Daran, a Yazidi English teacher, makes investments in his teacher identity as his teaching context changes from Iraq to the United States. This study pushes teacher development research forward by examining how Daran negotiates his identity investments and how those investments endure contextual constraints.
This study explores the teacher development and identity work of Daran, a Yazidi English teacher from Iraq who was displaced to the United States where he continued to teach English but in the context of a public secondary school. Through Daran’s case, we learn how one teacher attempted to balance the past and present, old and new country allegiances, and competing teacher identities. Daran became an English teacher in Iraq due to his sense of practicality and as a result of the discrimination he experienced as a Yazidi (a non-Islamic ethnoreligious group) in northern Iraq, having his course options curtailed because of his ethnic and religious background. Daran chafed, too, at the stifled, behavioristic style of instruction he was expected to deliver. Upon immigration to the United States, Daran again pursued English teaching out of his sense of practicality, but in this new setting, he was determined to be ‘not the other,’ to become a ‘normal American.’ Yet, as an English teacher and Yazidi immigrant in a mid-sized city in the Midwest, his desire to not being the ‘other’ was often stymied. However, seeing himself in his English-learning immigrant and refugee students, Daran constructed a teacher identity of patriarch and mentor to students. Utilizing Darvin and Norton’s (2015) model of identity investment, this study explores Daran’s English teacher identity investments and development from Iraq to the United States. Further theoretical framing is gained from models that explore teachers’ identity resources (Clarke, 2009; Douglas Fir Group, 2017) and teacher agency (Kayi-Aydar, et al, 2019; Priestley, Biesta, and Robinson, 2015). Daran’s identity investments across his teacher identity journey provide insight onto the agency and development of a teacher across context and continents. Such insight holds promising implications for guiding teacher development.
