From “Toeing” to “Stomping the Line”: A First-Year Chinese Teacher’s Agency for Social Justice

• In Event: Language Teachers' Identities and Experiences

Abstract

Amidst calls for social justice education in the field of world languages, many states are actively attempting to pass legislation to prohibit such approaches. Given these challenges, it is important to understand how world language teachers who seek to enact agency for social justice navigate this precarious territory. Taking a positioning perspective toward language teacher agency, this longitudinal qualitative study sought to examine the interaction between one Chinese language teacher’s positioning and agency for social justice over the course of her first and second years of teaching in the rural Midwest. Findings illuminate the new teacher’s susceptibility to external positioning and its impact on her agency, yet also the contextual and agentic transformation emerging in her second year.

Authors

• William Davis, University of Oklahoma

• Rebecca Borden, University of Oklahoma