The shaping of a second language teacher identity in drawings

The use of visual methods to study aspects of teachers’ lives has gained momentum in the field of applied linguistics, given their potential to help research participants to not only express what is difficult to put into words, but also communicate their experiences more holistically. This paper makes use of drawings to examine how student teachers imagine EFL teaching before implementing language materials for the first time. By adopting a narrative perspective on teacher identity, it explores how the interplay between their past as pupils and present as student teachers shape their professional aspirations. The research participants are six Brazilian student teachers taking a four-year undergraduate Portuguese-English language teaching degree. We lived alongside each other during the first year of a teacher education project in which I collaborated as a teacher educator. The field texts include drawings asking the student teachers to visually represent an EFL teacher and their accompanying explanations. These were contextualised by recorded conversations, written journals and language learning autobiographies. The analysis consisted of identifying narrative threads articulating temporal transitions, personal and social conditions, and places within the participants’ drawings. By drawing, the student teachers could holistically share their experiences, dilemmas and struggles, and also creatively make sense of who they were becoming as professionals. The drawings represent their desire to spare their future pupils’ from their own experiences as pupils, as well as their expectations to have a meaningful impact on their language learning. At the same time, they offer opportunities to explore the multiple layers and stories that sustain student teachers’ imagined teacher identities.