This study investigates the stories of bilingual teachers who have multiple selves, seeing themselves as teacher, immigrant, female, mother, non-native speaker. How these teachers identify and develop their identities through narrative construction, positioning and metaphoric presentation is central to this study. The purpose of this study is to explore tensions between multiple conflicting identities of bilingual teachers with a focus on emotions and to examine the ways in which bilingual teachers construct their professional identities through creation of metaphor in relation to their beliefs, assumptions, thoughts, practice, and contexts.This study examines tensions emerged through identity construction and tension management focusing on bilingual teachers’ emotional complexity. Unfolding how bilingual teachers’ construct their professional identities in their narrative I delineate the multiple selves presented in the narrative such as immigrant identity, teacher identity, acculturator identity, language learner identity, and discuss how the micro and macro contextual factors are relevant to the tensions of multiple selves; for example, the school curriculum and culture, teacher and policy expectation, and teacher’ learning experience. This study also explores how bilingual teacher’s self-created metaphors reveal their perceptions of selves in terms of roles, responsibilities, and beliefs and assumptions in teaching and learning. Metaphor serves as useful means to present abstract ideas and thoughts and such functions of metaphor is employed in understanding teachers’ perceptions of themselves. Through this research, not only do teachers’ metaphors reveal their perception of what teacher is in Korea but also the metaphors uncover individual sense of themselves.
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