The construction of teachers’ professional identities in the interaction: some implications for the teacher continuing education

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss how teachers’ professional identities are construct in the interaction between teachers and the academic instructor in a  continuing education course in the area of language studies, but also reflects on the implications of this process for this type of education. From a Cultural Studies perspective, identities are understood as multipleand discursively constructed. The selected data generated in qualitative interpretative research approach is constituted of excerpts from transcriptions of course in which the conflict between teachers and teachers’ instructor becomes relevant in the constructionof identity of the interlocutors. The social dialogical conception of language form Bakhtin’s Circle and the perspective of Applied Linguistics and New  Literacy Studies are the theoretical base of the research. The article shows that even in an institutional interaction in relation to the  academic instructor in which teachers are positioned as students, they build professional identitiesstrengthened in the argumentation in a moment of conflict. In the process, the teachers build a collective sense and bring social voices of other courses and perspectives of teacher education into the clash with the instructor.KEYWORDS: identities; teacher continuing education; argumentation.