“I felt like I was being judged…”: A duoethnography exploring international language teacher educator identities

• Published in: TESOL journal 2025-03, Vol.16 (1)
• Main Authors: Lu, Xinyue, Iswandari, Yuseva Ariyani, Weng, Zhenjie, Troyan, Francis John
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1056-7941; 1949-3533
• DOI: 10.1002/tesj.884

Given the need to explore the nature of language teacher educator (LTE) identities, this duoethnography centers the identity journeys of three language teacher educators—Lu, Yuseva, and Zhenjie—as they evolved together and in dialogue with their advisor, Francis. To this end, they began with the central identity task, the Language Use Profile—part of the foundations course in their language teacher education programs and their language teacher educator development. As a point of departure for their duoethnography, this task allowed them to examine their understandings of their bi−/multilingual language use, language ideologies, and identities, and subsequently engage in a dialogic spiral that centered “reciprocity, care, and critical listening in research activities” (San Pedro & Kinloch, 2017, p. 391S). Their findings point to the importance of these spaces in LTE development as a means for centering identities in doctoral programs, in particular to better support the development of language teacher educators in ways that are both humanizing and acknowledge the complex nature of the work that they do.