Pedagogizing teacher identity in language teacher education practices

Becoming a language teacher is an ongoing process of identity work situated within wider socio-political discourses. The existing research has found that teacher identity informs teachers’ learning and practices, and is inextricably related to their other intersecting social identities (e.g., language, culture, gender, sexual orientation, faith/religion, nationality). This finding led scholars (e.g., Kanno & Stuart, 2011; Martel, 2015; Morgan & Clarke, 2011) to suggest that teacher identity should be incorporated into language teacher education (LTE) practices as an explicit goal or focus. For example, Varghese et al. (2016) called for identity to become “[the] central organizing principle” of LTE and asked the following question: “even if the production of a beginning language teacher through an engagement with teacher identity could be the end goal, what might that mean and what kinds of classes, structures, and experiences would serve that goal?” (p. 557). Colleagues have recently responded to that clarion call by redesigning teacher learning activities in their courses or adding new activities (see Canagarajah, 2020; Martel & Yazan, 2021; Varghese et al., 2019; Yazan, 2019). The main goal of this colloquium is to present teacher learning activities from diverse contexts that contribute to the efforts to “pedagogiz[e] teacher professional identity” (Lingard, 2009, p. 81) in LTE practices.