Profundizando en las identidades de los maestros de inglés colombianos desde sus voces en tiempos neoliberales: Un estudio narrativo

Abstract

This paper centers on a narrative study that delved into English language teachers’ voices in regard to their verbalized identity (re)construction when engaged in a reflexive and dialogical space in which storytelling was employed. This narrative study emerged from problematizing the principles, underpinning institutes for work and human development, which are rooted in the current national bilingual program. As a result, the adopted and adapted neoliberal discourses of the above-mentioned program and the legal measurements that strengthen them, allowed me to consider English language teachers have something to say and do about themselves in regard to ideologically-laden discourses fostered by the national bilingual program that are materialized at a private language institute in Bogotá. This, in turn, guided me to invite English language teachers to participate in a reflexive and dialogical space with the purpose of collecting their stories in order to account for the (re)construction of their identities through their own voices. EL teachers’ stories were collected through narrative interviews that were transcribed and analyzed from a socio-critical perspective using short story analysis (Barkhuizen, 2016). Findings suggest that, as opposed to powerful circulating discourses that have positioned EL teachers as emotionless, uncritical, and docile non-human beings that perpetuate neoliberal agendas, they claim their identity as human educators who attempt to contest a dehumanizing model between vertical and horizontal tensions with a humanistic dimensional agenda.