A teacher of English has to deal with numerous issues claimed to affect their performance in class. In order to boost the effectiveness and therefore the productivity of the teacher, a significant number of investigations have been conducted in research and educational institutions. The results are frequent and sometimes overwhelming tasks directed at the teachers in the format of training workshops all promising to enhance work in the language class. Teachers have been at the forefront of the endeavors to convert English language classes into a milieu where efficiency takes high priority and lacks are immediately taken care of.
In such a situation, there have also been attempts to address issues that teachers face, namely their professional, intellectual, social, and emotional concerns. This, for some years, was in the form of studies on the motivation, anxiety, and well-being, to name a few, of teachers. A teacher equipped with more of these qualities was supposed to be an advantage and a great asset in excelling in their job and then leveling up the institute in support of the general neoliberal ideologies in practice. In line with more developments in the field, due attention in time was directed toward sociocultural matters which revolved around the work of teachers, and then identity studies took a stronghold amidst the studies of language teachers.
However, what has been a major turn of events over the past few years, which is in line with the emergence and precedence of postmodernism over other philosophical standpoints, has been discussions over the essence of identity itself. While previously identity could easily be defined by reference to the traditional categories, such as nationality, religion, race, and gender, the new positionings reject such straightforwardness and vote for the fluidity of identity. That means a person cannot be pigeonholed easily based on their traditional categories and their being is constrained by spatial and temporal concerns. Simply put, a person shows an identity in a given moment as the conversation unfolds. That conversation is tuned according to the interlocutor, the institutional factors, and the broader cultural and social factors present in the society.
What needs to be done regarding such theoretical developments is to listen to the teacher’s stories about the daily events that the teacher experiences in the classroom. This includes their interactions with the students, colleagues, supervisors, and managers. In addition, the teacher is constrained by the narratives in society about being a teacher, the image of society toward English, and broader discourse about the status of English in the post-colonial world. Adding to all of these is the teacher himself as an individual, the concept of self, the teacher’s agentive power, and their emotions whether to express or cover them. Finally, the imaginative power of the teacher can enable them to assume further roles in the future. The stories of the teachers can help unravel the role of all these factors in determining the identity construction or reconstruction of the teacher over a period of time.
And here the project kicks in ...