Digital Trans-Literacies for Empowerment: Negotiating In-betweenness in Hong Kong EMI Classrooms

• In Event: Unforgetting Stories in Education and Reimagining the Future: Intersections of (Auto)biography, Learning, Teaching, and Empowerment

Abstract

This ethnographic study addresses the underexplored research-teaching nexus of Doctoral students as teaching assistants (TAs) in English-medium instruction (EMI) higher education. It focuses on a PhD student in Hong Kong who navigates the tensions among teaching, research, and co-learning with students. Through digital trans-literacies (Gu et al, 2025) in both offline and online contexts, he discovers empowerment in his TA position. Drawing on data triangulated through offline classroom observations, detailed field notes, audio recordings of in-class conversations, email exchanges, and social media narratives, this study illustrates how he orchestrates linguistic, semiotic and spatial resources to scaffold learning and build rapport. These practices not only facilitate communication but also reveal his negotiation of in-betweenness of multiple positioning as an emerging teacher, a student and a novice researcher. This enables us to reimagine EMI education through multilingualism, digital literacies and lived practices. These experiences also reveal how multilingual (emerging) teacher agentively employs digital trans-literacies as empowerment for legitimizing professional identity.

Authors

• John Chi Kin Lee, The Education University of Hong Kong

• Yu Xiang, The Education University of Hong Kong

• Michelle Mingyue Gu, Education University of Hong Kong