The Nexus of Identity, Emotions, and Agency in Virtual Exchanges Between Pre-Service Teachers From Türkiye and the United States

This study draws on data gleaned from multimodal identity tasks in an eight-week telecollaboration project involving 120 pre-service teachers from two teacher education programs in Türkiye and the United States. The authors explore what emotions teachers expressed during their participation in telecollaboration and how their emotions intersected with their teacher agency and identity construction. The intersectionality of language teachers’ identities and teachers’ emotions as agency informed the study's conceptual framework. Utilizing multimodal critical discourse analysis, the authors found that pre-service teachers asserted projective agency by expressing emotions through multimodal and narrative identity tasks. The findings showed that the pre-service teachers’ identity work was influenced by ecologically contextualized psycho-emotional circumstances throughout the project. Underscoring that teacher identity work cannot be conceptualized without attending to teachers’ emotions and agency, the authors argue that when intentionally integrated into teacher education courses, identity tasks open experiential dimensions for pre-service teachers to engage in agentive and emotionally laden identity work. The study contributes to language teacher education research, highlighting the supranational, multicultural, and multilingual nature of the pre-service teachers' interactions while engaging in online synchronous and asynchronous activities.