‘Agree to disagree’: Reconciling an English teacher’s identity tensions in negotiating an educational reform through a community of practice perspective

Abstract

Educational reforms often precipitate teacher tensions that subsequently impact teacher identity (re)construction. Adopting a community of practice (CoP) framework to examine identity-, belief- and emotion-inflected tensions, and drawing on data from five rounds of interviews, our longitudinal case study traced the identity reformation of an English teacher, Lee, as he negotiated an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) reform in China. We found that Lee’s constant teacher identity conflicts were intertwined with tensions that arose as he negotiated his (1) beliefs about students’ needs and acknowledgment of their language incompetency, and (2) reform-positive emotions and self-negative emotions. Our findings revealed, however, that these tensions were mediated through the assistance afforded by his CoP, which, on the one hand, effectively scaffolded community members’ teaching practices and helped ease the tensions that emerged but, on the other hand, created space for multiple voices to coexist, make adjustments, and thus subsequently achieve reconciliation. Highlighting the role of CoP in teacher development, our findings help advance the teacher identity research agenda by taking a holistic view on work-related tensions, and thus bear implications for educational reformers, teacher educators, and university administrators.