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Age, Gender and Language Teacher Identity: Narratives from Higher Education

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Abstract

This qualitative study, which uses a narrative inquiry approach, presents data from in-depth interviews with participants teaching English in higher education in Japan. It adopts a poststructuralist lens, conceptualising age as socially constructed, and uses this framework to analyse four cases. It reports on the social construction of their teacher identities, in particular how their gender identities influence the enactment of their age identities. This enactment takes place both in and out of classrooms. The central thesis of the article is that age identity was constructed differently for the male and female teachers and was constructed to the disadvantage of the female teachers throughout their professional lives.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to wholeheartedly thank the participants, reviewers and special edition editors. This article has been greatly improved due to their generous contributions of time and effort.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

    Sarah Louise Mason & Alice Chik

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  1. Sarah Louise Mason
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  2. Alice Chik
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Correspondence to Sarah Louise Mason.

Ethics declarations

All procedures performed in this study were in accordance with the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research 2007, (updated July 2018), [Section 5.2.22].

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

This study was conducted after receiving approval from the Human Sciences Subcommittee of Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Mason, S.L., Chik, A. Age, Gender and Language Teacher Identity: Narratives from Higher Education. Sexuality & Culture 24, 1028–1045 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-020-09749-x

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