This presentation discusses (career) opportunities and challenges of new subjectivities which have been made available to language teachers within their Twitter-based professional development as part of the symposium on trajectories and perspectives of language teachers in the 21st century.
There has been a growing demand for part-time and freelance teachers in education in recent years. This is particularly true for English Language Teaching (ELT), which has become a global industry that requires language teachers to continuously improve professionally, if they want to stay in business. However, access to professional development opportunities has been problematic for freelance language teachers (Stickler & Emke, 2015).
Research has suggested that language teachers use the social media platform Twitter to share teaching ideas and resources within a community of practice (Lord & Lomicka, 2014, Rosell-Aguilar, 2018). However, while such studies have provided valuable insight into human experiences and perceptions of Twitter for professional learning, they tend to overlook the relational, human and non-human complexities involved (with)in the enactment of human practices.
Drawing on recent doctoral research which employed a Deleuzo-Guattarian inspired research approach (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), this presentation argues that tweets are performative in the construction of new language teacher subjectivities that move beyond traditional concepts of what it means to be a language teacher, offer new career opportunities but could also lead to teachers' self-exploitation.
