A Study Of Teacher-learners’ Identities In An Online Learning Community: The CLEN

In recent years, teachers’ development attracts more and more social attention.However, simple teachers training cannot meet their needs. In order to obtain abroader knowledge and more real educational experience, a new kind of learningcommunity of practice appears. In1991, Lave and Wenger proposed the concept of"community of practice". This theory tends to improve gradually. With thedevelopment of technology, educators have put this idea into a real teachers’ networklearning environment to create online learning communities of practice. Teachersparticipate in them to share knowledge, experiences, ask questions and solveproblems.In this study, the three-year-old founder of online learning community of practiceCLEN was selected, teachers in CLEN act as observing subjects in the study, byobserving their identities and changes, exploring their online learning needs,promoting teachers’ professional development. This study tries to answer threequestions:1) What are teacher-learners’ identities in CLEN?2) How areteacher-learners’ identities transformed in CLEN?3) What factors contribute to theirtransformation in CLEN?The study lasts two semesters and employs content analysis and interviews. Itaims to collect and analyze the information of teachers’ learning activities byobserving their blogs and home pages in CLEN, exploring the three questionscombining with Wenger’s identity theory. The results show that:Firstly, there are five identities of teacher learners in the online learningcommunity of practice CLEN: peripheral learners, inbound learners, insider learners,boundary learners and outbound learner. Secondly, during different periods and underdifferent learning environments, the teacher learners have different kinds of identitiestransformations, mainly including: transformation from peripheral learners toboundary learner, transformation from boundary learners to insider learners andtransformation from outbound learners to insider learners. Thirdly, there are variousfactors contributing to teacher learners’ identities transformation in CLEN: theteacher learners’ personal factors (interest, awareness of cooperation, free time),CLEN’s features as a learning environment, the learning modules and resourcesprovided. The findings show that the results can not only help educators to master teachers’learning condition in the online learning community CLEN, also to tap factorscontributing to teachers’ identities transformation, making teachers professionaldevelopment and online learning communities’ promotion.In this study, there are two limitations—the sample teachers’ gender distributionand the research scope of CLEN (only seven female teachers were selected; CLEN asan international teacher learning network platform, currently focused on thedevelopment of the domestic market with no analysis of foreign teachers.