The Professional Identity of English Language Teacher Educators in Light of Activity Theoretic Perspective: A Shift from Face-to-Face to Online Courses

With the unavoidable shift in the means of teacher education resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, EFL teacher educators underwent changes of various kinds, not only in how they presented their course material but also in how they perceived themselves in relation to the unprecedented contextual changes. The current study explores the impact of holding online teacher training courses on EFL teacher educators’ identity development from an activity theoretic perspective. To this end, necessary data were collected through a narrative inquiry and semi-structured interviews with 3 EFL teacher educators. Taking the basic components of activity theory into account, the obtained data were thematically analyzed using Merriam’s (2014) three stages of constructing, sorting, and naming categories. Findings revealed that teacher educators’ perceptions of the online learning milieu, regulatory rules governing online classes, practical guidance provided by compeers, online platforms, and new responsibilities assigned to teacher educators in virtual contexts can remarkably impact their professional identity. The results of this study have implications for educational policymakers and teacher educators.