Teacher, why? English teaching and identity navigations

Abstract

Conceiving discourse as an ideological materialization of individual consciousness, this paper tries and investigate teachers’ of English identity navigations in response-videos published in YouTube, informed by the Dialogical Theory of Discourse. Through the scope of Sociocultural Theory, we elicit concepts from the bakhtinian theoretical lens, as well as Bonny Norton’s theorizations on identity in order to create intelligibility about affiliations to imagined communities by the support of a  choir of voices in the concrete utterances under analysis. We perceive the prominence of pathos and of self-fulfillment as traces of alignment onto teacher’s community, in addition to the actualization of meanings regarding the category of teacher vocation. With that, we refract meanings to teacher’s scene in the contemporary Brazilian context.