Using Resigency for Supporting Novice Language Teachers

Mostafa Nazari, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong

Introduction

In writing this piece on supporting novice language teachers, I would like to use a previously-developed concept (Nazari, 2025) that casts new lights on how novice teachers could be assisted in the process of professional development. Before discussing how resigency could help novice teachers, I briefly discuss the general landscape of novice-ness, establishing the ground for the significance of resigency in novice teachers’ career.

Novice teachers generally face a wide range of challenges in their work such as adapting themselves to curricular demands and their instruction to student learning, actualizing the knowledge gained from formal education, navigating classroom events and interactions, responding to power relations (e.g., teacher-student, collegial, teacher-supervisor, and sociocultural issues), and balancing instruction with assessment issues (see Tsui, 2009). However, the presence of these challenges does not mean that novice teachers succumb to the challenges and do not take according actions to address them. In a sense, it is time to redefine novice-ness beyond characterizing novice teachers as individuals bombarded by challenges and more importantly, marginalize them against experienced teachers as fully competent practitioners. For example, in a study on novice teachers who were in their first, second, and third years of teaching, Nazari et al. (2023) found that teaching does not operate in a linear, additive manner, but each teacher has peculiar paths of identity development that needs to be acknowledged. This means that dichotomies like novice vs. experienced, novice vs. expert, and experienced vs. expert teachers need to be observed more carefully, especially considering the new generation of teachers who work with technological advancements in many contexts. This complexity thus calls for defining novel ways of supporting novice teachers and the range of issues that they face in their professional work. Here, I discuss resigency as the source of that support.

What is resigency?

Resigency is a mixture of resilience, agency, and identity construction, and is defined as “the way teachers use personal-contextual resources to develop competenc(i)es that ensure their professional longevity in response to constraining power dynamics” (p. 1). Additionally, resigency has three main principles. First, it finds meaning in light of the sociopolitical-cultural-educational power, discourse, and history that come to operate as sources of tensions for teachers. Power here is not limited to external issues, but entails any issue that puts pressure on teachers, be it personal backgrounds, internal concerns, institutional demands or sociopolitical issues. Second, it opens room for how teachers use personal, interpersonal, institutional, historical, and sociocultural resources and capitals to navigate the challenging situations. Third, resigency is intricately linked to teacher identities; different identities could inform teachers’ resilience and agentic behaviors and could result from the complex process of navigating challenges through resilience and agency potentials. In a sense, resigency could itself be an identity but could also move beyond identity to embrace the complexity and multiplicity of teachers’ work. The outcome of becoming resigent is teachers who remain in the profession because they have been able to show competenc(i)es that help them move forward.

How resigency relates to novice language teachers

Considering the above brief description, resigency seems to offer a helpful heuristic for understanding the lives of novice teachers and helping them grow more effectively. In what follows, I mention three ways in which novice teachers’ lives could be described through the lens of resigency and how they could be supported through developing awareness of how resigency works:

• As mentioned earlier, novice teachers’ work involves a myriad of personal, interpersonal, institutional, and sociocultural challenges, pressures, and power forces. An understanding of power and how it works is at the heart of resigency. In this sense, novice teachers could themselves identify the source of power and how it shapes their being and becoming through informed reflection; additionally, teacher educators could ask novice teachers to identify those sources through joint discussions or personal sharing of experiences.
• Like any other teacher, novice teachers find strategies to address the arising challenges. That is, they show agentic behaviors in addressing challenges, a process that could make them resilient over time or they may be personally resilient enough to show their competencies and take agentic actions to tackle the challenges. These multifaceted experiences of novice teachers could be useful contents for professional development courses. For example, novice teachers could negotiate their challenges and the related tackling strategies with more experienced teachers to reify or restructure them around sound practices.
• It is evident that teachers are in an ever-changing process of identity (re)construction, a process replete with fluctuating emotions, levels of wellbeing, efficacy dynamics, motivational changes, and autonomous behaviors, among others. These processes depend largely on the resigency of teachers and shape it as they relate to the daily work of teachers, which is an outstanding characteristic of resigency. Thus, teachers could engage in keeping diaries of the push and pull of these processes and how they relate to their identities as resigent teachers. Furthermore, teachers could engage in online communities of practice, sharing experiences with colleagues and teachers of other countries in order to expand their worldviews of teaching toward global transaction and local action.

Conclusion 

Novice teachers could help themselves and get help from teacher educators in the process of professional development. Across this path, resigency can be an option that could facilitate their transition to the world of practice more smoothly.

References

Nazari (2025). Resigency: Critical conceptualization of the complexity of resilience and agency among language teachers. In H. Jinna & H. Uysal (Eds.), Criticality, agency, and language teacher identities: Research and praxis from global teacher education (pp. 1-31). Bloomsbury Academic.

Nazari, M., De Costa, P. I., & Karimpour, S. (2023). Novice language teacher identity construction: Similarities, differences, and beyond. Educational Linguistics, 2(1), 1-28. https://doi.org/10.1515/eduling-2022-0013

Tsui, A. B. M. (2009). Teaching expertise: Approaches, perspectives and characteristics. In A. Burns & J. C. Richards (Eds.), The Cambridge guide to second language teacher education (pp. 190–197). Cambridge University Press.

Mostafa Nazari is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Mostafa’s research focuses on teacher identities, teacher emotion, and action research.