ABSTRACT
Language teachers inevitably grapple with tensions in their teaching. This has been a fundamental theme interwoven in my thinking and activity as a language teacher educator and as a researcher of language teacher cognition and development. When I embarked on the research adventure known as a dissertation some time ago, I focused on how teachers managed their tensions; the confl icts they experienced regularly in their teaching and interactions with students, in terms of their personal practical knowledge (Golombek, 1998). And as my thinking and activity as both a teacher educator and researcher has been deepened through my engagement with Vygotskian sociocultural theory, I have adopted the more explanatory constructs of dissonance and contradiction to signify the kinds of tensions teachers experience within themselves, as well as between themselves and students, and other actors and goals located in the teaching environment. My contemporary work thus continues this focus on grappling with tensions by exploring how teachers’ emotional and cognitive dissonance in response to classroom activity points to contradictions in feeling, thinking, and doing that can be mediated to promote teacher development (Golombek & Doran, 2014).
