Crossing Temporal Borders: Language Teachers' Reflections on Past "Critical Incidents" in Constructing Professional Identities

Drawing on Barkhuizen’s (2017) definition of “story” as narratives about the past that include reflective, evaluative commentary and temporality, this study examines how language teachers construct stories about... [ view full abstract ]

Drawing on Barkhuizen’s (2017) definition of “story” as narratives about the past that include reflective, evaluative commentary and temporality, this study examines how language teachers construct stories about “critical incidents” in their teaching careers in research interviews. “Critical incidents” are past events or situations that are treated as having mobilized a significant turning point for an individual (Tripp 2012). Our study examined a corpus of 28 critical incident stories that emerged in interviews with teachers of English in the U.K. and the U.S. as they responded to questions about their emotions and teaching. Thirteen out of twenty-five teachers produced such narratives. We analyzed how these stories are constructed and what particular identity work and ideological effects they produce.

In examining the “how”, we identified the following four characteristics of critical incident stories: Use of 1) orientation utterances that situate the incident as occurring in the past (“I remember I had a student”); 2) identification of incidents as significant turning points through using epistemic verbs (“I realized”) and discourse markers (“so”) that signal a change of awareness or understanding; 3) evaluations that assign a more general meaning to individual incidents through using select discourse markers and present tense verb forms (“So it’s about finding any positive out of the negative”); and 4) emotionally charged language (“struggle”, “frustration”).

In considering the significance of these critical incidents, the “what”, we found that as teachers constructed temporal boundary crossing in their stories (contrasting past emotionally difficult situations with current awareness and greater emotional control), and as they assigned meaning to what they learned from these incidents, they were able to discursively position themselves as experienced, professional, capable teachers. We also found that these stories functioned to reinforce norms and values associated with emotions and teaching. That is, they reinforced ideologies of “good” teachers as individuals who control their emotions or express only “appropriate” emotions, and who thus conform to the “feeling rules” (Benesch 2017) of their profession. We end by discussing how critical incident stories provide a rich resource for educational linguistics research and particularly for exploring teachers’ ongoing emotion labor (Benesch 2017).