collaborative-autoethnography
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- PaperTESOL Quarterly12 Jul 2026
Language Teacher Educator Identity, Wellbeing and Agency Nested in a Community of Practice: A Collaborative Autoethnography
Yasemin Tezgiden‐Cakcak, Aycan Demir‐Ayaz, Işıl Günseli Kaçar
Three language teacher educators in Türkiye used collaborative autoethnography to examine how their community of practice (CoP) helped them navigate identity tensions, boost wellbeing, and enhance agency. The study reconceptualizes the identity-wellbeing-agency triangle as a mutual, recursive process nested in a CoP, showing how such spaces empower educators in neoliberal academia.
Original abstract
In this collaborative autoethnography, we, as three university‐based language teacher educators in Türkiye, explore how our community of practice (CoP) acted as a catalyst in navigating our identity tensions, boosting our wellbeing and contributing to our agency. Grounded in Wenger's (2009) framework of CoP, we embarked on a critical journey of navigating the tensions between our aspired and assigned identities as teacher educators in a dialogic and reflective third space of a CoP. The collegial space of our CoP enabled us to enact our agency and nurtured our wellbeing, embracing us in a safety net of solidarity and empowering us professionally in neoliberal academia. Conceptualizing the identity–wellbeing–agency triangle as a mutual, recursive and interdependent process nested in a CoP, this study showcases how LTEs reclaim their legitimacy, nourish their wellbeing and enact their agency in a safe dialogic space. Such a reconceptualization may bring new insights to LTEs in different contexts.