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‘No one would give me that job in Australia’: When professional identities intersect with how teachers look, speak, and where they come from
Abstract
This article investigates how non-native English-speaking teachers’ (NNESTs) professional identities can be affected by their employment experiences in Australia. Hermeneutic phenomenological narrative analyses of the written narratives of lived experiences of a group of NNESTs demonstrate how their professional identities were negatively affected by hiring discrimination, which also had psycho-emotional impacts on their professional selves. Socio-cultural representations of race, language, and other cultural attributes convergingly contributed to their unemployment despite meeting country-specific eligibility criteria to be English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers. The interplay between their professional identities and socio-cultural constructs took shape in modes of power relations enmeshed in the historic processes: economic, political, and cultural, which included discourses of native-speakerism, neo-racism, post-colonialism, neoliberalism, and multiculturalism. Despite these modalities, the NNESTs furthered their hybrid professional actions, recognising the value in the global community of multiple and diverse professional experiences.
Type
Journal Article
Type of thesis
Series
Citation
Date
2023
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Degree
Supervisors
Rights
© 2023 The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License.