Understanding The Dialogical Self: A Bakhtinian Perspective On Teachers' Stories

Approaches for teacher professional development had been occupied with developing universal, standard models and theories of teacher identity. Studies in this period have largely conceived of the self as fixed, centralized and context-free. In contrast to such universal and categorically static concept, Hermans et al. (1992) sees the self as a multiplicity of parts, termed voices, characters or positions, which have the potential of entertaining dialogic relationships with each other. In light of their contribution to the dialogical self, more and more researchers argue for the socialized, historical, cultural and dynamic nature of the self. Over the years, teachers have developed a store of life experience that is meaningful and unique. To explore teacher identity, in this sense, means gaining access to their feelings, ideas and understandings of the world rather than putting their unique experience into the categories associated with the topic of teacher identity within literature, such as "a subject matter expert", "a pedagogical expert", and "a didactical expert". Therefore, in order to develop a better understanding of the dialogical self, it is necessary for this study to investigate teachers' life experience by putting forward the following questions: 1) What kind of research text is appropriate to represent life experience? 2) Whose voices are there in the teachers' stories? 3) How do those voices come into contact with each other and change each other's meanings? 4) What implications does the study have for the construction of hybrid teacher identities?The answers to these questions are based on my study of two English teachers' identity. First, I represent the life stories that they live and tell, and relive and retell in order to search for their teacher identity in a context of cultural difference, value plurality and increasing globalization. Through the inquiry, it is likely for me to not only better understand the two teachers, but also make sense of my own experience as a teacher. Second, a dialogical approach is applied to analyzing the dialogic relationship in the teachers' stories, including both the dialogue between different consciousnesses ("great dialogue"), and the double-voiced discourse within the two teachers' minds ("microdialogue"). This study suggests the development of teacher identity is a dialogical process which involves a constant negotiation of the hybrid sense of self. It is by this hybridity that teachers are able to reclaim the wholeness of their lives. Besides, two general implications are offered for future study of the construction of hybrid teacher identities at the end of the thesis.