Colombian English Language Teachers’ Storied Agency Contesting the Inset of Globalization and Capitalism of Education

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the reflexivity and agency of language teachers’ personal, academic, and research profiles as a step toward a critical identity perspective (Kubota, R., Reflections on language teacher identity research. Routledge, 2017). We examine stories about meaningful experiences told by Colombian language teachers. It is an account of research based on the narrative turn that acknowledges the form of stories (i.e., narrative genre) and (re)construction of small stories as both data and analysis methodology (i.e., narrative research). We analyze the notion of self-as-teacher (McLean, S.V., The role of self in teacher development. State University of NY Press, 1999) that language teachers create via their own stories (Quintero Polo, Álvaro H., Profile: Issues in Teachers’ Professional Development 21:27–42, 2019). We opened an online call for the participation of public school teachers who were simultaneously students of programs related to English language teaching (hereinafter ELT) or applied linguistics to ELT. We sent the call for participation to 25 universities across Colombia. We received responses from 13 public school teachers, and 7 out of those 13 teachers accepted to take part from the beginning to end. We invited the participants to some narrative interviews. They introspectively reconstructed meaningful experiences that led them to consider their pedagogical and research practices as spaces for their agency to face the demands of neoliberal policy reforms (Hill, D., Revolutionizing pedagogy. Palgrave, 2010). The question that guided our study was: what reflexive and transformative perspectives do EL teachers take on to story themselves as critical agents of language education? That question triggered questioning of a hierarchy concerning policymaking that accentuates the lack of a multidirectional communication among the social and political actors in that hierarchy at the upper (i.e., corporate groups), intermediate (i.e., technocrats and experts), and lower (i.e., teachers) levels. Being teachers at the lower level of the hierarchy, we argue that a means-end relationship between the self and life stories serves the purpose to revindicate what language teachers have to say and do about themselves as well as how they act upon the multilayered power of neoliberal discourses that often construct them as actors with negative traits.

Contrasted with the demands of the capitalist market we find the long rationalist tradition that permeates our culture, reaching from Descartes to Marx, Freud and many others, which continues to demand that education is not simply training for a partial function, but capacity building (Our translation).

—Estanislao Zuleta (2020, p. 74)

This chapter stems from the research study titled “Critical Language Teacher Identity in ELT as a Political Milieu: Colombian Teachers’ Storied Agency in Times of Neoliberal Insertion in Supranational Policies.” It is an institutionalized study by the Office of Research of Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas by code N° 246273220.