Forgive me, Baby!: Applied theatre, spirituality, and teacher identity work in EFL teaching

This article, based on an autoethnographic doctoral study, explores how applied theatre and Catholic spirituality influence teacher identity in English as a foreign language (EFL) in Vietnamese higher education. Situated within the field of sociology of education, it centres on my experience as a Vietnamese Catholic male EFL lecturer who wrote and directed an explicitly anti-abortion one-act monologue, Forgive Me, Baby! , performed by a student in a secular university. Using relational and evocative autoethnography, I reflect on critical incidents around this project to show how faith, emotions, and artistic practice connect with institutional rules and cultural expectations in a socialist, religiously diverse context. The analysis shows how Catholic teachings about care for vulnerable lives, together with applied theatre practice, changed my understanding of professionalism, vocation, gendered vulnerability, and care. It also shows the conflicts and risks that arise when a performance with strong moral messages about abortion is staged with students, raising issues about power, whether students freely agree to take part, and how their different moral beliefs are treated. I suggest that applied theatre and serious reflection on one's faith can challenge narrow, instrumental, purely utilitarian views of language education, but can also create difficult moral problems when teachers bring strong religious beliefs into everyday classroom work. The article adds to discussions on teacher identity, spirituality in education, and arts-based pedagogy by showing how a theatre practice shaped by faith can become a space where teachers reshape who they are, change how they teach, and ask hard moral questions in EFL higher education.