct their research agendas. In this process, the available discourses, practices, and methodologies shape initial ways of being. Similarly, the sociocultural contexts and communities of practice teachers inhabit, and their inner capacities afford or constrain the constructions of their identities. Nevertheless, teacher-researcher identities do not lie fixed or complete but are fluid and ongoing as teachers deconstruct their past experiences in the master’s program. At this point, teachers experience epistemic breaks that allow them to (re)construct renewed ways of being teacher-researchers. In the end, their identities are constantly shaped in a pull-and-push relationship with their past experiences, their present constructions, and their imagined prospections.