Enacting teacher emotion, agency, and professional identity: A netnography of a novice Chinese language teacher’s crisis teaching

Oct 15, 2026

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Netnography, a qualitative research approach, entails observing, analysing, and interpreting online data. This netnography explores how teacher agency, emotion regulation, and professional identity were enacted by a novice Chinese language teacher in response to emergency remote teaching (ERT) in Australia amid the global pandemic. Ecologically sound netnography enables uncoerced spaces for participants’ voices, revealing nuanced patterns tied to the community’s fears, tensions, and resilience. Triangulated data include reflective journals, digital teaching artifacts, debriefings, interviews, and online questionnaire responses.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages23

Reading Time58 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Language teacher emotion regulation

Australian Journal of Applied Linguistics ISSN 2209-0959 [https://www.castledown.com/journals/ajal/](https://www.castledown.com/journals/ajal/) Australian Journal of Applied Linguistics (2024) [https://doi.org/10.29140/ajal.1333](https://doi.org/10.29140/ajal.1333) Enacting teacher emotion, agency, and professional identity: A netnography of a novice Chinese language teacher’s crisis teaching SASHA JANES JULIAN CHEN [sashajanes@hotmail.com](sashajanes@hotmail.com) [Julian.Chen@curtin.edu.au](Julian.Chen@curtin.edu.au) Curtin University, Australia. Curtin University, Australia. Copyright: © 2024 Sasha Janes and Julian Chen Abstract Netnography, a qualitative research approach, entails observing, analysing, and interpreting online data. This netnography explores how teacher agency, emotion regulation, and professional identity were enacted by a novice Chinese language teacher in response to emergency remote teaching (ERT) in Australia amid the global pandemic. Ecologically sound, netnography creates uncoerced spaces to allow participants to have their voices heard, thus enabling researchers to discover nuanced patterns linked to the social-emotional state and wellbeing of the community members, regarding fears, tensions, and resilience triggered by ERT. Multiple data sources were triangulated from the teacher’s reflective journal, digital teaching artifacts, debriefing sessions, interviews, and online questionnaire responses. Thematic analysis reveals teacher identity was re-envisioned through crisis teaching pedagogy and the regulation of negative emotions to facilitate agency, which reciprocally bolstered teacher identity. The findings also indicate teacher identity development is challenged and shaped by negotiating a new role in remote teaching, thus impacting pre-ERT identity. Hence, the emotion regulation trajectory of ERT can stimulate and encourage technologyenhanced professional learning as teacher agency and resilience reinforce a new identity reimagined as a capable online teacher. By situating novice teacher agency, emotion regulation, and emerging identity in crisis teaching, this netnographic research conceptualises how ERT presents not only challenges for novice teachers’ identity development and emotion but also the sustainability and empowerment of online teaching and professional growth of impacted teachers of Asian languages. Keywords: emergency remote teaching (ERT); language teaching; emotion regulation; teacher agency; professional identity Introduction The inauspicious COVID-19 shook up the landscape of teaching and learning normally held in a physical classroom. This unprecedented outbreak dramatically shifted the predominance of face-to-face teaching to online teaching, with this crisis-response often referred to as emergency remote teaching (ERT) (Hodges et al., 2020) . While technical support, resources and training are typically well placed at the macro (Faculty) and meso (School) levels within Australian universities, little is known about how Asian language academics adapted to ERTat the micro level and, more specifically, how the COVID-19 crisis presented an opportunity for re-positioning identity as capable online teachers. In the university where this study was conducted, the Chinese major course had been delivered predominately on campus before the pandemic. Not until COVID-19 disruptively forced all the teaching professionals into ERT did the Chinese lecturers and tutors start to experience online teaching. Unprepared and perplexed, they were forced to make uninformed decisions on the feasibility and suitability of transferring in-class assessments and tasks to the electronic format. Inevitably, they were confronted by the urgent and drastic demands of moving all the course units online and were in dire need of the technical skills required for online delivery (Chen, 2021) . Evidently, the ERT phenomenon has accentuated the relatively under-researched aspect of Chi

FAQs

What research approach does the study use and what is its focus?

The study uses netnography, focusing on how a novice Chinese language teacher enacts teacher agency, emotion regulation, and professional identity during emergency remote teaching.

How is data collected and what sources are triangulated?

Data are triangulated from the teacher’s reflective journal, digital teaching artifacts, debriefing sessions, interviews, and online questionnaire responses.

What do the findings suggest about teacher identity and emotion regulation in ERT?

Teacher identity is re-envisioned through crisis-teaching pedagogy and regulation of negative emotions, and this identity development is shaped by negotiating a new remote teaching role.

Oct 15, 2026

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