This book is about the power of discourse and community in shaping language teacher identities. In this final chapter I discuss the findings of the UAE study, relate them to other regional studies, and consider their implications for language teacher education and teacher education more widely. As emphasized in Chapter 2 and consistent with the premises of discourse theory, the findings presented here are an attempt to identify the operations of the 'taken for granted' within the student teachers' discourse; but rather than revealing the true picture behind the filter, all these findings can do is replace one filter with another that perhaps reveals different angles and perspectives and hence new shades of meaning, as part of what Phillips and Jorgensen (2002) describe as a positioned opening for discussion. This final chapter also considers possible ways forward in relation to the immediate context of the study and finally in terms of potential directions for future research.

Revisiting the Research Issues

The interrelated factors that I observed in working with the student teachers, including the students' embodiment of learning to teach as the taking on of a new identity, the strength of their sense of community and the enthusiasm with which they embraced particular educational discourses, prompted the research issues underlying the UAE study, concerning the ways in which the social and educational discourses that have shaped the contemporary UAE context and the HCT's teacher education programme are taken up by the students as they construct their identities as teachers and a community of practice. Below, some of the more obvious connections between these discourses and the student teachers' identities and community are discussed, before exploring the situation in a more complex light.