‘Becoming More of a Fairy Godmother Type of Teacher’: Teacher Identity Negotiation in a Time of Pandemic

ABSTRACT

The first years of the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic have brought unanticipated and far-reaching change to the ways language teachers have had to conceptualise and implement their practices. Many teachers have been compelled to move rapidly from classroom to online teaching which has had a substantial impact not only on their sense of identity, but also their sense of confidence in their usual practices. In this chapter, I draw on the reflections of Australian teachers working with international students in the English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students (ELICOS) sector, several of whom I have worked with in these early pandemic years as a facilitator of action research, as part of their professional development. Together with their colleagues, they needed to rapidly adjust their professional expectations, roles and practices. The chapter draws on short narrative comments from these teachers and illustrates how they and their colleagues drew on new concepts and mindsets to negotiate their teacher identities and to discover how they could best work with their students in the change to online environments. The data show that social, cognitive and emotional factors were major influences on these negotiations of identity. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.