Reclaiming Professional Identity: Empowering Novice Second Language Teachers Through Narrative Practices

This study examines how peer support groups contribute to professional identity development and agency among novice second language teachers navigating the challenges of early career teaching. Grounded in Foucault’s modes of objectification—which included dividing practices, classification through universal truths, and subjectification ( Foucault, 1983 )—and the cultivation of positive narrative approaches to teacher identity, it explores how teachers use storytelling and collaborative reflection to resist institutional and societal discourses that marginalize language education. Drawing on qualitative case study data from a virtual peer support group of four early-career language teachers, findings show that participants used storytelling to reinterpret experiences of isolation, curricular devaluation, and unrealistic expectations of self-sacrifice. Through these narrative practices, they reframed challenges as systemic rather than personal, constructing more agentive and sustainable understandings of themselves as educators. Their “efficacy narratives” provided a means to reclaim professional legitimacy and align their pedagogical values with communicative, culturally sustaining approaches to language teaching. Although the peer support group served as a powerful space for identity negotiation, findings also reveal that raciolinguistic and colonial hierarchies continue to shape teachers’ experiences—even within supportive communities. The study concludes that peer-based narrative spaces promote agency and professional growth but must also attend to structural inequities embedded in educational systems. Implications extend to teacher education policy and practice, emphasizing alumni engagement, collaborative reflection, and narrative inquiry as strategies for sustaining novice teachers’ confidence, well-being, and commitment to equitable language education.