The Moorland is a metaphorical expression to describe the underdeveloped middle and eastern Anatolian parts of Turkey. This area lacks the touristic appeal and potential of the Turkish Riviera, and the physical, social, and financial opportunities there have been limited (Saygılı & Özdemir, 2021). On a different level, the Moorland also overlaps with the "third region" – another frequently used expression in the public school system – that describes a territory where novice language (e.g., TESOL) teachers often begin their careers after being employed by the Ministry of Education. This third region includes culturally and linguistically diverse settlements with students from ethnically diverse and minoritized backgrounds who use non-dominant languages such as Kurdish, Arabic, or Syriac at home. As a part of their contract, public school teachers are required to work in these aforementioned third-region territories before they can be assigned to schools in more prestigious school districts and regions. Our study focuses on novice TESOL practitioners and captures the collegial solitude and systemic barriers they experience, which in turn demotivated them and led to their professional burnout (Han & Mahzoun, 2017). In addition, our focal novice EFL teachers found themselves tackling even more complicated tensions when they taught in classroom settings with minority languages due to resurgent nationalism in Turkey (Toker & Olğun-Baytaş, 2021).
Drawing on a broader linguistic ethnographic project that we conducted, we analyze the video-based sharings of our teacher-partners who also participated in a response group. Reflecting on the lack of access to resources often found in an uneven world (Pennycook, 2022), the teachers shared personal stories of how they navigated tensions originating from various challenges such as socioeconomic inequalities, racial and sectarian tensions, and the refugee crisis confronting Turkey after the Syrian war fallout. Our findings illustrate that teachers face the dire reality of having to grapple with a relatively sanitized and technical initial language teacher education (Tezgiden-Cakcak, 2019) that underprepared them for the stark and harsh realities of their current classrooms. We offer a critique of existing language teacher education programs in Turkey (and beyond) and call for an expanded second language (L2) teacher education knowledge base and introduce a socio-political agenda for L2 teacher education that will require language educators to identify power relations, negotiate the ethical problems they face in the third region, and thus become agentic educators who can lead in transformative pedagogical change.
References
Han,T., & Mahzoun,Z. (2017). What demotivates foreign EFL teachers? A case study in Turkish context. Qualitative Report, 22(4), 1001–1014.
Pennycook,A. (2022). Critical applied linguistics in the 2020s. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 19(1), 1–21.
Saygılı,H., & Özdemir,K. (2021). Regional economic growth in Turkey: the effects of physical, social and financial infrastructure investment. Empirical Economics, 60(4), 2039–2061.
Tezgiden-Cakcak,Y. (2019). Moving beyond technicism in English-language teacher education. Lexington Books.
Toker,Ş., & Olğun-Baytaş,M. (2021). Grappling with the transformative potential of translanguaging pedagogy in an elementary school with Syrian refugees in post-coup Turkey. International Multilingual Research Journal, 00(00), 1–15.
