Teachers’ Identities Manifested In Blogs

Blogs, as an emerging online communication tool, has been widely adopted by people indifferent domains. The popularity of blogs attracts a growing number of teachers to use it.Researchers begin to pay attention to the teachers’ professional identity formation throughblogging. However, all these studies are confined in teachers in elementary and secondaryschools. How college teachers demonstrate their identities through blogging remainsunexplored. This study conducts a comparative study of the identities manifested throughblogging between English and non-English teachers in higher education to find discrepanciesbetween the use of blogs and make suggestions for English teacher in higher education toconstruct teacher’s identity through blogging.This study adopts case study approach and selects one English teacher and twonon-English teachers from Hunan University Distinguished Blog Group as subjects. Data foranalysis includes posts, comments and replies in their blog during one year period fromSeptember,2011to September,2012and transcripts from three interviews with the subject s.Based on grounded theory, the researcher develops a coding scheme from the posts of thebloggers. The study focuses on three questions:1. How do English and non-English teachersuse their blogs?2. What identities of English and non-English teachers are constructedthrough blogging? Are their identities similar to or different from each other?3. How doesblogging provide opportunities for teachers’ identity formation? From analysis, the researcherfinds non-English teachers devote more time and energy in blogging than the English teacher.Teachers all intend to transmit positive emotions through blogging. The three teachers all trytheir best to give feedbacks to students. The non-English teachers demonstrate three identitiesin blogs, namely teacher, citizen and family member. The English teacher manifests teacherand family member identities through blogging. The non-English teachers’ identity isembodied in teacher professionalism, moral education to students and engagement inschool-related issues. The English teacher’s identity is manifested only in moral education tostudents. The researcher also finds blogs function as a reflective tool and a virtual communitybuilding tool for teachers to construct their identities. According to the findings in this study,the researcher provides four implications for English teachers in higher education to constructteacher’s identity through blogging.