Enacting teacher emotion, agency, and professional identity: A netnography of a novice Chinese language teacher’s crisis teaching

Abstract

This netnography explores how teacher agency, emotion regulation, and professional identity were enacted by a novice Chinese language teacher in response to emergency remote teaching (ERT) in Australia amid the global pandemic. Ecologically sound, netnography creates uncoerced spaces to allow participants to have their voices heard, thus enabling researchers to discover nuanced patterns linked to the social-emotional state and wellbeing of the community members, regarding fears, tensions, and resilience triggered by ERT. Multiple data sources were triangulated from the teacher’s reflection journal, digital teaching artifacts, debriefing sessions, interviews, and online questionnaire responses. Thematic analysis reveals teacher identity was re-envisioned through crisis teaching pedagogy and the regulation of negative emotions to facilitate agency, which reciprocally bolstered teacher identity. The findings also indicate teacher identity development is challenged and shaped by negotiating a new role in remote teaching, thus impacting pre-ERT identity. Hence, the emotion regulation trajectory of ERT can stimulate and encourage technology-enhanced professional learning as teacher agency and resilience reinforce a new identity reimagined as a capable online teacher. By situating novice teacher agency, emotion regulation, and emerging identity in crisis teaching, this netnographic research conceptualises how ERT presents not only challenges for novice teachers’ identity development and emotion, but also the sustainability and empowerment of online teaching and professional growth of impacted teachers of Asian languages.

EFL Pre-service Teachers’ Enactment of Agentic Capacities in their Online Pedagogical Practicum

“…A growing body of research has undertaken in-service teachers' professional agentic capacities both in face-to-face (f2f) education (Kitade, 2015;Li, 2023;Priestley et al, 2015) and in online language educational environments in Western, European, and Asian settings (Ashton, 2022;Cai & Zheng, 2022;Janes & Chen, 2024;Lim, 2021;Sari, 2021;Zaiti & Zaidah, 2021). However, there is a lack of attention given to literature that examines the experiences of pre-service teachers when conducting their teaching internships online in Global South countries where English is not the first language.…”

“…The construct of teacher agency is increasingly taken heed of over the past decade. Studies have been examining the elements that supported or downplayed in-service teachers' agency both face-to-face education (Kitade, 2015;Li, 2023;Priestley et al, 2015) and in online language educational settings in Western, European, and Asian settings (Ashton, 2022;Cai & Zheng, 2022;Duff, 2012;Janes & Chen, 2024;Lim, 2021;Sari, 2021;Zaiti & Zaidah, 2021). These studies have mostly explored the experiences of American, European, or Asian language in-service teachers in both L1 and L2 contexts with less than 10 participants under the predominance of narrative inquiry over case study designs in the context of the global pandemic COVID 19.…”