Examining the stories of unlived selves in the career trajectories of language teachers in relation to agency: an exploratory study

Date

2023-10-26

Author

Demir Bektaş, Melike
Gürbüz, Nurdan

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Teaching has become more difficult and stressful today as the lives of teachers are harder with the external demands of performance, surveillance and accountability, affecting the way they do their jobs and build their professional identity trajectories. As a result of changing curricular needs and student profiles, as well as the pressure of changing technological innovations that teachers have to adapt to, increased level of stress and loss of morale reported internationally take a toll on teachers’ sense of professional identity, autonomy, agency and self-efficacy. Building on the concept of social nothingness, this study aims to expand the current research on teacher agency and professionalism byturning the spotlight on an unexplored aspect of it: the unlived, unformed, failed or non-existent identities that teachers perceive in their current sense of themselves, and how such reverse identity development impacts their individual agential power. To this end, semi-structured interviews were conducted with tertiary-level EFL teachers working at a public university in Turkey in order to explore the things they haven’t done or that haven’t happened in their career trajectories, as well as absences that they perceive in their work. The findings reveal that the missed opportunities or the unfollowed career paths of teachers are, to a large extent, shaped by the changing realities of their environment and wider macro systems. Lack of resources, time and ongoing professional support, together with factors like less power and autonomy over curricular issues have the cumulative effect of silencing highly capable and qualified teachers and restricting their agency to create their future ideal selves. As a result, the findings suggest that their career trajectories are being mostly shaped by non-doings and absences instead of intentional goal-oriented professional acts, and some already perform silent quitting.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/107651

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Department of Foreign Language Education, Conference / Seminar