The Construction and Reconstruction of Teacher Identities: The Case of Second Career English Language Teachers in Hong Kong

A teacher shortage in Hong Kong in core subjects, such as English, has led to interest in the recruitment and retention of teachers. In Chap. 6, it was argued that recruiting large numbers of non-local students to undergraduate teacher education programs does not necessarily offer a reliable solution to this difficulty and suggests the need to explore alternative routes through which teachers may be recruited. This chapter considers one such alternative, namely the role second career teachers could play in meeting possible teacher shortages in multilingual contexts such as Hong Kong. The chapter draws upon Wenger’s (Communities of practice. Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998) theory of identity formation and using data from interviews with eight second-career English language teachers in Hong Kong, this chapter explores how second-career teachers may be better supported in their professional development. The study found that second-career teachers’ skills and experiences were not valued within their schools and that this was reflected in a rigid division the participants drew between the institutionally endorsed identity positions made available to them and the type of teachers they wanted to be. In response to this antagonism, second-career teachers used their position of non-participation to establish identity territories that connected aspects of their first-career identities such as engineers and managers to their emerging teacher identities. It is suggested that non-participation, a potentially negative experience in Wenger’s (Communities of practice. Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998) framework, was deployed by this group of teachers to create the space they needed to enact their own preferred teacher identities. Implications for attracting and retaining second-career teachers are discussed.