© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. Membership, belonging, and identity in the twenty-first century Gary Motteram This article takes a case study approach to exploring membership, belonging, and identity amongst English language teachers in the twenty-first century. It explores findings from two membership surveys conducted for the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL), and considers the impact of recommendations emerging from the first survey which were implemented to enable members to engage more fully in the organization. The article shows that a combination of reaching out to the broader community of teachers (using increasingly widespread digital technologies), combined with supporting targeted local actions, not only better enables teacher associations to achieve their mission to serve all their members, but also takes into account the changing nature of belonging and identity of ELT teachers, enabling them to become more engaged and have a stronger voice in the ELT community as a whole. Issues of identity have been regularly discussed in the teacher development literature, but very little is made of the relationship between teacher associations (TAs) and teacher identity. In this respect, it is pertinent to consider Varghese, Morgan, Johnston, and Johnson’s (2005: 39) view of language teacher identity, which they see as: constituted by the practices in relation to a group and the process of individual identification or non-identification with the group. In this article, I am interested in aspects of the practice of belonging to a teachers’ organization that defines itself as global, the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL), and the teacher identities that are forged from engaging with that organization. I explore this practice through data gathered via two questionnaires and consider the following question: What do we learn about teacher identity and belonging when we look at the practice of being a member of a TA? A membership organization is a subset of the broader group termed ‘civil society organizations’. Civil society organizations are generally part of the voluntary sector and are usually charities, that is, organizations that aim to fulfil a particular purpose (education in this case) and are Introduction IATEFL as a membership organization ELT Journal Volume 70/2 April 2016; doi:10.1093/elt/ccw001 150 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/eltj/article-abstract/70/2/150/2397964 by NILE user on 30 May 2020