The case of English teachers’ professional identity in a community of practice in a Mexican public university

Abstract

This case study explores the professional identity of a group of English language teachers in a community of practice in a public university in Mexico. The main characteristic of this particular group of teachers is that they do not have a degree in the area of language teaching. The eight participants have a degree in different areas of knowledge; however, they have been teaching English for many years. The present research follows the Theory of communities of Practice by Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1998) and the theory of identity by Norton (1995) to create an articulated framework for the study.
By drawing on narrative inquiry in the form of life stories, I gathered the data for this study in which the participants narrated different aspects of their professional lives and their ways of navigating the community of practice (CoP). With the help of the extended positioning analysis by Barkhuizen (2009), I could analyse in three different levels the narratives elicited with a semi-structured interview from the participants.
The findings of the research demonstrated that all the participants navigated in different ways the community of practice. I also discovered how some aspects which are not considered in the Theory of CoP such as power relations, inequality, status, among others, turned out to be of the outmost importance in the interactions of the community. The macro discourses out there, like neoliberalism, also play an important role in the construction of teachers’ identities in the community of practice.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Adriana Patino: orcid.org/0000-0003-1950-3954

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