Introduction In the social sciences, there has been revived interest in the experience of self in cultural, historical and political contexts, and identity has become a buzz word in research literature in recent years (Block, 2007). In general education, the research on teachers’ identity has been fruitful, showing a wide range of research foci and methodological approaches (see Beauchamp & Thomas, 2009; Beijaard, Meijer, & Verloop, 2004). In TESOL, however, the research on language teachers’ identities has not received overt attention until recently (Clarke, 2009; Barkhuizen, 2009; Tsui, 2007). This paper looks at how an EFL teacher (Hui) negotiates her identity to adapt to the ‘new work order’ (Gee & Lankshear, 1995) in a university department in China. From a narrative inquiry perspective, it aims to illuminate the complexity of teacher identity in the reform context where teachers need to reconcile conflicting selves in order to contend with a workplace in which liberal and traditional pedagogies coexist. Review of Literature A survey of the literature on language teacher identity generates no more than a dozen studies, which confirms the paucity of research in this area. Most of these studies are premised on a poststructuralist view on identity (Norton, 2000), which claims that teachers’ professional identity is often challenged because of their linguistic, racial, sexual and ethnic backgrounds. An emerging line of research on language teacher identity in the past couple of years, however, focuses on language teachers’ experience in educational reforms (e.g. Clarke, 2009; Tsui, 2007). These studies have reflected the globalization process where developing countries try to implement a world model of schooling featuring liberal pedagogy (Anderson-Levitt, 2003). A common situation in this process is what has been called ‘competing pedagogies’ in this research, where both traditional and liberal pedagogical systems operate in the same institution. Within such a context, it is suggested that teachers need to change their identity to cope with different challenges in the workplace and the complexity of this process still remains to know.

Research Methodology: Narrative Inquiry As Clandinin and Connelly (2000: 188) note, “we came to narrative inquiry as a way to study experience.” Thus narrative inquiry has been considered as an appropriate research strategy to examine teachers’ identity experience. An explicit narrative theorization of identity is made by Sfard and Prusak (2005) who propose that the significant narratives about a person can be split into those presenting an expected state of affairs (designated identity) and those about the actual state of affairs (actual identities). Learning, therefore, can be seen as a process of closing the ‘gap’ between different identities in a nexus of social relationships. Based on this framework, the research views narrative inquiry as both a phenomenon (storied identity experience) and a method (the process of ‘restoreying’) (see also Xu & Connelly, 2009).

Findings Hui was included in the community to be transformed into a liberal, but she struggled to find her footing throughout the year. The asymmetrical power relationships within the community, which led to the non-negotiability of meanings (Tsui, 2007), finally resulted in her being excluded from the community. The findings show that, in the context of competing discourses, teachers’ identity changes or shifts as a result of competition between teachers’ actual and designated identities. Teachers’ inclusion in or exclusion from the community, as Hui’s case indicates, depends on whether the gap between these different identities can be bridged through negotiation and whether the teachers’ strategies of self-positioning are grounded in a sense of security in the community. One implication for educational reforms is to recognize identity shifting as an essential process in teacher development. To facilitate this process, both participation and non-participation should be valued, since exclusion from one community may entail new opportunities for inclusion in other communities. What’s more, the critical position of negotiation between teachers’ actual and designated identities entails the necessity of creating supportive collegiate communities of practice.