ABSTRACT
I am Canadian and currently live and work in and around Vancouver, British Columbia, but I was born and lived until my late 20s on the Canadian prairies. My fi rst teaching job was with Plains Cree children in a school in a small town in northern Alberta. My second teaching job was teaching English at night school to immigrant adults, many of whom were Chilean refugees after the 1973 coup. I think of the challenges I experienced in both positions as something like knots in entangled yarn, and I have been trying to untangle them ever since: throughout my graduate studies; my PhD dissertation about Swampy Cree-speaking students learning English in northern Ontario; my university teaching of English as an additional language teachers and of Indigenous and heritage language teachers; my research with children learning English at school; my collaborative classroom research with teachers; and most recently, the research I do with my colleague, Diane Dagenais, investigating language and literacy learning through engagement with a variety of digital technologies. Our emphasis in this recent work has not been so much on teachers, but rather on student learning, although teacher experiences are of course a logically necessary direction we will pursue in the future. In this chapter I trace how my thinking on teacher identity and language teaching has evolved along with developments in our fi eld, and with my accumulated experience working with teachers.
