Contesting professionalism on social media: Emotional tensions and identity negotiation among English language teachers

Despite the burgeoning interest in language teachers’ emotions and identity, research into their emotions within digital environments remains scarce, notwithstanding the growing presence of teachers on social media (SM) platforms (Nejadghanbar et al., 2024). SM teaching poses unique emotional tensions due to diverse audiences and expectations, exacerbated by a lack of training and research guidance for teachers (Chao, 2022). The concept of teacher professionalism has been significantly altered by SM's influence. Traditionally shaped by regulatory bodies and unions (Pendergast et al., 2019), professionalism is now also molded by market forces, where individual teachers and their audiences play a defining role. In this new context, conventional markers of professionalism, like higher education qualifications, may not equate to perceived professionalism. This shift presents challenges for understanding professionalism (Pendergast et al., 2019) and generates tensions among teachers. This study sought to investigate language teachers' perceptions of professionalism on SM through an emotional lens. Analyzing narrative frames and semi-structured interviews with 15 Iranian teachers about their Instagram experiences, it examined how professionalism is conceptualized, embraced, and contested. Additionally, it examined how these evolving notions of professionalism affect teachers' identities. The findings revealed that the teachers' traditional views of professionalism, rooted in formal education and classroom experience, were challenged by Instagram's dynamics. They faced emotional tensions while grappling with the clash between established professional standards and new, market-driven measures of professionalism, which are largely defined and quantified by visibility and follower counts. The teachers realized that those who made pie-crust promises with exaggerated contents and those who had better understandings of and resources for their SM audience gained higher visibility and branded themselves as ‘professional’. The emotional tensions caused some teachers to abandon teaching and branding on SM, while others engaged with and adapted to certain professional norms on SM, negotiating their teacher identity.