Teachers’ professional identity: Contributions of a critical EFL teacher education course in Iran

This paper is a report on contributions of a critical EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher education course to Iranian teachers’ professional identity reconstruction.2 Pre-course and post-course interviews with seven teachers, their reflective journals, class discussions, and the teacher educator’s reflective journals were analyzed as guided by grounded theory. Three major shifts were observed in their professional identities: from conformity to and romanticization of dominant ideologies to critical autonomy, from no orientation or an instrumentalist orientation to a critical/transformative orientation of teaching, and from a linguistic and technical view to an educational view of second language education.

► Shift from conformity to dominant ideologies to critical autonomy.
► Shift from no/an instrumentalist orientation to a critical/transformative orientation.
► Shift from a linguistic and technical view to an educational view of ELT.