Living and Teaching in Two Worlds: Professional Identity Development in Transnational Dual Language Immersion Teachers

Abstract

This study explores how transnational teachers working in dual language immersion schools in the United States negotiate their professional identity to pursue a career in teaching. Researchers pay attention to tensions between transnational teachers’ individual agency and the sociocultural influence of the workplace. An important issue is how chainging teacher’s professional identity impacts the ways in which they implement curriulum, particularly related to accountability. Framed by third space theory, we explore their heterogeneous stories and socio-culturally contextualized teaching experiences via a qualitative multiple case study. The three teachers wer all teaching Spanish or Chinese in urban public elementary schools in the Intermountain West region of the United States. Data sources include a semester long classroom observation, semi-structured teacher interviews, informal conversations with the teachers, teacher journal entries, and artifacts. Our results indicate that these teachers’ professional identity development processes were diverse, complex, and ongoing. All three displayed multicultural awareness regarding the codes of their new educational and cultural settings and exercised their agency through strong self-concept and frequent reflection within their situated contexts. Their prior cross-cultural teaching and schooling experiences served as a springboard that enabled them to gain a better understanding of their culturally and linguistically diverse students and to teach their target languages by incorporating elements of their students’ sociocultural backgrounds. This study supports a rich sociocultural appreciation of the processes and contexts of transnational teachers’ professional identity development.

Keywords: Professional identity development, teacher identity, transnational teacher, third space theory, dual language immersion