Narratives of learning to become English teachers in Thailand: developing identity through a teacher education program

ABSTRACT

This study uses teacher identity as an analytic lens to explore how pre-service teachers’ professional identity developed during teacher education and to examine what aspects of teacher education promote the development of teacher identity. Guided by the teacher’s personal interpretative framework and utilizing a narrative inquiry with a cross-sectional research design, this study employed interviews to elicit data from 50 English-majored pre-service teachers at a five-year teacher education program in Thailand. The findings revealed that multiple dimensions of teacher identity were changed at different points of time. Two patterns of identity changes were found: sudden and gradual changes. Additionally, the roles of teacher education in promoting teacher identity development are passive and fragmented, relying on the pre-service teachers to connect the dots of their own identity. This study serves as a springboard for teacher educators to reconsider the teacher education curriculum and redefine practices in teacher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Learning to become a teacher
• teacher identity
• student teacher
• teacher education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Thailand Research Fund [MRG5980181].

Notes on contributors

Denchai Prabjandee

Denchai Prabjandee, EdD, is a teacher educator at the Faculty of Education, Burapha University, Thailand. He teaches graduate students in the Teaching English as a Global Language program. His research interests include teacher identity and the global spread of English and its impact on language teacher education.