Going beyond boundaries: A collaborative autoethnographic study of three teachers’ negotiation of cognitive/emotional dissonances

II Theoretical framework: Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory on cognitive/emotional dissonances, growth points, and responsive mediation

Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory emphasizes the unity of cognition and emotion in the development of higher mental processes in human development (Vygotsky, 1978, 1987). Within this theoretical framework, the following three interrelated concepts have been actively discussed in language teacher education: Cognitive/emotional dissonance, growth points, and responsive mediation (Golombek & Doran, 2014; Golombek & Johnson, 2004; Johnson & Worden, 2014; Johnson et al., 2023). We use the concepts to explore teacher identity development, for its explanatory power on how teachers resolve tensions and how their negotiation of tensions leads to identity development.

Teachers often experience dissonances when they sense discrepancies between what they envision and what actually happens in their teaching (Golombek & Doran, 2014; Johnson & Worden, 2014; Wall, 2018). In working to resolve the discrepancies, teachers draw on both their cognition and emotion. For instance, a teacher may get anxious when they first notice a gap in their pedagogical knowledge. The anxiety prompts them to consult their supervisor for advice. In this process, their cognition and emotion work together to resolve the gap. Their cognition and emotion are inextricably intertwined, or what Golombek (2015) calls, a ‘unity’ (p. 472). Hence, the term cognitive/emotional dissonance indicates that dissonance and its resolution emerge from the dialectic interaction of both cognition and emotion (Johnson & Worden, 2014; Johnson et al., 2023).

The cognitive/emotional dissonance may provide growth points for development. Johnson and Golombek (2016) defined ‘growth points as a moment or series of moments when teachers’ cognitive/emotional dissonance comes into being’ (p. 45). If they receive responsive mediation (Johnson & Golombek, 2020) carefully attuned to their growth points from mediators (e.g. teacher educators or experienced colleagues), they may be able to co-regulate together and achieve what the teachers could not yet achieve on their own. Responsive mediation is a dialogic activity for their professional development that involves their cognition, emotion, and experience. For the mediation to be effective, the mediator needs to ‘recognize the upper limits of teachers’ potential’ and ‘be strategic in the sort of assistance given, while also recognizing and being responsive to teachers’ responses’ (Johnson & Golombek, 2016, p. 34). With proper support, teachers learn to advocate for emergent bilinguals (Maddamsetti, 2022); turn their negative emotions into positive ones (Yang, 2019); and perceive the unpredictability of teaching more positively (Johnson & Worden, 2014).

III Literature review: Cognitive/emotional dissonances and teacher identity development

Teachers (re)negotiate and develop their identities as they face and resolve these cognitive/emotional dissonances. All aspects of teachers’ social identities come into play, such as their race, gender, geography, class, religion, first language, and sexual orientation (Varghese et al., 2016). For example, novice teachers commonly experience responsibility-related tensions, including the feelings of incompetence versus the expectation to be a professional (Pentón Herrera & Martínex-Alba, 2022; Pillen et al., 2013). The very same tension could be more critical to non-native speakers of English, like Motha et al. (2012) experienced when teaching ‘correct pronunciation,’ such as pronouncing ‘tomato’ as ‘tom-ah-to’ or ‘tom-ay-to.’ If a non-native-speaking teacher pronounces it differently from the majority of people in that area, it would pose a threat to their professional identity more seriously than native-speaking teachers; however, if the non-native teacher skillfully turns it into a moment for teaching diverse pronunciations, it would legitimate their teacher identity. In short, as Yazan and Peercy (2018) indicated, teacher identity development ‘involves a complex and multifaceted symbiosis between individual aspirations and ideals, and social interactions with others in professional settings’ (p. 11).

We expand our focus to teachers’ ongoing, lifelong negotiation of dissonances and identity development. Teachers’ identity work is continual, which involves both short- and long-term tensions and conflicts (Yazan & Lindahl, 2020). Previous studies revealed that teachers undergo significant life changes, move transnationally, and all too often confront privilege and marginalization in their roles as teachers in classrooms (Park, 2017). Furthermore, some teachers feel alienated from the mainstream community (Lieb, 2021) as they traverse the borders between many social categories, including communities, nations, disciplines, and languages (Yazan et al., 2021). Teachers’ struggles with precarious job contracts and socio-economic issues are largely left underdiscussed (Thirolf, 2012), and they are not much welcomed by the institutions’ academic communities (Strong, 2022). Given the common problems in teachers’ lifelong identity formation process, we consider what dissonances we, as teachers, face in our professional development process, and how we cope with these challenges, especially when responsive mediation from teacher educators or experienced colleagues is not available. By adopting collaborative autoethnography (CAE) (Chang et al., 2013), we explore these themes and identify coping strategies and support for teachers in the global teacher education community.

Our specific research questions are:

By addressing these questions, we contribute to the field of L2 teacher education by (1) identifying the dissonances teachers at different career stages experienced and analysing how and why they were (not) resolved, (2) drawing attention to transnational movement and socioeconomic precarity as both a struggling site for teachers and a transformative space leading to alternative identities, and (3) introducing CAE as a research method and a mediational space in which teachers can (re)connect with colleagues.

IV Collaborative autoethnography as a research method and a space for professional development

We adopted CAE to examine the cognitive/emotional dissonances and their resolution. Autoethnography (AE) is a qualitative research method for reflecting upon, analysing, and interpreting researchers’ own experiences in their sociopolitical contexts (Chang, 2008), and CAE is a collective form of autoethnographic inquiry. Compared with individual AE, CAE allows researchers to ‘analyze and interpret their data collectively to gain a meaningful understanding of sociocultural phenomena reflected in their autobiographical data’ (Chang et al., 2013, p. 24). In this sense, it aims to use personal and collective stories as a means to understand a broader ‘cultural, social, and political’ landscape (Ellingson & Ellis, 2008, p. 448).

(C)AE studies on L2 teacher identity have explored how their lived experiences shape their identities and teaching. The studies have reported the tensions and struggles as transnationals in liminal spaces (Liao & Maddamsetti, 2019; Lieb, 2021); as a teacher navigating the periphery and the center (Canagarajah, 2012); and as teachers (re)negotiating language ideologies in the classroom (Yazan, 2019a; Zacharias, 2019). These studies have allowed teachers and teacher educators to understand (early-career) teachers’ professional development and provided a theoretical base for facilitating their identity development (Yazan, 2019b).

We expand this line of research in two aspects: using a concurrent approach and analysing transnational teachers in different career stages. First, many (C)AE studies took a retrospective approach, i.e. the teachers reflected upon their development by interviewing each other or sharing narratives, or referring to past documents (e.g. Han et al., 2020; Jin et al., 2020; Liao & Maddamsetti, 2019). We took a concurrent approach, keeping an individual narrative on what we thought and felt as teachers every two weeks, and collaboratively reflecting upon and interpreting the experience in a biweekly meeting from August 2019 to December 2020. Second, we were all at different career stages, specifically a beginning Ph.D. student with no prior college teaching experience (Eunhae), a new assistant professor with some part-time college teaching experience (Miso), and a lecturer with a completed Ph.D. and 10 years of college teaching experience (Sungwoo). This diversity allowed us to provide responsive mediation to each other and simultaneously enabled us to find common dissonances experienced at different career stages.

1 Introducing ourselves as CAE participants

All three participants of this CAE – Eunhae, Miso, and Sungwoo – were born and raised in South Korea (henceforth, Korea), obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English-related majors in Seoul, and have attended or were attending the same doctoral program in applied linguistics at a large research-oriented public university in the United States. All of us consider ourselves transnationals, as we have moved from Korea to the U.S. (Eunhae), from Korea and the U.S. to Japan (Miso), and from the U.S. to Korea (Sungwoo) during our teaching career.

Figure 1 summarizes our career trajectories. Eunhae had seven years of informal teaching experience and taught English at an elementary school full-time for five months in Korea before joining the Ph.D. program in the U.S. At the beginning of this study, she began teaching a college-level English as a second language (ESL) writing course for the first time in her life as part of her Ph.D. assistantship. Miso had served in several informal teaching positions in Korea before formally starting her college-level teaching career in the U.S. in August 2014. She taught first-year writing, intensive English, and ESL-related courses part-time there, then moved to Japan to begin her professorship in April 2020. Finally, Sungwoo had the longest career, including 6.5 years as a software development staff member at an IT startup and an English education company in Korea, three years of teaching as a Ph.D. student in the U.S., and seven years of semester-by-semester adjuncting back in Korea. In August 2019, Sungwoo’s status changed to a three-year contract-based lecturer at a Korean university.

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Figure 1.

Each participant’s career trajectories.

2 Data generation and analysis

The data generated included biweekly individual multimodal narratives and meeting transcripts. We wrote individual multimodal narratives on what we experienced as teachers during the two-week period. Each narrative was approximately two to four pages long and frequently included photos of our everyday experiences. We uploaded the narratives 24 hours prior to the meetings, read each other’s writings, and joined the two-hour meeting in which we shared our experiences and emotions, asked for help and advice from each other, and exchanged opinions on topics that emerged from our conversations. In the meeting, we verbalized our dissonances and sought feedback from other participants. Such interactive data allowed us to analyse how we facilitated each other’s professional development, interweaving personal narratives and collective discussions with them. The narratives and transcriptions of biweekly meetings captured vivid and intense cognitive/emotional dissonances when they happened, such as embarking on a first-ever college teaching job or relocating to teach in a new country during the Covid-19 pandemic. Such ‘raw’ data allowed us to analyse identity development as we experienced them, rather than reconstructing them later. This concurrent approach allowed us to capture the moment-by-moment dynamics of identity negotiation. All meetings were held via Zoom (video conference software) and were video-recorded and transcribed.

Acknowledging Keleş’s (2022) criticism that (C)AE studies in applied linguistics might have been overlooking the influences of power imbalance in the workplace and academia, we describe our relationships in detail. All of us were not in formal institutional relationships (e.g., advisor-advisee, teacher-student, or colleagues at the same institution), which allowed us to confide in each other during the meeting relatively safely. Although our ages and years of teaching experience differ, we all agree that our relationship has been collegial, because we could not exert pressure on each other (e.g. grade). It is reflected in the term we used: ‘-ssam’ (a short form for ‘teacher’ in Korean), a friendly and egalitarian title for addressing all teachers in Korea. We decided the authorship solely by who initiated the study and wrote the majority of the manuscript.

The research project was ongoing at the time this manuscript was written. For this manuscript, we included the data generated from August 2019 to December 2020. The total number of meeting transcripts and narratives included in the current analysis is 30 and 90, respectively.

We followed the six phases of thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) to identify the dissonances inductively and to examine the process for resolving them, powered by ATLAS.ti 8. We first familiarized ourselves with the data by reading through the transcripts and narratives several times, jotting down our initial impressions, and discussing them during the meetings. Based on the discussions, we generated initial codes and kept revising them as the data accumulated and new codes emerged. After we finalized the codebook, we analyzed the codes relevant to this project’s topics: cognitive/emotional dissonances, resolutions, and identity negotiations. We first generated an ethnoarray (Abramson et al., 2018) on our data using ATLAS.ti and Excel, which visually indicated the density of each code during each meeting. A portion of the ethnoarray is presented in Figure 2.

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Figure 2.

A portion of the ethnoarray.

We examined the ethnoarray together to see the patterns across all three participants and revisited the raw data iteratively to confirm the patterns we found. Upon reviewing various topics that emerged, we defined and named three themes: (1) interacting with students and preparing lesson materials; (2) undergoing transnational movement and transition to new positions; and (3) securing stable positions, grappling with socioeconomic issues, and dealing with precarity. We discuss each of them in the following section.

1 Eunhae’s narrative: A novice teacher learning to teach within a supportive network

The first dissonance that I experienced was in teaching an academic writing class at the undergraduate level. I went from working as a K-6 English instructor in Korea to a first-time college-level ESL writing instructor and first-year Ph.D. student in the U.S. This incident brought about a transition to a new role and new identity.

I began my first-ever college teaching job at the beginning of this CAE study and experienced intense cognitive/emotional dissonance. I used highly emotion-laden words to describe my experiences, such as ‘fearful’ (M1_T_08/28/19) ¹ ; ‘It’s beyond my limit’ (M3_T_09/25/19); ‘I felt like I got waterbombed all of a sudden’ (M5_T_11/06/19); ‘I felt like my energy was draining’ (M6_N_11/27/19); ‘I was about to burst into tears’ (M6_N_11/27/19). In retrospect, this dissonance mainly originated from the following factors: (1) I had had almost no formal teaching experience in higher education but was assigned to teach a course; (2) I was highly anxious about interacting with students on the spot; and (3) I thought I lacked pedagogical content knowledge. Excerpt 1 illustrates these points. I expressed concerns about controlling the class, giving clear and natural directions, and interacting with students face-to-face:

Excerpt 1:

I lost control of my class. Three to four students sit in the front, but all others sit in the back, and their eyes are fixed on their laptops [. . .] My students and I are like, ‘Let’s do our job and leave here as soon as possible,’ not like teaching and learning something. I can’t deliver my instructions clearly. I get awkward, so I just put my PowerPoint up and start to read. I’m not in control of my class, so I can’t make any changes. I prepare learning materials and activities, but [. . .] when I see my students’ faces, I just can’t. It’s never easy. (M3_T_09/25/2019)

I expressed frustration with my classes and experienced a loss of control, sensing that my instruction was not being delivered, which made me feel out of place. The manifestations of such cognitive/emotional dissonance led to feelings of powerlessness and burnout.

These dissonances, fortunately, were resolved through mediation. Although the emotional distress was intense, I could ask for help nearby and use it as an opportunity to grow further. I came to those growing moments through a mediation process reflected in my data which indicated steady progress, from an over-anxious novice to a moderately confident teacher. My intense distress was what first motivated me to seek help and mediation from various people, including my senior colleague, my supervisor, Sungwoo, and Miso. During my first weeks of teaching, my senior colleague shared all of their teaching materials with me, but they confused me more than they helped me because I did not understand the rationale behind the materials. However, I asked for my supervisor’s help, observed more-experienced teachers’ classes, and shared my problems during our meetings. My supervisor provided developmentally appropriate mediation, including how to respond to students’ classroom utterances naturally, designing classroom materials relevant to each major assignment, using simple examples to introduce new concepts, speaking slowly and using pauses, and dealing with students’ complaints. Sungwoo and Miso also provided some mediation during our CAE meetings. Excerpt 2 is one instance of on-the-spot mediation that took place right after my turn in Excerpt 1:

Excerpt 2:

Miso: All teachers have different styles. He [Eunhae’s friend] is pretty bold and has a ‘so what?’ kind of style. His [Miso’s friend] style is expert-ish, I mean, he is super knowledgeable in his field, so he claims expertise, and all students agree with that. I’m not that bold, but I’m like a friend. If a student is doodling on a worksheet, I just approach her and say, ‘Is it fun?’ Then she puts it away. It’s a friendly way. I found my style in this way. It’s like finding your fashion style. If clothes don’t suit you well, you’ll be in trouble.

Sungwoo: It is difficult to teach well on the first try. What’s important is to know when to create tension and when to release it. If you need to explain something, get everyone’s attention tight. If there’s no need to do so, release it. Of course, it is difficult, especially when you teach for the first time. It’s like rhythm [. . .] It’s difficult for students to concentrate on the class all the time. Find your own style. (M3_T_09/25/2019)

I gradually considered the suggestions and tried out new methods. I set a more detailed classroom policy, used more specific instruction methods, repeated my instructions several times, and attempted to remain calm whenever I faced unexpected problems. I thought, ‘my instruction is still vague [. . .] but even when I feel like, ah, “today’s a complete failure,” it is important to let go of that feeling and resume explaining what I meant to say’ (M10_N_02/13/20); ‘Last semester, I said, “Turn in your first draft,” but this semester, I wrote “The first draft should be 70% of your final draft, which should be at least 500 words,” and I felt I was giving more specific instructions’ (M15_N_04/23/20). During my third semester of teaching, I felt that my teaching was, indeed, meaningful. When ‘a student asked which section I teach next semester because he wanted to recommend my class to his friend,’ I came to realize that ‘My three semesters of teaching were like group work; everyone helped me out’ (M28_N_11/15/20). With mediation from advanced peers, along with my students’ supportive moves, I developed my skills to manage my class and interact with students in my own style.

Unlike two other teachers, however, I experienced less tension and less socioeconomic precarity moving to another country. Although teaching and studying in another country and in another language was daunting, this was easily resolved by the supportive network where I could socialize in the new community, talk to my supervisor, and share my concerns in CAE meetings. Moreover, the graduate program provided assistantship to doctoral students for 10 months, and I struggled less with precarious feelings. Although I was not ready to greet summer without any funding during Covid-19, the department provided a part-time position for graduate students, and I worked as a diligent research assistant who persistently puts in extra efforts.

My dissonances were easily resolved because the dissonances were mainly classroom-level, and responsive mediation was effective. My supervisor, colleagues, and two other participants in this study readily responded to my dissonances and provided responsive mediation on my concerns. Although some of this assistance was not helpful (e.g. sharing all lesson materials with me), my supervisor helped me deliver clearer instructions several times, and Miso and Sungwoo helped me find my own teaching style. I was in ‘good hands’; that is, I had access to a supportive network full of experienced teachers who provided assistance tailored to my zone of proximal development. Furthermore, the dissonances turned into growth points for me to develop more self-efficacy as a teacher. In other words, I gradually learned to self-regulate (Vygotsky, 1978) my teaching practices and stabilize my identity as still a novice, but one who is a reasonably self-confident teacher.

2 Miso’s narrative: Transnational migration, sense of estrangement, and identity (re)negotiation

I don’t belong to America, Korea, nor Japan [. . .] I’m a whole person, but I feel like I am sliced up, and my sliced selves [function] differently [in each country]. (M20_N_07/10/20)

As I scribbled this sentence onto my biweekly narrative, I had no clue about where I was standing. I was a sixth-year Ph.D. student on the job market in the U.S. at the beginning of this study (August 2019), successfully landed in a job after a series of repeated failures (January 2020), and moved to Japan to begin my first-ever full-time faculty job (March 2020), even though I had never lived in Japan and rarely spoke Japanese. At first, I was more than thrilled to join the new institution, and all of my colleagues fully welcomed me with tremendous hospitality, as I wrote: ‘In America, I had to do everything by myself, so I supposed I would do the same here in Japan, but my new colleagues already teamed up and came to my rescue’ (M13_N_03/26/20).

However, the rosy dream in March 2020 broke as soon as the Covid-19 pandemic swept the world in April 2020. In my first-ever online academic year, I was left all alone; no one to talk to, nowhere to go, no in-person contact to socialize into a totally new community, and no opportunity to learn the new language and culture. From M14 to M22, I kept sharing three layers of intense emotional dissonance: (1) I was a Korean educated in the U.S., but teaching in Japan without any clue about online classes or Japanese local context; (2) I had highly limited opportunities to learn the new academic system, even though I was a total stranger without anyone to rely on; and (3) I could not cope with the senses of estrangement, loneliness, and depression throughout the lockdown period. In Excerpt 3, I described the dissonance as if I were in a ‘prison without bars’ where ‘everything was collapsing.’

Excerpt 3:

Miso: I was not sure where I belonged [. . .] I might have experienced less identity crisis if I studied in this country and got a job here, but I went here and there [. . .] I feel like I fell between the cracks of all three countries [. . .] I went to a faculty meeting, but I felt devastated. There was no single word I didn’t know, but I didn’t understand what they were saying. It felt like alien words to me. The upcoming fall semester is likely to be online again, and as soon as I heard it, I felt like everything was collapsing around me. It [i.e. my home] felt like a prison without bars [. . .] I wanted to burn it up. (M19_T_06/25/20)

The dissonance intensified as I could not see any way out. If I had had more experience or prior network in Japan, I might have been able to cope with it better; without any of them, I wanted to quit and find another career: ‘If this online thing lasts longer, I think I would need to quit with no regrets. I have spent all of my twenties [in graduate school] but I ended up becoming a cyber teacher. How frustrating. But quitting may be better than continuing’ (M20_07_10_20).

In desperation, I developed workarounds to relieve the distress by trying to socialize in both academic and non-academic communities, as well as pick up Japanese to interact with students during synchronous classes more often. Acknowledging the Covid-19-related limitations, I ventured out to befriend colleagues and make academic acquaintances during online conferences (M16, M17, M20, M29). I also tried to socialize in other communities, such as Korean communities in Japan and my local community center, both of which provided me with in-person spaces to breathe (M24, M25). Finally, I pushed myself hard to pick up Japanese to communicate with my students more smoothly (M27, M29). Although none of these efforts resolved the root of my identity crisis, I was, at least, able to relieve the intensity of the emotional dissonances and regain inner strength to teach. If my identity as a new professor did not function well enough, I could turn to my other identities. I could be a trusted friend in the Korean community, a new participant in the local community center, and a hard-working student in the Japanese class. All of them shaped who I am; I did not have to be defined solely by my teaching identity.

Excerpt 4:

I glanced through a book called Professional development in applied linguistics. It suggested defining what success meant to me: ‘A first step in coming to grips with this fact is to define what success means to you. When should you go about defining success? Early and often’ (Larsson et al., 2020, p. 53) [. . .] I always wanted to learn, teach, and write. It doesn’t have to be a college teaching job, and it doesn’t have to be an academic paper [. . .] If I define success this way, I have always succeeded, and I always will. I will be always learning, teaching, and writing regardless of where I live, unless I get a superpower and start working as a petroleum engineer. (M26_N_10/03/20)

In Excerpt 4, I recalled why I chose this profession (‘I always wanted to learn, teach, and write’) and realized that I always succeeded and always would. Although I was still caught between three countries and did not interact with new colleagues and students face to face, I found ways to motivate myself. Finally, during M28, I declared, ‘I came to realize that my vocation is teaching’ (M28_N_11/15/20). Although no one could help me resolve the dissonance, other aspects of my life gave me the courage to continue and define my success again. Identity negotiation is a lifelong process – and what I learned throughout this dissonance was how to respect, nurture, and live with all of my identities.

3 Sungwoo’s narrative: A precarious adjunct teacher’s search for alternative identities

During the period of our collaborative dialogue, I encountered a series of unexpected events, through which I needed to reorient and reposition my identities as a teacher. As all my colleagues did, I faced a challenge in transitioning to online classes due to the unprecedented crisis of the global Covid-19 pandemic. As a person who deeply appreciates the beauty of face-to-face interactions, I was frustrated by the fact that I could not enjoy the co-presence with my students. This initial anxiety subsided quickly to a new strand of pedagogical explorations while I tried to marshal diverse affordances and balance asynchronous and synchronous classes. Along the way, our bi-weekly gatherings served as a firm relief, assuring me that I was not the only one who was struggling in the tempestuous era. Just being aware that we were getting through the tough times together created a soothing space.

However, dissonances in my professional identity were still raging. As a fixed-time university lecturer, I struggled to secure stable positions, grappling with socioeconomic issues and precarity. I would never define myself merely as an adjunct in its literal sense, which refers to ‘something added to a more important thing,’ as I was certain I had been contributing to the educational communities where I belonged. However, my institutional status largely constrained my life as a knowledge worker. Excerpt 5 shows this conflict between ‘an epistemological stance as a teacher’ and ‘an ontological angst as a human,’ so to speak.

Excerpt 5:

I strongly felt that I was doing relevant work, but located at the periphery. I also felt that my job was fun, but I was on the border. Along with these feelings, I found myself pondering upon my conflicting identities. Basically, people tend to see me doing things ‘at the center,’ but I had to accept a position with a yearly contract which can only be extended for a maximum of three years. Before that, I had to renew my contract on a semester basis. I was not sure whether I would be assigned classes the next semester. Along with those kinds of mixed identities – both at the center and at the periphery – I came to assume my conflicting identities, I think. Recently, I often think that I must take these dual identities with me for the rest of my life. I might not get a secure job outside academia. I guess I would not be able to teach classes at universities as I get old. I thought much about this kind of thing during the break. (M22_T_07/10/20)

The low job security and salary for adjuncts and lecturers are a grave socioeconomic issue in Korea as in most countries. Although temporary lecturers deliver 33.6% of the entire courses in Korea (Higher Education in Korea, 2020), they are typically paid 66,000 KRW (approximately 58.12 in USD) per hour (Ministry of Education, 2020). The amended law, enabling 3-year contracts while leaving the level of wages untouched, was still far too insufficient for stabilizing adjuncts’ lives.

This structural inequality directly affected my life and constantly intensified my cognitive, emotional, and even physical dissonances (for a detailed account of the emotional experiences and institutional challenges faced by an adjunct, see Dubson, 2022). To secure a minimum living wage, I had to teach as many courses as possible, deliver public lectures, and write books for public consumption. Juggling all these activities left me no time to write papers and apply for a tenure-track job, which demands a long list of publications. While I was well aware of the problem, I was unable to escape from the vicious cycle. ‘I had lived a precarious life, getting my contract on a semester basis, and nothing was set in stone for the upcoming semester’ (M19_T_6/25/20). I felt like it was perpetual and ever-renewing, like the curse of Sisyphus.

Out of this double bind, I had to develop a new mode of identity. I was slowly realizing that these dual identities will remain an integral part of me for my whole life. I began to actively seek alternative roles as a writer and public intellectual. In addition to two books I had previously written for a public audience, I co-authored another on the fast-changing ecology of multiliteracies (from M5 to M14). I eagerly accepted invitations to give talks at high schools, colleges, local libraries, and English teachers’ associations (e.g. M2, 5, 9, 10, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 26, 28). Although none of these activities carried much value in tenure-track applications, I could feel rewarded and satisfied with my new journey.

Along the way, I began to realize that getting a tenure-track job is not the one and only way to establish my identity as a successful teacher-scholar. One catalyst for this realization came from the experience in which I fused my scholarly knowledge of literacy and power in writing a trade book:

This one-year-long project [i.e. publishing a public-oriented book on multiliteracies] is meaningful in itself while it is not a publication in a top-tier journal [. . .] Now I need to meet and organize people, and create my own stories. (M9_T_1/30/20)

I chose to carry on with the weight of several sets of seemingly conflicting stances towards my life, creating my own mantra that says, ‘ambivalence is not an exceptional state of mind; rather, it is one of the most natural, and even creative, cognitive, emotional, and social states in my life.’ Excerpt 6 illustrates this attitude in a clear manner.

Excerpt 6:

I realize that two thoughts co-exist within me. One is that my life, as of now, is neither bad nor great, but I am doing just fine. The other is that ‘inferiority’ is still lingering in me [. . .] As always, there’s no final answer. There’s no exit either. I have reached a conclusion: striking a balance in my daily life is important, not belittling myself is crucial, and remembering that the colleagues with whom I can share these thoughts are valuable. (M23_N_08/21/20)

As this excerpt attests, my life is ‘neither bad nor great.’ I still feel a sense of ‘inferiority’ from time to time, but willingly admit that ‘there’s no final answer.’ I recognize that to strike ‘a balance’ in my daily life is important while the ultimate, secure balance will never come. I am undergoing the same pressure as before, but that is perfectly okay. I cross the borders of academia and am eager to explore the wider world.