Iranian ELT Student Teachers’ Portrayal of Their Identities as an English Language Teacher: Drawings Speak Louder than Words

ABSTRACT

This study makes use of visual methodology to achieve insights regarding Iranian ELT student teachers’ professional identities. Accordingly, the researcher makes an attempt to investigate the 51 male-female student teachers’ professional identities through their drawings. Social constructivism, hermeneutics, and grounded theory inspire this study and allow the researcher to make sense of drawings and approach them as texts, which freight meaning to be interpreted. Data analysis based on inductive design led to the emergence of themes that most of the student teachers have reconstructed and developed their identities in the rapid evolving cultural and global context created by the new insights and perspectives of postmodernism. However, in the case of student teachers whose identities have been traditionally shaped, teacher educators are required to provide support through additional instruction, dialogue, feedback, and insights to raise their consciousness about their identities and self.

KEYWORDS:

• Drawings; preservice education; socialization process; student teacher identity; visual methodology

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Notes on contributors

Parvin Safari

Parvin Safari (Ph.D. in TEFL) is affiliated with the Department of English Language & Literature, Khazar University, BAKU, Azerbaijan. She got her Ph.D. from Shiraz University, Iran (Persia), and her M.A. as a Top Student from Yazd University. She is an external reviewer and editorial member of Asian EFL Journal, and Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal. So far, she has extensively presented and published in (inter)national conferences and reputable journals. Her areas of interest include Critical Pedagogy, Critical Language Testing, Ecological Language Learning, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, Teacher Education, Educational Reform, and Discourse Analysis.