Teacher Learning as Identity Change: The Case of EFL Teachers in the Context of Curriculum Reform

Abstract

With global educational reforms underway, EFL teachers are constantly urged to adapt their professional practices to meet the challenges of new curricula. Under this circumstance, how in‐service EFL teachers manage to learn and develop becomes a key concern. The available literature shows that teacher learning involves not only acquiring new knowledge and skills but also developing and adopting probably a whole new identity (Clarke, 2008). A recent and inspiring idea is that teacher learning is so intertwined with and affected by identity‐making that the former can and should be conceptualized as the latter (de Costa & Norton, 2017). The significance of integrating the two is attested by increasing calls for paying more attention to language teacher identity in teacher education programs (Varghese et al., 2016), which underscores the value of utilizing teacher identity not only as a research tool to reconceptualize teacher learning and professional practice but also a pedagogical tool to show holistic and situated framings of teacher learning (e.g., Menard‐Warwick, 2013). During curriculum reforms, EFL teachers are expected to upgrade knowledge and skills and assume multiple roles as creators, enactors, managers, and activists (Jiang, Zhang, May & Qin, 2020), and yet, given the multiplicity, discontinuity, and social nature of teacher identity (Zhang & Zhang, 2015), and the complicated nexus between teacher learning and identity‐making, it is imperative to gain an integrated and holistic understanding of the complex dynamics of teacher learning as embedded in and interacted with identity change during the curriculum reform.

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