title: Identity and Technology Integration: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis Study of English for Academic Purposes Lecturers at a European University
Creators: name: Radfordarrow, Maryjane
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2022

description: Teachers across a wide range of educational, geographic and practice contexts are being confronted with technologies that have the potential to both disrupt and transform their classrooms, relationship to students, and their own understandings of themselves as professionals. As educational technologies become more integrated into the teaching and learning of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) at universities, developing better understandings of why and in what ways teachers implement and use them can support this integration in constructive ways for both teachers and learners. This thesis explores the idea that interrogating teachers’ ideas about who they are, their identities, may shed light on how they perceive, engage with, and choose whether and to what extent to adopt technologies in the context of their educational practice. This approach may also be useful in supporting EAP teachers’ learning and integration of technology in ways that enhance their practice and relationships to students. Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), this study explores the experiences of university EAP teachers using Moodle in their teaching practice. It seeks to develop a clearer understanding of the identities they construct within the context of the language centre of a large European research university. This research also explores the construct of identity as a means of understanding educational technology adoption and use, an approach that has not been widely explored to date, as well as the usefulness of IPA as a methodology suitable for interrogating such experiences within the field of Education. Over the course of a single semester, six EAP teachers took part in focus groups and individual interviews and provided written narratives through which they shared their experiences and individual journeys, their aspirations, frustrations, and changes in their teaching practices. Using IPA data analysis, these narratives together were used to create idiographic sketches of each participant and to develop a detailed analysis of both convergence and divergence of themes across the participants. The study found that participants’ experience of educational technology is always viewed in light of their teaching practices and their relationships to students. It also suggests that professional precarity and beliefs in unsubstantiated myths such as the “digital native” may constitute barriers to teachers’ educational technology integration. These findings support a useful role for identity, conceived as a holistic model incorporating various aspects of a teacher’s being and doing, in not only understanding but also supporting these technology-related practices. The results generate recommendations for practice, including first and foremost that professional learning and support for technology integration begin with teachers, their ideas about themselves, and their concrete practices rather than the technologies themselves.