Becoming and being a critical language teacher educator: A duoethnography

Abstract

Language teacher educator (LTE) identity development is an emerging field exploring how LTEs learn to teach and negotiate their identities and how their identity construction processes help teacher candidates learn. The complexity of the issue has prompted researchers to explore their professional journeys and experiences in various contexts from differing perspectives. Still, the field is constantly evolving as LTEs strive to understand the multifaceted nature of the profession and its implications for teacher education. Within this perspective, through a duoethnographic study, in this research the authors aim to explore how they construct, negotiate, and enact their critical LTE identities and agency as two Turkish‐speaking, mid‐career English language teacher educators situated currently in two different higher education institutions in Türkiye. The researchers collected lengthy personal narratives recounting their experiences and thematically analyzed them through iterative coding. Three major themes concerning their meso and micro contexts emerged: their trajectories in becoming LTEs, issues of belonging and marginalization, negotiating their LTE identities, and exercising agency. Their narratives indicate how they followed different trajectories to become teacher educators, were positioned as others in their institutional settings, legitimized their LTE identities in time, and became empowered to practice their aspired identities. Despite being marginalized in different contexts, their narratives show they have consistently created counter‐hegemonic discursive and experiential spaces in their classrooms and institutional contexts as micro‐level policy‐makers enacting their critical LTE identities.