EFL Teachers’ Identity Construction through a Reflection Consciousness-Raising Interactive Workshop

Abstract

As part of a large-scale project, the current qualitative study investigated the possible contribution of a consciousness-raising interactive workshop (as a form of professional development activity) to 30) 22 female and 8 male) Iranian EFL teachers' professional identity construction. Thirty Iranian EFL teachers were asked to write two reflective journals (one individually and one collectively) before and two others after they attended an eight-session interactive workshop on Reflective Journal Writing (RJW). The workshop aimed at raising their consciousness of RJW based on the framework proposed by Richards (1995) and the journal content guide developed by Soodmand Afshar (in press). Subsequently, in order to demonstrate how the consciousness-raising interactive workshop contributed to the participants' professional identity construction, interviews were conducted with them. The data collected were analyzed through the grounded-theory approach and qualitative content analysis. The results indicated that the workshop contributed to the participants' professional identity construction in various ways which are discussed at length in the paper.