Doing ‘identity work’ in teacher education : the case of a UAE teacher

Abstract

The juxtapositions of modernity and tradition, the global and the local, extreme wealth and poverty, which comprise the United Arab Emirates (UAE) offers a vivid example of the notion that identity relies on difference. A paradigm case of what Findlow (2000) calls a ‘willed nation’, since its inception as a modern nationstate in 1971 the UAE has established a range of practices and codes that serve at once to provide a sense of national identity, and to identify differences between the local and non-local populations, as well as within the local population, for example in terms of gender. However, identity’s paradoxical reliance on difference for its self-constitution often takes the form of antagonism towards those same constitutive differences. In this chapter, issues arising from constructions of identity and difference are examined in relation to teacher formation in the context of a new Bachelor of Education program, designed to prepare UAE female nationals for English teaching positions, working alongside non-UAE nationals, in UAE government schools. The notion of engaging in ongoing ‘identity work’ is explored as one approach to managing these issues. The past decade has seen a steady rise in research in teacher education employing identity as an ‘analytic lens’ (Gee, 2000), including research that uses identity as a conceptual tool to investigate the development of teachers’ professional knowledge (Alsup, 2006; Britzman, 1991, 1994; Clarke, 2008; Danielewicz, 2001; Geijsel & Meijers, 2005; Miller Marsh, 2003; Phillips, 2002; Santoro, 1997; Tsui, 2007), to explore their emotions (Evans, 2002; Zembylas, 2003a, 2003b), as well as to examine the relationship between their personal and professional lives (Day, Kington, Stobart, & Sammons, 2006; Goodson & Sikes, 2001; MacLure, 1993; Mitchell & Weber, 1999; Reid & Santoro, 2006; Søreide, 2006). Reflecting this conceptual approach that sees personal and professional knowledge as unfolding within wider socially, culturally, historically and politically shaped discursive contexts, Varghese, Morgan, Johnston, and Johnson argue that “in order to understand [language] teaching and learning we need to understand teachers: the professional, cultural, political and individual identities which they claim or which are assigned to them” (2005, p. 22). But what particular advantages does identity offer in thinking about teaching and how people learn to teach? Here I argue that identity, through the way it embodies and reflects the paradoxical and contradictory nature of socially organized human life, assists us in making explicit, and potentially working productively with, the ‘heteroglossic’ tensions and contradictions that construct the teacher (Britzman, 1991, p. 111). My aim in this chapter is to explore how these complexities might be productively leveraged through the notion of doing ‘identity work’ in teacher education. In order to do this, the following discussion presents an initial exploration of identity, drawing on poststructuralist theorizations that have been particularly influential in thinking about the complexities of identity in recent years.