Raising the Curtain: Positioning and Identity Construction in Online Language Teacher Education

Abstract

More fully online MA TESOL programs are offered now than ever (England, 2012; Hall & Knox, 2009; Murray, 2013; Murray & Christison, 2017), resulting in an unprecedented number of teachers who have received or are receiving their education online. Such a major shift in the educational context requires a closer look in terms of professional growth, social interaction, professional identity development, and teacher learning. To this end, given the importance of identity development in teacher education programs (e.g., Kanno & Stuart, 2011; Kayi-Aydar, 2015), this qualitative study explored how teacher candidates construct and perform their identities as teachers in fully online educational settings. Using De Costa and Norton’s (2017) multilevel framework for analyzing language teacher identity and viewing identity through a poststructural lens (e.g., Pavlenko, 2003; Morgan, 2004), I explored the positioning processes of three instructors and eight teacher candidates in a fully online MA TESOL program over the course of five months and multiple classes. To adapt to the multimodal digital environment, I combined positioning theory (Davies & Harré, 1990; Harré & van Langenhove, 1999) with social semiotics (Hodge & Kress, 1988; Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001) and an ethnographic approach (Blommaert & Jie, 2010; Beach, Bagley, & Marques da Silva, 2018), which offered new insights into the ways that the context and design of the online course site powerfully shape the positioning processes that occur. Institutional and instructor positioning via course design were found to strongly influence teacher candidate identity construction and community development. Teacher candidates reported the need for discursive modeling and personalized content creation by instructors and private, non-evaluated spaces for informal, off-task talk. In addition, distinctions between teacher candidates’ positions enacted in course postings and interviews, as well as the ways these positions sedimented over time, highlight the need for future multicontextual exploration of online identity construction. The multimodal positioning analysis developed and applied in this study emerged as a promising way to explore interactions in online settings in more nuanced detail.