An Interview With Peter De Costa on Language Teacher Emotions and Identities

The goal of this research brief is to explore Peter De Costa's insights into the complex interplay between language teacher identity (LTI) and emotions, highlighting the evolving trends in research, the implications for teacher preparation, and the need for culturally responsive pedagogies in the global TESOL landscape. The insights and perspectives shared in this research brief are drawn from our interview conducted on April 17, 2024. Our interview began with De Costa's reflection on the evolving and dynamic nature of LTI, emphasizing how teachers navigate their roles, relationships, and professional contexts while being shaped by broader sociohistorical and ideological forces. When asked about earlier studies on LTI, De Costa highlighted two special journal issues, De Costa and Norton (2017) and Varghese et al. (2016), as recent examples that built on the earlier LTI work. Describing the current state of LTI research as “healthy” and “diversifying,” De Costa referenced recent books by Hiratsuka (2024) and Ku (2023), which examine LTI in relation to beliefs and emotions. Then, he emphasized, “People are starting to realize that they just cannot look at identities in isolation; they need to examine LTI in relation to other constructs, whether it be beliefs or emotions.” This perspective is reflected in Wolff and De Costa (2017), his very first piece that explored teacher emotions in conjunction with LTI. He also noted that race remains a significant aspect of identity that appears to have “captured the imagination of a lot of people” in LTI work. He pointed to Melo-Pfeifer and Tavares (2024) as a good example of research examining the interrelated aspects of LTI, ideology, and ethnicity. Many teachers work in multilingual settings, but they are constrained by standard English monolingual ideologies. That can be very stressful if they themselves are former English learners but now find themselves having to work with multilingual learners under top-down monolingual ideology conditions that often restrict their pedagogical practices. These ideological conditions may sometimes be something of their own creation in that teachers overcompensate to some extent and end up imposing their own monolingual ideology conditions. In addition, sometimes they may also [wrongly] buy into an English native-speakerist ideology that espouses that the best English teachers have to be native speakers of the language. Because of this, we need to factor in ideologies into the teacher education landscape. De Costa argued that teacher emotions warrant further investigation because they are also culturally and discursively shaped and closely linked to social contexts and power structures (De Costa et al. 2018). He put forward the idea of “emotion as pedagogy,” explaining, “Just as identity functions as pedagogy, where a teacher's sense of self influences their teaching approach, emotions also play a fundamental role in shaping how educators interact with students and engage in their teaching practices.” He then proposed thinking about a “pedagogy of hope” and a “pedagogy of resilience” by recommending the scholarship on positive psychology (which includes key aspects such as well-being and grit) by Sarah Mercer, Tammy Gregersen, Peter MacIntyre, and Christina Gkonou, among others. Think about a veteran teacher, who, as a result of years of experience, is able to bank and build this emotional capital in terms of resilience. They are not easily swayed by students who themselves might be emotional. So, a teacher who has developed emotional capital will be able to resist and weather challenges that might emerge at the workplace. Some teachers might be non-White, and multilingual as opposed to a lot of teachers in the United States right now, who tend to be female, White, and (English) monolingual. Teachers should be aware that power is an important feature in the classroom and that certain teachers often have more power over their multilingual students. This awareness is important for both White and non-White teachers, and we need to keep in mind that some of the non-White teachers were probably ESL learners themselves. I think this can be very helpful because non-White, multilingual teachers would have encountered similar emotional and identity tensions that their multilingual students might be currently facing, and they would need to draw on their own past emotional and identity experiences to design pedagogy. Discussing the growing diversity and complexity of TESOL, De Costa stressed the need for teacher preparation programs to “adapt to different cultural and educational settings, as effective teaching varies across contexts.” He illustrated this with a case from his study, Wolff and De Costa (2017), where Puja—a teacher from Bangladesh—was revered as a “God” in her home country but was reduced to a “helper” in the United States. De Costa stressed, “Teachers need to realize that their identities are not stable; they change with educational contexts and settings.” De Costa also underscored the importance of contextualizing educational issues, noting that while “race is a very important issue in the United States, social status might be more prominently featured in classrooms elsewhere.” He cautioned against the assumption that a race-focused pedagogy that is effective in the United States would be equally relevant or appropriate in other teaching contexts. Hence, he highlighted the need to “avoid a one-size-fits-all approach” and instead adapt to specific cultural and social contexts. It is important that we realize that language policy specifically can start from all three levels. They might start as a bottom-up process at the classroom level, but they could also start in a top-down direction in terms of a national language policy that subsequently trickles down to the meso-school level and then finally into the micro-classroom level. What teachers or teacher educators need to do is to center language policy understandings in their curriculum. It is important to teach skills like teaching reading, speaking, grammar, and all that, but teacher preparation programs also need to add a broader dimension in their curricula, a more socio-political element. This is because language learning and language teaching are impacted by sociopolitical issues. For example, a government might sanction the acquisition of a given language that does not belong to a dominant group in society. By issuing such an educational directive by way of creating a new language policy, for example an English-only policy, the acquisition of minority languages and their actual use in language classrooms would be curtailed. This policy decision would have a direct impact on the identities and emotions of teachers and learners whose first language (L1) might be a non-dominant language such as Arabic. The minoritization of their home language could result in a sense of identity invalidation and trigger a slew of emotions ranging from shame to pride with respect to the use of their L1 by this group of teachers and learners. Thus, by incorporating an ecological perspective into language teacher education programs, teachers will become aware of the importance of being familiar with not just language and education policies but also see how these policies might impact schools, and, by extension, shape teacher and learner identities and emotions. It is very important to think about how developments like translanguaging and decolonizing pedagogies are ultimately connected to identity and emotion research. For example, if I am a teacher who translanguages, what does that say about how I negotiate my different linguistic identities? How does that impact how I deal with the emotions of my students and my own emotions? If you are looking at emotions, for example, they need to expose themselves to different perspectives. For example, positive psychology is one area of investigating emotions, and it is a very valid and established line of inquiry. But there is also a critical approach to investigating emotions. What new applied linguists need to do is to expose themselves to different perspectives and then decide which approach better appeals to them. Sometimes if you start on one track and stay on that track, then you are oblivious to parallel developments that might be taking place. In research, we are always talking about how one needs to track identity and emotion change over space and time. So, if you do not have that longitudinal element to your work, that could be problematic. You will shortchange yourself of the potential richness that could come with your research site, or of the potentially rich data that you could otherwise get from your participants. There is no easy solution, but if this challenge is addressed, I think more meaningful contributions to the field in the long term will be made.