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There are currently over 15 million refugees and asylum seekers living in urban sites of protracted transitory displacement throughout the world. People in this situation, including children, are often denied access to formal education, which has led to the establishment of informal Alternative Learning Centres (ALCs) by refugees themselves. English is commonly adopted as the medium of instruction at ALCs, with teachers drawn from the refugee community based on their relative levels of English proficiency. How these spontaneous teachers negotiate their language teacher identities (LTIs) given their lack of teacher education and precarious social positioning is yet to be considered by applied linguistics and refugee education scholars despite the educational ramifications teachers’ LTIs have on the provision of quality education for countless refugee students. Through a critical identity theoretical and pedagogic frame, this study attends to this voluminous gap in the literature by reporting on a 12 month participatory action research (PAR) inquiry aimed at facilitating the desired LTIs of thirteen spontaneous English language teachers practicing at an ALC in Indonesia. The research reports that the transitory displacement context gives rise to theoretical and practical deviations from identity studies situated in formal non-displacement education contexts. Drawing on key constructs from Darvin and Norton’s (2015) critical identities framework, the participants’ LTI negotiations, although situated and temporary, are shown to be structured across time and space through the ongoing interplay between primary and secondary habitus values, beliefs, feelings, and attitudes; their own and their students’ English-related future desires; and their present micro, meso and macro-fields of practice. For the participants, these multidimensional negotiations enabled them to move from inhabiting tentative language teacher identities to inhabiting and being ascribed their desired LTIs. The lessons learned from our PAR collaboration extends the scope of LTI and critical identity studies into the extreme anti-belonging context of transitory displacement. Further, as English-medium ALCs provide the sole source of education for tens of thousands of refugees around the world, this first study on spontaneous teacher development from an LTI perspective serves to shine the spotlight on spontaneous English teachers’ knowledge bases, desires, teaching strengths, and teaching challenges and, in doing so, informs the growing need for language teacher development in displacement contexts. Lastly, as a longitudinal PAR inquiry with refugee participants, our collaboration has substantive methodological implications for researchers wishing to engage with, and in the service of, marginalised communities. |
