Exploring contextual and individual factors that shape English language teachers’ perceptions and experiences around professional development programmes in a Saudi female university context: The role of professional identity, agency, and emotions

Abstract

Understanding teacher identity is an essential aspect of teacher development (Cross, 2006), and there is consensus that a teacher's professional identity is influenced by internal factors, such as tensions and emotions, and by external factors, such as context and experiences, placing teacher identity in a position of constant change (Nguyen, 2017; Pillen et al., 2013; Subryan, 2017). Emotions constitute an essential element of teachers’ work and identity, and have a significant effect on identity and its shaping (Hargreaves, 2001; Nias, 1996; Sutton & Wheatley, 2003). The concept of agency is also embedded in considerations of teacher identity and emotion (Vloet and van Swet, 2010), especially in contexts characterised by mandatory professional development practices and restrictive classroom policies, as is the case in this research context. Teacher education programmes play a crucial role in shaping teachers’ agency, and can be integrated into identity performances and constructions (Lai et al., 2016; Lasky, 2005; Priestley et al., 2012), and professional development is a prominent and institutionalised element of the context investigated in this study. Therefore, the aim of this study is to explore the role and impact of professional development in the environment in which these teachers operate, and this is explored in relation to teachers' professional identity, agency, and emotions.
This study investigates Saudi teachers working in the English Language Institute at King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia, where professional development and educational policies play a distinctive role in student and educator experiences. It aims to provide a holistic, phenomenological account of the intersecting elements that are influential in this educational context. To supplement the phenomenological methodological framework, I drew on Bucholtz and Hall’s (2010) identity framework, Wenger’s (1998) conceptualisation of trajectory in communities of practice, and Lazarus’s (1991) emotion’s theory to provide a theoretical and analytical focus for the study. The method for this phenomenological qualitative study involved observation of professional development training, and narrative and semi-structured interviews of six female English language Saudi teachers.
The findings provide valuable insights into how teacher identity is shaped and reshaped by teachers positioning themselves in relation to different elements within the context, indexed particularly through metaphors, and through processes of distinction from and adequation towards others. The findings demonstrate the influence of context, culture, and individual positioning on teacher identity, agency, and emotions, as well as the effect of agency and emotions on teacher identity. This effect is not a one-way process, and should instead be seen as an interrelationship between teachers’ identity, agency and emotions, and this interaction is what constructs and reconstructs teacher identity over time. Overall, this study contributes to our knowledge of how university English language teachers, operating in a context where professional development and policy play distinctive and dominant roles, operate with their own cultures, roles, and expectations, enabling them to engage with both restrictive and developmental practices in different and unexpected ways. Themes around relationality and roles show how teachers respond, often consciously, to different stimuli that require them to negotiate and align elements of their identities, emotions, and agency, which is not always easy and is characterised by change over time. This occurs in ways that require cultural awareness and qualitative insights to understand and interpret.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Hadeel Eshgi: orcid.org/0009-0000-5013-3010

ORCID for Alison Porter: orcid.org/0000-0002-8462-1909

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