Tale of two teachers: Chinese immigrant teachers’ professional identity in US foreign language classrooms.

Abstract

This study looks at Chinese immigrant teachers' identity through the theoretical framework of the figured worlds, aiming to explore how the Chinese immigrant teachers navigate the cultural and educational practices and negotiate their professional identities in the figured world of foreign language classes in the US public schools, and how the two competing storylines of "Chinese" and "American" teacher interplay in the teachers' identity. Two Chinese immigrant teachers were interviewed and observed in their classrooms over a period of four months. The findings revealed the uncertainty and figuring involved in the inscribed acts and meaning regarding the "American" and "Chinese" pedagogical storylines of teaching, and the situated processes of the figuring, positioning, and choices made by the immigrant teachers. The teachers' professional identities are complex and highly contextualized, reflecting positioning in multiple memberships and orchestration of various discourses in the "space of authoring" in the cultural worlds of the schools. The study contributed to immigrant teacher research at the age of global migration.