‘No one would give me that job in Australia’: when professional identities intersect with how teachers look, speak, and where they come from

Abstract

Abstract The article investigates how non-native English-speaking teachers’ (NNESTs) professional identities can be affected by their employment experiences in Australia. Qualitative analysis of narrative data provided by a group of NNESTs demonstrates how their professional identities were negatively affected by hiring discrimination, which also had psycho-emotional impacts on their professional selves. Socio-cultural representations of race, English language use, gender, and other cultural attributes convergingly contributed to their unemployment despite meeting country-specific eligibility criteria to be English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers. The interplay between their professional identities and socio-cultural constructs took shape “as modalities of power implicated in the historically specific processes—economic, political, and cultural” (Brah, 2014, p. 110), which included discourses of native-speakerism, neo-racism, post-colonialism, neoliberalism, and multiculturalism.

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