While it is not uncommon for teachers to adopt initial teacher identities (Xu, 2012) based, at least partially, on the ways in which they were taught (Lortie, 1975; Tsui, 2007), novice teachers often experience identity-disrupting moments when their imagined identities (Barkhuizen, 2016; Xu, 2012) formed as pre-service teachers do not align with the lived realities of their classrooms (e.g., Li, 2016; Said, 2014). In his theorization of Communities of Practice, Wenger (1998) argued that identities are negotiated at the intersection of the individual and the social world (Nasir & Cooks, 2009); this intersection for teachers is often characterized by the dissonance teachers feel between who they perceive themselves to be and who they think they need to become to be teachers.This dissertation project, entitled C324 [ssam] I am, is an (auto)ethnographic and longitudinal case study of novice teacher identity negotiations in which I partnered with 10 first-time English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers in South Korea, asking (1) How do first-time teachers come to identify as teachers?, and (2) How can a teacher's community support them in the process of negotiating this identity? Over the course of this study, participating teachers performed a number of different identities, included imagined and enacted teacher identities as well as teacher-researcher and teacher-author identities. Across the three phases of the dissertation study, participating teachers and I generated data in myriad forms, including one-on-one interviews; small-group conversations among participating teachers; monthly reflections on a shared blog; observational field notes generated as participants taught in their EFL classrooms; and teaching artifacts in the form of student work, lesson plans, written reflections, etc.Following a three-piece dissertation model, the first two articles of this dissertation take the form of ethnographic case studies, a research method that recognizes the messy complexity of human experience (Erickson, 1986) and allows the researcher to construct cases to story these lived experiences (Dyson & Genishi, 2005). Article 1, entitled "I teach, but I'm no teacher": Identity Negotiations of a Sojourning EFL Teacher in South Korea, explored the dissonance caused when an imagined teacher identity fell apart.Article 2, entitled Here ghost nothing: A Novice EFL Teacher's Letter to the Ghosts that Haunt Them, used Derrida's (1994, 2002) theories of hauntology and hospitality as a theoretical lens to explore the ways in which another novice EFL teacher engaged with their insecurities and self-doubts, asking: What do these feelings have to teach me? Article 3-coauthored with five participating teachers from the larger study-borrowed from collaborative autoethnographic (Chang, 2013; Chang, Ngunjiri, & Hernandez, 2013) and self-study (Barak, 2015; Samaras, 2010) methodologies to demonstrate the power of community in the negotiation of one's teacher identity. In Collaborative Negotiations of Teacher Identity: A Study of Self in Six Voices, we join a medley of scholars (e.g., Barak, 2015; Hamiloglu, 2014; Sarasa & Porta, 2018) to stress the positive impact of shared reflection in navigating the development of a teacher identity. The identities performed in this dissertation-those of imagined, enacted, and socially negotiated teacher identities as well as emerging teacher-researcher identities-suggest the power of validation that comes from hearing "You are not alone" and call for a community of support approach to teacher education.
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