Iranian ELT Student Teachers’ Portrayal of Their Identities as an English Language Teacher: Drawings Speak Louder than Words

This study makes use of visual methodology to achieve insights regarding Iranian ELT student teachers’ professional identities. Accordingly, the researcher makes an attempt to investigate the 51 male-female student teachers’ professional identities through their drawings. Social constructivism, hermeneutics, and grounded theory inspire this study and allow the researcher to make sense of drawings and approach them as texts, which freight meaning to be interpreted. Data analysis based on inductive design led to the emergence of themes that most of the student teachers have reconstructed and developed their identities in the rapid evolving cultural and global context created by the new insights and perspectives of postmodernism. However, in the case of student teachers whose identities have been traditionally shaped, teacher educators are required to provide support through additional instruction, dialogue, feedback, and insights to raise their consciousness about their identities and self.