Becoming Otherwise: An Autoethnography of Language Teacher Education, Emotion, and Institutional Disobedience

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 11:45 am - Gold 1
  In Roundtable Session: Unforgetting and Reimagining: Teacher Identities Across Languages and Contexts

Abstract

This autoethnographic (Chang, 2006) study examines how I, as a nontraditional language teacher educator (LTEd), navigate identity, vulnerability, and agency within exclusionary academic spaces. Using critical event analysis (Webster & Mertova, 2007) and narrative identity theory (McAdams, 2001; Bauer et al., 2008; Adler et al., 2017), I reflect on emotionally charged moments that disrupted assumptions about legitimacy, mentorship, and care. Drawing from feminist (Varghese et al., 2025) and affective frameworks (Zembylas, 2005; Benesch, 2018, 2020), I explore how agency is enacted under emotional strain and precarity. This work challenges tenure-track mythologies and contributes suggestions for how to address systemic exclusion, emphasizing the need for redemptive narrative, transparency, and care as essential conditions for supporting LTEds and the multilingual students they serve.

Author

• Jessica Selleck, Buffalo Public Schools