Our Job, Too

This chapter describes tensions in matters of identity and positionality that emerged throughout a faculty learning community of international full-time non-tenure-track faculty English language instructors on how to help emotionally distressed students in South Korea. We use professional identity and caring teacher frameworks to investigate a case study. Data are drawn from multiple sources over nine years, including faculty learning community documents, dialogical narrative writing, and exchanges with other faculty learning community members and key staff from the university. We analyze how status and positioning within university structures interacted with the self-identified pedagogical and pastoral roles of faculty learning community members. We find that the participants were caring higher education teachers with hybrid roles and dualistic identities.