Theorizing and Analyzing Language Teacher Agency 9781788923927

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Theorizing and Analyzing Language Teacher Agency

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION Founding Editor: Viv Edwards, University of Reading, UK Series Editors: Phan Le Ha, University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA and Joel Windle, Monash University, Australia. Two decades of research and development in language and literacy education have yielded a broad, multidisciplinary focus. Yet education systems face constant economic and technological change, with attendant issues of identity and power, community and culture. This series will feature critical and interpretive, disciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives on teaching and learning, language and literacy in new times. All books in this series are externally peer-reviewed. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION: 70

Theorizing and Analyzing Language Teacher Agency Edited by Hayriye Kayi-Aydar, Xuesong (Andy) Gao, Elizabeth R. Miller, Manka Varghese and Gergana Vitanova

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Blue Ridge Summit

DOI https://doi.org/10.21832/KAYIAY3910 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Names: Kayi-Aydar, Hayriye, editor. | Gao, Xuesong, editor. | Miller, Elizabeth R. - editor. | Varghese, Manka - editor. | Vitanova, Gergana, editor. Title: Theorizing and Analyzing Language Teacher Agency/Edited by Hayriye ­ Kayi-Aydar, Xuesong (Andy) Gao, Elizabeth R. Miller, Manka Varghese and Gergana Vitanova. Description: Bristol; Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters, [2019] | Series: New Perspectives on Language and Education: 70 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018060939| ISBN 9781788923910 (hbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781788923903 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781788923927 (pdf) | ISBN 9781788923934 (epub) | ISBN 9781788923941 (kindle) Subjects: LCSH: English teachers—Training of—Social aspects. | English teachers—Training of—Research—Methodology. Classification: LCC PE1066 .T47 2019 | DDC 428.0071—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018060939 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-391-0 (hbk) ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-390-3 (pbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK. USA: NBN, Blue Ridge Summit, PA, USA. Website: www.multilingual-matters.com Twitter: Multi_Ling_Mat Facebook: https​://ww​w.fac​ebook​.com/​multi​lingu​almat​ters Blog: www.c​hanne​lview​publi​catio​ns.wo​rdpre​ss.co​m Copyright © 2019 Hayriye Kayi-Aydar, Xuesong (Andy) Gao, Elizabeth R. Miller, Manka Varghese, Gergana Vitanova and the authors of individual chapters. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services Limited. Printed and bound in the UK by the CPI Books Group Ltd. Printed and bound in the US by Thomson-Shore, Inc.

Contents

Contributors vii Acknowledgements xiii 1 Introduction Hayriye Kayi-Aydar, Xuesong (Andy) Gao, Elizabeth R. Miller, Manka Varghese and Gergana Vitanova 2 Language Teacher Agency: Major Theoretical Considerations, Conceptualizations and Methodological Choices Hayriye Kayi-Aydar

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Part 1: Language Teacher Agency in K-12 Contexts 3 Examining High School English Language Learner Teacher Agency: Opportunities and Constraints Aliza Fones

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4 ‘What If You Don’t Have Boots’, Let Alone Bootstraps? An ELL Teacher’s Use of Narrative to Achieve and Generate Agency in the Face of Contextual Constraints G. Sue Kasun, J. Spencer Clark, A. Jyoti Kaneria and Emmie Staker

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5 Language Teacher Agency and High-Stakes Teacher Evaluation: A Positioning Analysis Amber N. Warren

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6 Using Actor-Network Theory to Problematize Agency and Identity Formation of Filipino Teachers in Japan Alison Stewart

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7 World Language Teachers Performing and Positioning Agency in Classroom Target Language Use Michele Back

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vi Contents

8 Bi/Multilingual Teachers’ Professional Holistic Lives: Agency to Enact Inquiry-based and Equity-oriented Identities across School Contexts Patricia Venegas-Weber

121

Part 2: Language Teacher Agency in Adult ESL/EFL Contexts 9 English Language Teachers’ Agency and Identity Mediation through Action Research: A Vygotskian Sociocultural Analysis Emily Edwards

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10 Problematizing English Language Teaching in China through a Local Chinese English Teacher Agency Lens Wenjing Li and Peter De Costa

160

11 Teacher Authority and the Collaborative Construction of Agency in Second Language Writing Instruction Patricia Mayes

180

12 Language Teacher Agency: A Critical Realist Perspective Karin Zotzmann

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13 Volunteer Teacher Agency in a Church-based ESL Program: An Ethnography Xia Chao

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14 English Language Instructors, Medium of Education and Professional Agency: An Indian Perspective Priti Sandhu

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Afterword 258 Anne Feryok Index 273

Contributors

Editors

Xuesong (Andy) Gao is an associate professor in the School of Education, the University of New South Wales (Australia). His current research and teaching interests are in the areas of learner autonomy, sociolinguistics, vocabulary studies, language learning narratives and language teacher education. His major publications appear in journals including Applied Linguistics, Educational Studies, English Language Teaching Journal, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Language Teaching Research, Research Papers in Education, Studies in Higher Education, System, Teaching and Teacher Education, TESOL Quarterly and World Englishes. In addition, he has published one research monograph (Strategic Language Learning) and co-edited a volume on identity, motivation and autonomy with Multilingual Matters. He is a co-editor for the System journal and serves on the editorial and advisory boards for journals including The Asia Pacific Education Researcher, Journal of Language, Identity and Education and Teacher Development. Hayriye Kayi-Aydar is an assistant professor of English applied linguistics at the University of Arizona. Her research works with discourse, narrative and English as a second language (ESL) pedagogy, at the intersections of the poststructural second language acquisition (SLA) approaches and interactional sociolinguistics. Her specific research interests are agency, identity and positioning in classroom talk and teacher/learner narratives. Her most recent work investigates how language teachers from different ethnic and racial backgrounds construct professional identities and how they position themselves in relation to others in contexts that include English language learners. Her work on identity and agency has appeared in various peer-reviewed journals, such as TESOL Quarterly, Teaching and Teacher Education, ELT Journal, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, Journal of Latinos and Education, System and Classroom Discourse. She is the author of the

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viii  Theorizing and Analyzing Language Teacher Agency

monograph Positioning Theory in Applied Linguistics: Research Design and Applications (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019). Elizabeth R. Miller is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research uses discourse analysis to explore issues relating to language learner identity and agency, power relations and language ideologies as they emerge in interactions involving adult immigrant learners of English. More recently, her research has focused on language teacher identity, agency and emotions. She has published a monograph titled The Language of Adult Immigrants: Agency in the Making and is co-editor of Theorizing and Analyzing Agency in Second Language Learning: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, both published by Multilingual Matters. Her research can also be found in journals such as Applied Linguistics, Modern Language Journal, Linguistics and Education, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, Multilingua, TESOL Quarterly among others. She is currently a member of the editorial board for TESOL Quarterly. Manka Varghese is an associate professor at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her main areas of research focus on the formation and production of language teacher identity and emerging bilingual/immigrant students’ college-going selves, and engages in critical perspectives that involve the exploration of agency in her theoretical frameworks. She was recently the lead editor of a TESOL Quarterly special issue on language teacher identity. Her articles have appeared in TESOL Quarterly, Journal of Language, Identity and Education, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies and International Journal of Multicultural Education along with numerous book chapters in edited volumes. She has served on the editorial board of Anthropology and Education Quarterly and currently serves on the editorial board of TESOL Quarterly. Gergana Vitanova is an associate professor at the University of Central Florida. Her research spans sociocultural issues of second language acquisition. Specifically, it focuses on the interplay between language learning and language teaching, identity, gender and agency. She is particularly interested in Bakhtin’s dialogical theory and its application to the analysis of narrative discourse. She has published in national and international journals such as Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, Language and Dialogue and others. She is also the author of the book Authoring the Dialogical Self: Gender, Agency, and Language Practices (John Benjamins) and a co-editor of the volumes Dialogues with Bakhtin on Second and Foreign Language Learning: New Perspectives (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates) and Theorizing and Analyzing Agency in Second Language Learning: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Multilingual Matters).

Contributors 

ix

Authors

Michele Back is an assistant professor of world languages education at the University of Connecticut. She works with pre-service and in-service teachers of Spanish, French and Chinese. Her research interests include world language teacher development and professionalization, including target language use and acquisition; cultivating global citizenship; developing a pedagogy of symbolic competence; and the role of translanguaging and multilingual ecology in transforming schools and other communities of practice. She has published articles in the Modern Language Journal, Foreign Language Annals and L2, as well as the books Racismo y lenguaje (with Virginia Zavala; Fondo Editorial PUCP, 2017) and Transcultural Performance: Negotiating Globalized Indigenous Identities (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2015). Xia Chao is an assistant professor in second language education. Her research focuses on the intersections among language, literacy, identity, culture and pedagogy in multicultural settings. Her work has appeared in various peer-reviewed research journals, including Journal of Literacy Research, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Linguistics and Education, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, Urban Education among others. Dr Chao is the recipient of the 2015 J. Michael Parker Award of the Literacy Research Association and the 2016 Outstanding Early Career Scholar Award in the Adult Literacy and Adult Education Special Interest Group of American Educational Research Association. J. Spencer Clark is assistant professor of curriculum studies at Kansas State University. His research focuses on the concept of agency in teaching, teacher education, K-12 classrooms and students’ use of technology. His research explores the ways individuals achieve and generate agency within educational and historical contexts. He has conducted research and professional developments in the United States and countries in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Central Eurasia. He teaches courses in curriculum theory, action research and social studies methods. He is a former high school world history, civics, economics and world literature teacher. Peter De Costa is an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics and Languages at Michigan State University. His primary areas of research are identity and ideology in SLA. He is the author of The Power of Identity and Ideology in Language Learning (Springer, 2016). He also edited Ethics in Applied Linguistics Research (Routledge, 2016). His work has appeared in AILA Review, Applied Linguistics Review, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, Language Learning, Language

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Policy, Language Teaching, Linguistics and Education, Research in the Teaching of English, System, TESOL Quarterly and The Modern Language Journal. He is the co-editor of TESOL Quarterly. Emily Edwards is a lecturer in academic language and learning at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. She is also a visiting fellow at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, where she recently completed her PhD in education. Her PhD study explored the impact of action research on English language teachers’ professional identity development, and the findings have been published in TESOL Quarterly, ELT Journal and the English Australia Journal. In addition to teacher research and teacher education, she also researches academic literacy and the emotional and social aspects involved in advanced language development. Aliza K. Fones is a post-doctoral scholar in the Department of Teaching and Learning at the University of Iowa. A former K-12 ELL teacher, Dr Fones investigates the experiences of English learner teachers and the language policies and contexts that shape their work. Currently, her work includes the ACCEL (Advocacy, Capacity, and Collaboration for English Learners) in Iowa project, supporting teachers to improve their instruction for English learners. Other research interests include immigration and education, dual-language instruction and teacher education. A. Jyoti Kaneria is a doctoral student in the Teaching and Learning, Language and Literacy PhD Program at Georgia State University. She has worked with and taught emerging bilinguals, both adults and youth, in Southwestern and Southeastern United States and Mexico. She has also conducted research in the United States and Mexico and is interested in continuing her research focused on emerging bilinguals with critical approaches to her work. G. Sue Kasun is assistant professor of language education in the Department of Middle and Secondary Education at Georgia State University. She is the founding director of the Georgia State University Center for Transnational and Multilingual Education. Her research interests include transnationalism, language and education, especially as they link with indigenous ways of knowing – areas that she has been studying on a Fulbright award in Pachuca, Mexico. Her publications have appeared in journals including TESOL Quarterly, Anthropology & Education Quarterly and Teachers College Record. Wendy Li is a PhD student in the Second Language Studies program at Michigan State University. She joined the program in fall 2015. Before coming to the United States, she taught English as a foreign language in different educational institutions in China for more than two years. Her

Contributors 

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research interests include instructed second language acquisition, language teacher identity, agency, emotions and language socialization. She holds an MA in TESOL from Lancaster University, UK. Patricia Mayes is an associate professor, whose research interests include sociolinguistics, conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis. She has examined the discursive construction of agency, identity and stance in online settings, as well as various face-to-face settings. Her recent work examines how writing teachers’ displays of authority enact agency and identity and reveal the pedagogical norms of the context. She has published work in Studies in Language, Research on Language and Social Interaction, Discourse and Society and Discourse Studies, as well as in the edited collections Pragmatics Across Languages and Cultures and Innovative Methods and Technologies for Electronic Discourse Analysis. Priti Sandhu is an associate professor in the English Department of the University of Washington. She received her PhD in second language acquisition from the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa in 2010. Her research interests include discourse analysis with a focus on narrative analysis, postcolonial language education policies and the intersectionality of language and identity. Her book, Professional Identity Constructions of Indian Women, was published by John Benjamins. In addition to chapters in anthologies, her articles have appeared in Applied Linguistics, Applied Linguistics Review, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Multilingua and the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education. Emmie Staker is a high school teacher primarily in the areas of English, ESOL and ethnic studies. Emmie centers principles grounded in critical language teaching and critical pedagogy. She believes ELLs deserve an enriched, critical and relevant curriculum that helps them navigate their social context with a critical consciousness, all while learning the skills deemed important in our society. Emmie has received multiple state- and county-level awards for her teaching and work with the local school district. Alison Stewart has been living in Japan for 24 years and is a professor of English and applied linguistics at Gakushuin University in Tokyo. She completed her PhD at the Institute of Education in London in 2005 on language teacher identity, and is currently working on a book to be published by Multilingual Matters on language teacher identity in Filipino English teachers in Japan. Her interest in Filipino teachers of English has recently led her to try to learn Tagalog and to travel round the Philippines. Other current research interests include inclusive practitioner research and language teaching associations.

xii  Theorizing and Analyzing Language Teacher Agency

Patricia Venegas-Weber is an assistant clinical professor in the Teaching, Learning and Social Justice Department in the College of Education at Seattle University. Her research interests center on the integration of literacy, teacher development, identity and bi-literacy and biculturalism. She has a special interest in exploring the professional identity development of elementary school teachers. Her research relates to linguistic and sociopolitical contexts for teaching and teacher agency to negotiate and (re)create robust multilingual and multicultural literacy learning spaces for linguistically diverse students. Her work appears in the Journal of Literacy Research (JLR). Amber N. Warren is an assistant professor of teacher education for teaching English language learners in the Literacy, Language and Culture program at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she teaches courses on topics and issues related to education in linguistically and culturally diverse settings. In her research, she primarily focuses on the use of discourse and conversation analysis methods to understand teacher preparation and interaction in online contexts and the intersection of teacher practice and education policy. She is also co-author of the TESOL publication, Pedagogy and Practice for Online English Language Teacher Education. Karin Zotzmann lectures in applied linguistics at the University of Southampton and has previously worked in the same area at different public and private universities in Mexico. Before taking up her position in Southampton, she worked at the Institute of Education, University of London (UK) and the College of Education and Leadership, Walden University (USA). Her main research interests include the conceptualization of intercultural competencies and learning in different social domains (education, business and military) within the framework of transnational or globalization processes, the impact of social class on foreign language learning and teaching and the implications of the internationalization and marketization of higher education on academic practices and inclusivity.

Acknowledgements

We are indebted to the external reviewers who provided important and insightful comments on the chapters in this book: Sovicheth Boun, Salem State University, USA Lucien Brown, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, University of Georgia, USA Kenan Dikilitaş, Bahcesehir University, Turkey Chatwara S. (Oui) Duran, University of Houston, USA Achillefs Kostoulas, University of Graz, Austria Patricia M. Morita Mullaney, Purdue University, USA Steve Przymus, Texas Christian University, TX, USA Lisya Seloni, Illinois State University, USA Judy Sharkey, University of New Hampshire Hyungjung Shin, University of Saskatchewan, Canada Katja Vähäsantanen, University of Jyväskylä, Finland Dominik D. Wolff, West Chester University of Pennsylvania, USA Bedrettin Yazan, University of Alabama, USA We are also grateful to Curtis Green-Eneix, a graduate research assistant in the English Applied Linguistics program at the University of Arizona, for his copy-editing of the final version of this book.

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1 Introduction Hayriye Kayi-Aydar, Xuesong (Andy) Gao, Elizabeth R. Miller, Manka Varghese and Gergana Vitanova

This volume relates to a series of efforts to understand language teacher agency in shifting educational contexts (e.g. Miller et  al., 2018; Ng & Boucher-Yip, 2017). As teachers engage in innovative teaching practices, adapt themselves to changing situations, meet expectations and requirements in their work environment and implement policies, they ‘exercise’ agency to make choices and decisions. Through practices and ‘particular ecological conditions and circumstances’ (Biesta et  al., 2015: 626) that support teacher agency, teachers claim professionalism and continue professional development (Charteris & Smardon, 2015; Soini et  al., 2015; Toom et al., 2015). Thus, as Biesta et al. (2015: 624) argue, ‘teacher agency is an indispensable element of good and meaningful education’. We recognize teacher agency as relational, social and contextual rather than an individual trait, possession or competence; ‘it is constructed situationally in relation to the current context’ (Toom et  al., 2015: 616) and social relations, and it is shaped by a myriad of factors, which can be personal (e.g. motivation, beliefs, desires, past experience, future aspirations and personal goals) and contextual. While contextual factors, such as dominant discourses, power and hierarchies, conflicts, tensions and dilemmas among others may prevent teachers from engaging in acts and actions that they desire, the very same discourses and factors may push teachers to engage in acts of resisting, challenging and criticizing, thereby promoting teacher agency. Teacher agency is therefore unpredictable and contextually complex. Soini et  al. (2015: 651) highlight the importance of facilitating all contributing factors, from personal to contextual, simultaneously to promote professional agency in the classroom environment, arguing that ‘the development of professional agency cannot be explained and is hence reduced to a single behavioral attribute’. Very much like teacher identities, which are considered multiple and dynamic (Akkerman & Meijer, 2011), teacher agency is constantly evolving and located in dialogic relationships with institutions, learners and other key stakeholders. A recent special issue on teacher agency published in Teachers and Teaching has offered important insights regarding teacher agency in 1

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relation to beliefs (Biesta et al., 2015), perceptions of teacher education (Soini et  al., 2015), pedagogical practices and social management of classroom (Eteläpelto et  al., 2015), as well as characteristics of teachers as change agents (van der Heijden et al., 2015). A few other studies in the issue also examined teacher agency in the context of educational reform and policy mandate (e.g. Buchanan, 2015; Stillman & Anderson, 2015). In our field of second/foreign language education, perhaps the initial comprehensive work on language teacher agency has been the collection co-edited by Ng and Boucher-Yip (2017). This co-edited volume consists of studies conducted in numerous settings where English is taught as a second/foreign language and it examines ‘the agency of the teacher in negotiating educational reforms and policy changes at the local and national levels’ (Ng & Boucher-Yip, 2017: 2). Another recent special issue, which four of the co-editors of this book have co-edited, has recently been published in System and includes numerous studies that take an interdisciplinary approach to examine language teacher agency in different pedagogical contexts (Miller et al., 2018). While this growing body of work on (language) teacher agency helps us better understand what professional teacher agency might look like, there is still much to learn about how different teaching contexts and diverse communities may affect the ways language teachers exercise agency. This is especially true for second language teachers or teachers of additional languages given that they function in extremely diverse sociocultural settings. It is thus necessary to understand what contextual factors, in addition to policy and reform, can limit or enhance teachers’ agentic actions across settings and communities. Language teachers may be seen as agents of change in their own learners’ lives, or even as individuals of conformity who might struggle with various institutional constraints. Moreover, because they often teach language-minoritized groups, teachers’ own subjectivities and intersectional identities (mainly around language and race) especially in relation to those of their students are key to understanding how their agency develops and is manifested. Building on previous work on (language) teacher agency and in an effort to theorize and expand understandings of language teacher agency, in this edited volume, numerous authors offer empirical and conceptual work that focuses on different dimensions of language teacher agency as well as factors that shape or contribute to it. As we began this project, one of our primary concerns and goals was to understand how language teachers around the world ‘exert judgment and control over their own work’ (Biesta et al., 2015) and with their own subjectivities in the contexts of the internationalization and globalization of language education, language policies, dominant language ideologies and ideological debates, and ongoing political tensions worldwide. This volume includes authors from multiple contexts who advance our understanding of language teacher agency by focusing not primarily or mostly on adult language

Introduction 

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teaching/learning contexts but on diverse K-12 settings as well. The chapters embrace multiple theoretical perspectives such as sociocultural theory (e.g. Chapters 3 and 9), positioning theory (e.g. Chapters 2, 5, 7, 8 and 14) and ecological approaches to agency (Chapters  4, 6, 10 and 13). The diverse work in the volume thus contributes to the still limited research on language teacher agency and gives voice to many second/ foreign language teachers around the world. We hope that future research will build on the work presented here to further examine language teacher agency in relation to other social categories, which may include but are not limited to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual identities, (dis)ability, socio-economic class, religion and their intersections. Looking at how language teachers act and reflect on their decisions and actions in numerous diverse contexts, such as online spaces, non-traditional teaching environments and professional development workshops or seminars, will help us see emerging patterns and understand the complex nature of the agency that second/foreign language teachers exercise. This work, we hope, will help create democratic learning and teaching spaces where language teachers can develop empowered identities through agentic actions in order to not only author their teaching practices but also become advocates for social justice, challenge social oppression and advance equity within minoritized language learning and teaching communities. While we celebrate the significance of teacher agency in this collected volume, we would like to urge our readers to be vigilant about the risks and dangers posed by existing macro social and political structures. Without addressing the fundamental roots of injustice and social oppression together, individual teachers’ agentic actions will not go too far. Therefore, it is extremely important for individual teachers to exercise agency in opening up pedagogical spaces for the underprivileged, but it is even more critical for us to exercise agency collectively to enforce changes at the macro sociopolitical levels and in our social consciousness. An Overview of the Chapters

In Chapter 2, Hayriye Kayi-Aydar offers an expanded conceptualization of language teacher agency in relation to emotions and teacher identities. Drawing from the intersections of Bandura’s socio-cognitive theory of agency, an ecological approach (see also Chapters 4, 6, 10 and 13) and positioning theory (see also Chapters 5, 7, 8 and 14), Kayi-Aydar defines language teacher agency as ‘a language teacher’s intentional authority to make choices and act accordingly in his or her local context’. This chapter characterizes language teacher agency and concludes with directions for future research. In the next chapter, Chapter  3, Aliza Fones addresses the gap in knowledge about teachers who teach English language learners (ELLs), a

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large and diverse group of students, in schools in the United States so that these students can have better educational opportunities. Fones explores ELL teachers’ agency in two large, linguistically diverse urban schools and the myriad of factors that might have mediated ELL teachers’ work (see also Chapter  12). In particular, Fones examines the opportunities and constraints that ELL teachers experienced when exercising agency in professional practice. Fones’ interpretation of teachers’ experiences draws our attention to the contextual and sociocultural factors that profoundly mediate ELL teachers’ agency (see also Chapter  9). It also reveals how ELL teachers worked together in teaching, highlighting the collective and collaborative nature of teacher agency (see also Chapter 6). In Chapter  4, Kasun, Clark, Kaneria and Staker combine ecological approaches to agency and the notion of nepantla (Anzaldúa, 1987, 2002) to describe a case study of an English language teacher in a rural high school in the United States (see also Chapters 5 and 10). Based on a reflexive and introspective methodology, this study shows a teacher’s positionality in relation to her students and administration. While several major themes emerge in the reflection on her agency development, the use of narrative in her classroom is highlighted as a dominant tool in the teacher’s everyday practices. Narratives allow her to connect with her students and provide a space for learners’ creativity and reflections, on the one hand. On the other, narratives provide her with a much needed opportunity to position herself as an active agent and someone who is actively involved both with the students and administration. As an expression of teacher agency, this teacher is also instrumental in negotiating and changing the curriculum at this school setting. The findings further show that, through the use of narratives, the teacher was able to transform her students’ realities and discover agency for herself (see also Chapter 11). Taking a critical stance on high-stakes teacher evaluation in policy and practice in US public schools in Chapter 5, Amber Warren presents a single case study of one K-12 teacher, using positioning analysis of the teacher’s narratives on high-stakes teacher evaluations implemented in her district (see also Chapters  4, 7 and 14). Warren details how her teacher-participant positioned herself as a knowledgeable expert in relation to evaluators but struggled to accomplish this positioning with her observers. Warren also describes how this teacher exercised agency to create space for teaching practices that aligned with her pedagogical beliefs but was against the district policies that emphasized scripted lessons. The chapter highlights the important link between teacher beliefs and district policies and the role of that link in the teacher’s attempts to make instructional decisions and choices. Because evaluators may not always understand the pedagogies appropriate for ELLs, one specific implication that the chapter points out is to require professional

Introduction 

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development for teachers who are expected to evaluate the practices of English language teachers in these school contexts. Alison Stewart’s Chapter 6 introduces the theoretical framework of ANT or actor-network theory (Latour, 1987, 2005) to explain how a collective of Filipino English teachers of Japan (FETJ) formed in Japan and in particular how their professional identities were formed. What is especially novel about this framework is that it shows how agentive processes – not necessarily through cause and effect but in a more complex way – take place through the interactions of humans and non-humans, including social media and particular laws that are in place (see also Chapter 3). This interaction enables the duality of structure and agency to be rejected and shows instead how ‘actors and whoever or whatever causes them to change together form a network, hence the term actor-network’ (p. 85). Stewart initially provides a history of English teaching in Japan and the positioning of FETJ in Japan, and then through her ethnographic entree into and research with a group of FETJ, shows how this collective came into existence in 2000, as they moved from an informal gathering to a structured organization, including some of the tensions and challenges as this happens. She then provides us with detailed portraits of two FETJ, including their life histories and how they entered the profession of English teaching in Japan, documenting the various forces, most notably the social networks that propelled them to their careers. Michele Back, in Chapter 7, investigates the role of agency in teachers using the target languages in the world language classroom. The study reveals the context-sensitive, performative nature of teacher agency through an in-depth engagement with three teachers’ discourses about teaching. The findings suggest that teachers’ agency performance is closely related to their positioning (see also Chapter 5). Mediated by contextual conditions and professional experiences, teacher positions may lead teachers to take different actions in teaching. In Back’s study, teachers’ positioning seems to have been associated with their deficit discourses about learners, which project them to be reluctant learners of the target language. She points to the need to develop meaning-based world language curricula that maximize the use of target languages. In reading this chapter, world language teachers will be encouraged to reflect on their pedagogical practices and identify strategies to promote the use of target languages. In Chapter 8, Patricia Venegas-Weber presents a life history study that looks at the linguistic and cultural trajectories of two teachers working in dual language immersion schools in the United States. Venegas-Weber notes that a variety of social, linguistic, political and ideological factors affected the two teachers’ professional identity and agency within their linguistic communities (see also Chapters 2, 9 and 13). She introduces the notion of ‘bi/multilingual pedagogical noticing’ to describe how the two teachers noticed the pedagogical resources that they had and how those

6  Theorizing and Analyzing Language Teacher Agency

resources allowed them to exercise agency in their classroom practices and schools. These teachers’ voices, as bi/multilinguals, allowed them to enact their agency by drawing on their personal experiences in their bi/ multilingual teaching and reflecting on who they had become as just and equitably oriented bi/multilingual teachers and learners. Highlighting the importance of agency for social justice, Venegas-Weber concludes that the work on social justice happens in the detail of practice, in the will of questioning one’s positioning and in ‘pedagogical noticings’. In Chapter 9, Emily Edwards uses a Vygotskian sociocultural perspective in a longitudinal study to show how action research (AR) can mediate five English as a second language (ESL) teachers’ agency and their professional identity in an Australian-based teacher professional development program. She notes the limited research that has been conducted on the emergence of teacher agency as related to AR. In particular, she focuses on the key concepts of mediation and tools within a Vygotskian perspective to understand how the physical and symbolic tools within the AR are appropriated and internalized to produce what she refers to as mediated agency. Examples of the tools are the AR cycle as well as texts and concepts learned during the AR. Through five in-depth interviews, she shows how the five participants appropriated various tools in differential ways and mapped these onto a future-oriented sense of self, which is viewed as the interaction of a person’s present and real self with an ideal self. The success the teachers had in such an appropriation, Edwards suggests, seemed to depend on how the reuse of appropriated tools aligned with a teacher’s future-self goals, the domain of their tool transformation such as their own classrooms or future research and publications, and most significantly, the support of their institutional environments to value teachers’ identities as teacher researchers (see also Chapter 8). In Chapter 10, Li and De Costa also offer a single case study focusing on the practices of one English teacher in China, taking an ecological approach to teacher agency (Priestley et al., 2015, see also Chapter 4) and drawing on Kumaravadivelu’s (2012) postmethod pedagogy. Li and De Costa portray how one Chinese teacher exercised agency to localize his pedagogy and facilitate his students’ English learning despite the social and contextual constraints. Drawing from his students’ needs and plans for the future and his own accumulated teaching experience, this Chinese teacher was able to challenge stereotypes regarding English teachers in Asian contexts and agentively chose teaching practices in his unique professional space that are typically not in line with those found in traditional educational institutions or language classrooms in China. In the following chapter (Chapter 11), Patricia Mayes shifts the attention to a writing context that adopts a ‘learning-to-write’ approach to understand teacher agency. Mayes analyzes the interactional management of two types of authority during writing conferences to examine teacher agency. She indicates how teachers used the turn-taking system

Introduction 

7

and design for authority, which also affected student engagement and participation. Mayes highlights the collaborative nature of agency, indicating that student and teacher agency is jointly constructed (see also Chapter 4). The chapter concludes with the argument that institutional contexts shape teacher agency in complex ways, and one way to illustrate this complexity is though micro-level, turn-by-turn analysis. In Chapter 12, Karin Zotzmann adopts a critical realist perspective (Archer, 1995, 1996; Bhaskar, 1986, 1998; Fleetwood, 2005, 2008) to illustrate how language teachers in two different contexts (private language schools vs. public universities) in Mexico interacted with and responded to the affordances and constraints of socio-economic and institutional structures and class relations (see also Chapter  2). Zotzmann shows how structures of privilege and power often constrained language teachers in private schools because of the need to keep their students, as ‘clients’, satisfied, which sometimes led these teachers to compromise their professional beliefs and values so that they could keep their jobs or receive better pay. By contrast, teachers at public universities exercised more agency in adapting their textbooks and curricular materials to better accommodate their students who typically came from much less privileged backgrounds. In this case, the teachers wanted to avoid further disenfranchising their students by asking them to relate to textbook accounts of affluent tourists or shoppers. In both contexts, the language teachers adapted their teaching practices in relation to their students’ socio-economic identities, but only in the latter case, where the teachers held greater socio-economic status compared to their students, did teachers experience this curricular adaptation as agentive power. In investigating how volunteer teachers in a church-based ESL program in the United States exercised agency, Xia Chao, in Chapter  13, adopts a poststructuralist approach that emphasizes the constant interplay between individual efforts and contextual, structural affordances and constraints. She found that the teachers’ spiritual identities and religious beliefs contributed to their agency (see also Chapter 8). Though the teachers were careful to avoid imposing their religious beliefs on their students, they regarded their Christianity as mediating their agency in that it motivated them to demonstrate care for and genuine interest in their adult immigrant students’ lives and to provide language instruction that would address students’ practical needs such as needing to speak to their children’s teachers or to interact with doctors. At the same time, these teachers’ enthusiasm for wanting to empower and prepare their students to manage their lives in English in the United States sometimes resulted in a lack of recognition of the need to respect students as bilingual and bicultural adults who did not want to adopt English language practices in their family lives (i.e. by watching English language television or speaking English with their children at home). Despite these challenges, it seems that these English language teachers’ situated and

8  Theorizing and Analyzing Language Teacher Agency

religiously motivated agency resulted in generally positive and effective teacher–student relationships. In Chapter 14, Priti Sandhu uses positioning analysis (see Chapter 5) to explore narratives produced by teachers at a private English language school in northern India. She found a clear pattern in how these teachers constructed themselves as (in)agentive that relates to these teachers’ own educational histories. Even though none of the teachers in her study had undergone teacher training or had taken any teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL)-related training courses, she found that teachers who had attended English-medium (EM) schools positioned themselves as able to exercise their professional agency in terms of curriculum planning, textbook selection and interacting well with students. By contrast, those teachers who had attended Hindu-medium (HM) schools or combined HM/EM schools positioned themselves as far less agentive in these aspects of their professional practices and explicitly attributed their inability to make curriculum choices to their limited English proficiency. While Sandhu detected no difference in English proficiency among the teachers as she conducted the interviews (all were fluent users of English), she attributes the narrated lack of agency among the teachers with Hindu-medium education (HME) and HME/Englishmedium education (EME) backgrounds to hegemonic discourses in India that equate English fluency with EME. References Akkerman, S.F. and Meijer, P.C. (2011) A dialogical approach to conceptualizing teacher identity. Teaching and Teacher Education 27, 308–319. Anzaldúa, G. (1987) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute. Anzaldúa, G. (2002) Now let us shift… the path of conocimiento… inner work, public acts. In G. Anzaldúa and A. Keating (eds) This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (pp. 540–578). New York: Routledge. Archer, M.S. (1995) Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Archer, M.S. (1996) Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory (2nd rev. edn). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bhaskar, R. (1986) Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation. London: Verso. Bhaskar, R. (1998) The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences (3rd edn). London/New York: Routledge. Biesta, G., Priestley, M. and Robinson, S. (2015) The role of beliefs in teacher agency. Teachers and Teaching 21 (6), 624–640. Buchanan, R. (2015) Teacher identity and agency in an era of accountability. Teachers and Teaching 21 (6), 700–719. Charteris, J. and Smardon, D. (2015) Teacher agency and dialogic feedback: Using classroom data for practitioner inquiry. Teaching and Teacher Education 50, 114–123. Eteläpelto, A., Vähäsantanen, K. and Hökkä, P. (2015) How do novice teachers in Finland perceive their professional agency? Teachers and Teaching 21 (6), 660–680. Fleetwood, S. (2005) Ontology in organization and management studies: A critical realist perspective. Organization 12, 197–222.

Introduction 

9

Fleetwood, S. (2008) Institutions and social structures. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 38 (3), 241–265. Kumaravadivelu, B. (2012) Language Teacher Education for a Global Society: A Modular Model for Knowing, Analyzing, Recognizing, Doing, and Seeing. New York: Routledge. Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, E., Kayi-Aydar, H., Varghese, M. and Vitanova, G. (2018) Interdisciplinarity in language teacher agency: Theoretical and analytical explorations. System 79, 1–112. Ng, P.C.L. and Boucher-Yip, E.F. (eds) (2017) Teacher Agency and Policy Response in English Language Teaching. New York: Routledge. Priestley, M., Biesta, G. and Robinson, S. (2015) Teacher Agency: An Ecological Approach. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Soini, T., Pietarinen, J., Toom, A. and Pyhältö, K. (2015) What contributes to first-year student teachers’ sense of professional agency in the classroom? Teachers and Teaching 21 (6), 641–659. Stillman, J. and Anderson, L. (2015) From accommodation to appropriation: Teaching, identity, and authorship in a tightly coupled policy context. Teachers and Teaching 21 (6), 720–744. Toom, A., Pyhältö, K. and Rust, F.O.C. (2015) Teachers’ professional agency in contradictory times. Teachers and Teaching 21 (6), 615–623. Van der Heijden, H.R.M.A., Geldens, J.J.M., Beijaard, D. and Popeijus, H.L. (2015) Characteristics of teachers as change agents. Teachers and Teaching 21 (6), 681–699.

2 Language Teacher Agency: Major Theoretical Considerations, Conceptualizations and Methodological Choices Hayriye Kayi-Aydar

This chapter provides an overview of the three theoretical frameworks that have provided definitions and descriptions for the notion of agency. Drawing on the similarities among and integrating the major principles of social cognitive theory, ecological perspectives and positioning theory/ poststructuralism, the chapter aims to offer an expanded conceptualization of the notion of language teacher agency (LTA). The chapter concludes with suggestions for methodological choices as well as implications for future research. Introduction

In the language teacher education literature, the topic of language teacher identities has recently gained strong attention (see Barkhuizen, 2016). Rejecting a singular categorization or an ‘essential self’ to describe language teachers, studies have highlighted the multidimensional nature of teacher identities and focused on the role of contextual, cultural and sociopolitical issues in understanding who language teachers are. Part of this work has capitalized on the decision-making processes of teachers along with their actions as they (re)constructed multiple identities (e.g. Kayi-Aydar, 2015, 2017; Ruohotie-Lyhty & Moate, 2016). It is this strand of research that has shifted the attention to language teacher agency (LTA), an area of research that has, until recently, been neglected in the language teacher education literature. Teacher agency has been viewed as a teacher’s conscious efforts to ‘resist feelings of powerlessness and negativity experienced as a by-­ product of the [environmental] conditions’ (Ollerhead, 2010: 607), capacity to ‘act purposefully and reflectively on their world’ (Rogers & Wetzel, 10

Language Teacher Agency  11

2013: 63), ‘active efforts to make choices and intentional action in a way that makes a significant difference’ (Toom et  al., 2015: 615; emphasis added) or ‘capacity to influence, make choices, and take stances in ways that affect one’s work’ (Ruohotie-Lyhty & Moate, 2016: 319). Although limited in number, the studies on LTA have mostly used the ecological model developed by Mark Priestley and colleagues (e.g. Priestley et al., 2015). This is not surprising given that they have developed perhaps the first and most comprehensive framework to conceptualize teacher agency. This chapter aims to provide an overview of the ecological approach along with two other commonly used theoretical frameworks on the notion of agency to stimulate further research in this area. As I explain how agency is defined and described in social cognitive theory (e.g. Bandura, 1989), the ecological view (e.g. Priestley et al., 2015) and positioning theory (e.g. Davies, 2000), I hope to accomplish three goals: (a) offer a (re)conceptualization of the notion of LTA, (b) bring insights that would inform methodological and theoretical decisions in LTA research and (c) offer implications and directions for future research. Agency in Social Cognitive Theory

Drawing on social cognitive theory, Bandura (2000) suggests that individuals are the producers and products of the environment. As they are produced by environmental circumstances, they create, change or transform the very same circumstances through agentic capability and therefore become ‘agents of experiences rather than simply undergoers of experiences’ (Bandura, 2001: 4). Agency is ‘to intentionally make things happen by one’s actions’ (Bandura, 2001: 2). Perceived efficacy is the core element of human agency; it affects human behavior, goals, aspirations, outcome expectations, as well as courses of action to take. Other core features of agency include intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness and self-reflectiveness (Bandura, 2001). According to Bandura, all agentic actions are intentional. An individual’s choices are mediated through the exercise of self-influence and proactive commitment. Through the exercise of forethought, individuals set goals, consider the potential consequences of their actions and select the courses of action that they believe would lead to the most desired outcomes. The anticipation of future events guides their selections and actions. Being a planner and forethinker, the agentic individual then links thought to action, which involves self-monitoring, self-guidance and corrective self-reactions (Bandura, 2001). Finally, the agentic individual engages in self-reflection, evaluating his or her choices, courses of action and motivation. Bandura’s socio-cognitive theory of human agency differentiates among three major forms of agency: personal, proxy and collective. Adopting a model of emergent interactive agency, Bandura (2000, 2001) recognizes that the individual exerts agency through cognitive,

12  Theorizing and Analyzing Language Teacher Agency

motivational, affective and choice processes. This personal agency, however, is not always sufficient as in various circumstances individuals would need the support of others to exercise agency. The personal agency becomes proxy agency when individuals ‘do not have direct control over the social conditions and institutional practices that affect their everyday lives’ (Bandura, 2001: 13). They would then need the help of others who would act on their behalf. Proxy agency is ‘a vulnerable security that rests on the competence, power, and favors of others’ (Bandura, 2001: 13). This form of agency is needed when individuals either do not have the power or resources needed to act or the act may involve too much risk though this may not be the case for others who can ‘wield influence and power to act at their behest to secure the outcomes’ (Bandura, 2001: 13) that non-agentic individuals desire. Individuals, operating within a broad network of sociocultural influences rather than in isolation, may also need collective power and a shared belief system to act and produce desired results. This interactive, socially coordinated and interdependent effort turns personal agency to collective agency. It is through these three different forms of agency, Bandura argues, that individuals can exercise control over their personal destinies and lives. An Ecological Approach to Agency

The ecological approach to agency first appeared in the writings of Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische (e.g. Emirbayer & Mische, 1998) and then Mark Priestley and colleagues (e.g. Priestley et al., 2015). Emirbayer and Mische (1998: 970) define human agency as: the temporally constructed engagement by actors of different structural environments – the temporal-relational contexts of action – which, through the interplay of habit, imagination and judgement, both reproduces and transforms those structures in interactive response to the problems posed by changing historical situations. In the educational context (e.g. Biesta & Tedder, 2006, 2007; Priestley et  al., 2015), teacher agency is understood as ‘the teachers’ capacity to critically shape their responses to challenging situations’ (Biesta & Tedder, 2006: 11). Building on the work by Emirbayer and Mische (1998), Priestley et al. (2015: 29) further describe teacher agency as a temporal and ‘situated achievement’, which is the ‘outcome of the interplay of iterational, practical-evaluative, and projective dimensions’. These three dimensions are essential in describing teacher agency. The iterational dimension includes a teacher’s life history in general along with professional biographies. The practical-evaluative dimension consists of cultural (e.g. ideas, values and beliefs), structural (e.g. social structures, roles and relationships) and material (e.g. resources and physical environment) features. The projective dimension includes long- and shortterm orientations of actions and aspirations. While one dimension may

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be more dominant over others, there is a dynamic interplay among them, which varies within different structural contexts of action (Charteris & Smardon, 2015; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). In Chapter 4 of this volume, Kasun and her colleagues illustrate these three dimensions of teacher agency in a structurally constrained ecological context of which their teacher-participant was a part. As the dimensions interact, time plays a significant role. Emirbayer and Mische (1998: 963) argue that the ‘agentic dimension of social action can only be captured in its full complexity if it is analytically situated within the flow of time’. In other words, teacher agency is informed by teachers’ past life experiences and professional biographies, their current influences, relationships and situations, as well as alternative possibilities and aspirations for the future (Charteris & Smardon, 2015; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Priestley et al., 2015). Toom et al. (2015: 616) claim that ‘environments that promote active participation and belonging also promote the construction of professional agency’. This situationally constructed agency is achieved in a dialogical process in which the teacher engages in inner (one’s own dialogical thinking) and outer dialogues (one’s conversations with others) to process the temporal dimensions as well as account for the available resources. In this sense, agency is not an innate quality one can possess nor is it dependent on an actor’s capacity (Biesta & Tedder, 2007). Rather, it is an emergent, dynamic phenomenon, which can be achieved in one context but does not necessarily transfer to another. Similarly, Charteris and Smardon (2015) critically question the view of agency as internalized capacity, suggesting that such a view underestimates structural constraints. According to Emirbayer and Mische (1998: 969), agents are not ‘atomized individuals but rather active respondents within nested and overlapping systems’. Emirbayer and Mische refer to them as ‘temporal-relational contexts’. In brief, in the ecological approach, teacher agency is a ‘situated achievement’ (Priestley et  al., 2015: 29) whose existence is not only dependent on individual abilities and capability but cultures and structures. This situated achievement is an emergent phenomenon within ‘existing cultures of thinking, working, and doing, and on wider structural issues’ (Priestley et al., 2015: 35). Agency and Positioning

Positioning theory (e.g. Davies & Harré, 1990; Kayi-Aydar, 2019) is about understanding how rights and duties are distributed in conversations or narratives among individuals. In and through discourse, individuals assign positions, which are known as clusters of rights and duties, to themselves and others, a process called ‘positioning’. The nature of agency or one’s agentic moves in talk can be understood

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through positioning. Even though positioning theory does not directly focus on agency, Bronwyn Davies, a poststructural feminist, has written extensively on the link between positioning and agency, which I believe provides useful insights and implications for applied linguists and teacher educators. Davies (2000) challenges the definitions of agency in humanist discourses and redefines it from feminist poststructuralist perspectives. Davies (2000: 62) argues that ‘just as there are multiple readings of any text, so there are multiple readings of ourselves. We are constituted through multiple discourses at any one point in time. While we may regard a move we make as correct within one game or discourse, it may equally be dangerous within another’. An agent then is the ‘speaking/writing subject’ who can ‘move within and between discourses’ and also ‘counteract, modify, refuse, or go beyond’ the discourses available to him or her (Davies, 2000: 60). Davies (2000: 66) explains agency through the notion of authorship; that is, agents ‘take up the act of authorship of speaking and writing in ways that are disruptive of current discourses, that invert, invent, and break old bonds’. The authority that Davies talks about is different than the authority one may use to dictate or control others or to claim and impose knowledge. This authority or agency is not an individual quality and not coercive in nature. Rather, as Davies (2000: 68), suggests, ‘agency is spoken into existence at any one moment. It is fragmented, transitory, a discursive position that can be occupied within one discourse simultaneously with its non-occupation in another’, a view also supported by Priestley et al. (2015). Based in a poststructural framework, Davies (2000: 67) further defines and describes agency as: • The discursive constitution of a particular individual as having presence (rather than absence), as having access to a subject position in which they have the right to speak and be heard. • The discursive constitution of that person as author of their own multiple meanings and desires. • A sense of oneself as one who can go beyond the given meaning in any one discourse and forge something new, through a combination of previously unrelated discourses, through the invention of words and concepts that capture a shift in consciousness that is beginning to occur, or through imagining not what is, but what might be. There is a strong link between positioning/positions and agency, which is neither correlational nor causal. Rather, the relationship is complex, mutually shaped and unpredictable. Even when they are assigned similar positions, individuals may engage in different actions. A good example is offered in Chapter  7 of this volume in which Back

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demonstrates how three teachers positioned their students as reluctant learners but acted upon this interactive positioning in different ways. It is only through subject positions that individuals can speak or act. Therefore, certain positions may allow individuals to exercise agency in certain contexts or prevent them from doing so. Agentic individuals can also exercise agency as they assign certain positions to themselves or other individuals. In line with poststructural understandings and positioning theory, Davies and Gannon (2011) acknowledge that Not only we are constituted through multiple and contradictory discourses, but how those discursive positionings are read opens up or closes down the possibility of agency. Through writing we can open up strategies for resisting, subverting, decomposing discourses themselves through which we are constituted. (Davies & Gannon, 2011: 313)

In light of positioning theory and poststructural understandings, teacher agency can be defined as authorship that is constituted through and in terms of the teacher’s access to the subject positions available to him or her. In the work environment, for example, a teacher can challenge the discourses of hierarchies only through the subject positions made available to her or him. Language Teacher Agency: Theoretical (Re)conceptualizations and Methodological Considerations

One of my goals in this chapter is to (re)conceptualize LTA in light of the three theoretical models or frameworks that I have discussed above. Integrating the principles of those approaches, I believe, can offer a strong methodological and theoretical foundation to investigate the complex nature of LTA. Even though the three frameworks or approaches reviewed above share numerous similarities, such as the focus on context, environment and social interactions in conceptualizing agency, each differs in terms of their primary focus. While authorship and positioning are highlighted in poststructural understandings, for example, time and environment are the major highlights in the ecological approach. Drawing on the highlights and similarities in the approaches reviewed in this chapter, I define LTA as a language teacher’s intentional authority to make choices and act accordingly in his or her local context. The conceptualization of the notion of LTA involves the following and is represented in Figure 2.1: (1) Following Bandura (2000, 2001), I propose that LTA is both individual and collective. What I mean by ‘individual agency’ is that a teacher’s past experiences, beliefs, desires, expectations, motivations, future goals and needs contribute to his or her agency as the teacher

16  Theorizing and Analyzing Language Teacher Agency

Figure 2.1  Conceptualization of LTA

engages in agentic action by himself or herself. And yet, I recognize that enacting agency is not always an individual act. Indeed, most of the time, language teachers exercise agency collectively, through available support network systems, such as co-workers, parents or students. Collective agency entails ‘intentionally interacting with others as a resource’ to make decisions as well as ‘acting as a support for them’ (Toom et al., 2015: 615). (2) The collective nature of LTA also makes it context dependent. While language teachers can exercise agency in certain contexts or discourses, they may not be able to do so in others. Their agency is affected by the environment. Context and discourses promote or inhibit agency. In the general teacher education literature, the focus has largely been on the policy or curriculum context, in which, most of the time, teacher agency has been viewed in some sort of ‘resistance’ or ‘push-back’ discourse. However, I understand that this is not the only context in which language teachers enact agency. Context is rather complex; I, therefore think of it in terms of layers: micro, mezzo and macro. This understanding of context is very similar to the transdisciplinary framework developed by the Douglas Fir Group (2016) to describe second language learning and acquisition. At the micro level, agency is achieved in the classroom context and affected by the local contextual factors. In this very micro level, teachers make decisions regarding pedagogical practices and options, classroom management, turn-taking and interaction, which are affected by cognition, teacher knowledge, experience, personal beliefs, values, interactions with students, along with other social dimensions. At the mezzo level, I consider the school environment. Norms and school culture, school policies and rules, relationships with administration and other teachers, and power dynamics all affect the ways teachers

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act, interact and respond to expectations, changes, rules and norms in the school context. At the macro level, which involves broader communities, LTA is affected by language policies and ideologies, sociopolitical and socio-educational discourses, societal norms and values, globalization and the internationalization of language education, external demands and regulations and power dynamics. Looking at agency in different layers of context would help us move beyond ‘resistance’, ‘push-back’ or policy discourses, diversify agentic opportunities and actions, and understand the diversity and complexity of factors that shape LTA. (3) Previous research shows that teachers’ judgements of their competence in teaching affect their agency (e.g. Soini et al., 2015). I believe that, in addition to competence in teaching, the linguistic competencies or abilities of the language teachers also shape their agency. This view is supported in the ecological approach, which argues that through inner and outer dialogues and language in use, teachers can agentically communicate their ideas, beliefs and values (Charteris & Smardon, 2015). The role of discourses is also highlighted in positioning theory and poststructuralism. When agency is exercised in and through language and discourse, language teachers’ language abilities play a significant role. This certainly does not mean that certain groups of language teachers, for example non-native speakers, are less agentic than others. Rather, agency is fluid; how teachers may exercise agency through language depends on the individuals with whom the language teachers interact, power dynamics, as well as other contextual factors that may affect language use. (4) LTA is also shaped by the ‘past, present and future’. Language teachers’ linguistic and educational histories, their own language learning experiences, current practices and future goals, dreams and expectations contribute to their decision-making processes, choices and ways they exercise agency. (5) Finally, LTA is exercised through discourse, action, identities and emotions. In the theoretical frameworks reviewed here, ‘acts’ are considered a significant indication of agency. However, Toom et al. (2015) claim that mere teacher behavior should not be used as criterion for teacher agency. They suggest that ‘the teacher behaviors combined with internal processes such as attitudes, emotions and cognitive processing, constitute the complexity of professional agency’ (Toom et al., 2015: 616). Fear, anxiety, pride and other emotions and feelings contribute to and shape language teachers’ decision-making and agentic actions. Agentic action can also be reflected in feelings, emotions and discourse. In the language teacher education literature, there has recently been a strong emphasis and focus on the link between identity and agency.

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Ruohotie-Lyhty and Moate (2016: 319), for example, use the notion of identity-agency to argue that individuals invest agency in the development of their professional identity and they ‘are active in using agentic experiences in the making of their professional identity’. Toom et  al. (2015: 619) make two important observations regarding the identity and teacher agency relationship: (1) Professional agency is connected to professional identity through ideals and goals as well as commitments and ethical standards related to the work of teaching and pupils’ well-being. (2) The construction of professional agency is clearly understood as a complex, continuous and future-oriented negotiation process between identity and contexts where teachers work. In light of these discussions, I argue that LTA is best understood through an exploration of an identity, agency and emotions triangle. The complex identity–agency relationship is affected by and reflected in one’s emotions and feelings, an argument also detailed in the poststructuralist writings of Michalinos Zembylas who argues that The construction of teacher identity is at bottom affective, and is dependent upon power and agency (i.e. I understand power as forming the identity and providing the very condition of its trajectory). […] an investigation of the emotional components of teacher identity yields a richer understanding of the teacher self. (Zembylas, 2003: 214)

Given the complex conceptualization I offer for the notion of LTA, methodological options to investigate it would vary. In light of the conceptualization above, I find two types of analysis useful. One is positioning analysis, which involves identifying positions and subsequent acts in the data. The question, ‘who positions whom and what happens as a result of such positioning?’ would be a major guiding question in the analysis (see Kayi-Aydar [2019] for a full explanation of using positioning analysis as a methodological tool). The other is linguistic analysis, which involves identifying linguistic elements, such as reported speech, emotion words, sentence structure (e.g. active vs. passive) and modality, all of which provide important information about identities and agency (see Miller [2014] for a more comprehensive linguistic analysis of agency). From a methodological standpoint, Kleres (2011) similarly suggests that Anger narratives, for instance may operate with an agentic other, with self as an object. Shameful situations may be narrated by diluting self’s agency. Helplessness may involve a non-agentive experiencer as indicated by such grammatical features as modal auxiliaries, hypothetical past/future constructs, ‘try’ predicates, and negation. (Kleres, 2011: 192)

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Such linguistic analysis would yield important findings regarding the achievement of agency and its relation to identities and emotions. Issues and Directions in Language Teacher Education

A limited number of studies on teacher agency have offered empirically based definitions of it as well as described the factors and possibilities that constrained or promoted agency achievement. Both in light of the theoretical understandings reviewed in this chapter and my review of the related literature, I have identified four major themes that can be further pursued in future research. (1)  LTA and beliefs

In the ecological approach to agency, beliefs form an important aspect of teacher agency. Agentic teachers act upon their beliefs. In other words, beliefs about students, language, language teaching and learning, teacher roles and educational purposes appear to contribute to teacher agency (Priestley et al., 2015). In a study by Pantić (2017), primary school teachers in Scotland believed that attending to children’s well-being and holistic development was an essential part of their professional roles. Such beliefs affected their sense of purpose as agents as well as their context-specific practices. Similarly, Ollerhead (2010) examined how two English as a second language (ESL) teachers responded to Australia’s Language, Literacy, and Numeracy Program policy and found that the two teachers’ personal attitudes and beliefs affected the ways they felt empowered to exercise agency in their teaching. Although it is widely accepted that there is a link between beliefs and agency, further studies are needed to fully explore the nature of this relationship (Kubanyiova & Feryok, 2015). How do beliefs about language and language teaching affect LTA? Do strong professional beliefs enable teachers to exercise agency when other contextual factors restrict it (Priestley et  al., 2015)? Why do teachers act in ways or make pedagogical choices inconsistent with their beliefs? Do changes in beliefs precede or follow from acts or changes in practices (Pantić, 2017)? Addressing such questions would help us better understand the agency–beliefs relationship. (2)  Interaction between individual agency and collective agency

The three theoretical conceptualizations of agency that I reviewed in this chapter all assume that even though agency is not a personal trait or characteristic, the capacities and abilities of the individual still play a role, to a degree, in the achievement of agency. In my conceptualization of LTA, I distinguish between two types of agency: individual and collective. Although both types of agency are recognized to varying degrees in social cognitive theory, the ecological approach and in positioning theory

20  Theorizing and Analyzing Language Teacher Agency

or poststructuralism, it is not clear how these two types of agency interact. The question, ‘How do individual and collective agency determine, motivate or interact with each other?’ remains unanswered. Further research is needed to understand the nature of these two types of agency as well as the contextual factors that affect both. (3)  Understanding the layers of context in the achievement of agency

Context or environment has been highlighted as an important dimension of the achievement of teacher agency in all three approaches above. Both in the ecological approach and in positioning theory, it is argued that agency is fluid; that is, a teacher can achieve agency in one context but not in another. I have also previously stated that teacher agency has been largely investigated in a policy context or as a response to curriculum changes. In my conceptualization of LTA, I have identified three layers of context in which language teachers enact agency. I believe it is necessary to understand how language teachers exercise agency in these micro, mezzo and macro levels of contexts. What does LTA look like in each context? How do different levels of contexts affect LTA? What makes teachers enact more or less agency in one context over another? What is the interrelation between teacher agency and its effectiveness in the classroom and/or school? Looking at LTA at different context levels would enable us to better understand the complex, shifting and changing nature of LTA. By looking at agency enacted at each level, we would then know more about the contextual challenges that affect the exercise of agency. (4)  Identities, emotions and agency triangle

Complex links among identities, emotions and agency have been addressed in numerous poststructural writings (e.g. Davies, 2000; Kleres, 2011; Zembylas, 2003). Although a very few recent LTA studies (e.g. Kayi-Aydar, 2017; Ruohotie-Lyhty & Moate, 2016) have examined the link between identities and agency, further studies are needed to understand the nature of this intricate relationship. Furthermore, an important element, emotions, has been missing in the LTA-identity studies. An analysis of emotions would yield further insights into agency achievement as well as identity constructions and negotiations. References Bandura, A. (1989) Human agency in social cognitive theory. American Psychologist 44 (9), 1175. Bandura, A. (2000) Exercise of human agency through collective efficacy. Current Directions in Psychological Science 9 (3), 75–78.

Language Teacher Agency  21

Bandura, A. (2001) Social cognitive theory: An agentic perspective. Annual Review of Psychology 52 (1), 1–26. Barkhuizen, G. (2016) Reflections on Language Teacher Identity Research. New York: Routledge. Biesta, G. and Tedder, M. (2006) How is agency possible? Towards an ecological understanding of agency-as-achievement. The Learning Lives project. See https​://ww​w.res​ earch​gate.​net/p​ublic​ation​/2286​44383​_How_​is_ag​ency_​possi​ble_T​oward​s_an_​ecolo​ gical​_unde​rstan​ding_​of_ag​ency-​as-ac​hieve​ment (accessed 9 October 2018). Biesta, G. and Tedder, M. (2007) Agency and learning in the life course: Towards an ecological perspective. Studies in the Education of Adults 39 (2), 132–149. Charteris, J. and Smardon, D. (2015) Teacher agency and dialogic feedback: Using classroom data for practitioner inquiry. Teaching and Teacher Education 50, 114–123. Davies, B. (2000) A Body of Writing, 1990–1999.Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Davies, B. and Harré, R. (1990) Positioning: The discursive production of selves. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 20 (1), 43–63. Davies, B. and Gannon, S. (2011) Feminism/poststructuralism. In C. Lewin and B. Somekh (eds) Theory and Methods in Social Research (pp. 312–319). London: Sage. Douglas Fir Group (2016) A transdisciplinary approach to SLA in a multilingual world. Modern Language Journal 100 (Supplement), 19–47. Emirbayer, M. and Mische, A. (1998) What is agency? American Journal of Sociology 103 (4), 962–1023. Kayi-Aydar, H. (2015) Multiple identities, negotiations, and agency across time and space: A narrative inquiry of a foreign language teacher candidate. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 12 (2), 137–160. Kayi-Aydar, H. (2017) A language teacher’s agency in the development of her professional identities: A narrative case study. Journal of Latinos and Education 1–15. Kayi-Aydar, H. (2019) Positioning Theory in Applied Linguistics: Research Design and Applications. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Kleres, J. (2011) Emotions and narrative analysis: A methodological approach. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 41 (2), 182–202. Kubanyiova, M. and Feryok, A. (2015) Language teacher cognition in applied linguistics research: Revisiting the territory, redrawing the boundaries, reclaiming the relevance. The Modern Language Journal 99 (3), 435–449. Miller, E.R. (2014) The Language of Adult Immigrants: Agency in the Making. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Ollerhead, S. (2010) Teacher agency and policy response in the adult ESL literacy classroom. TESOL Quarterly 44 (3), 606–618. Pantić, N. (2017) An exploratory study of teacher agency for social justice. Teaching and Teacher Education 66, 219–230. Priestley, M., Biesta, G. and Robinson, S. (2015) Teacher Agency: An Ecological Approach. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Rogers, R. and Wetzel, M.M. (2013) Studying agency in literacy teacher education: A layered approach to positive discourse analysis. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 10 (1), 62–92. Ruohotie-Lyhty, M. and Moate, J. (2016) Who and how? Preservice teachers as active agents developing professional identities. Teaching and Teacher Education 55, 318–327. Soini, T., Pietarinen, J., Toom, A. and Pyhältö, K. (2015) What contributes to first-year student teachers’ sense of professional agency in the classroom? Teachers and Teaching 21 (6), 641–659. Toom, A., Pyhältö, K. and Rust, F.O.C. (2015) Teachers’ professional agency in contradictory times. Teachers and Teaching 21 (6), 615–623. Zembylas, M. (2003) Emotions and teacher identity: A poststructural perspective. Teachers and Teaching 9 (3), 213–238.

3 Examining High School English Language Learner Teacher Agency: Opportunities and Constraints Aliza Fones

English language learners (ELLs) represent an important population of students in US schools, and understanding the work of their teachers is important for improving their educational opportunities. Yet, relatively little is known about the work of ELL teachers in high schools. This chapter explores high school ELL teacher agency within the context of their department and school amid myriad forces shaping ELL teachers’ work. Drawing from data collected during a qualitative study, I present a comparison of ELL teachers’ experiences in two large, linguistically diverse high schools within an urban school district that was home to a large percentage of ELL students. Using a sociocultural conceptualization of ELL teacher agency, I provide findings related to the opportunities and constraints of ELL teacher agency, namely the ways that it both influences and is influenced by district and school structures, how it is mediated by context and sociocultural factors and how it is collaborative in nature. This work has implications for ELL teacher preparation, ELL department structure and ELL program policy. Introduction

The position of English language learners (ELLs) in public schools in the United States has changed dramatically and frequently over the last 50  years. The Supreme Court ruling in Lau v. Nichols (1974) set a precedent for the mandatory provision of instructional programs in public schools to address the educational needs of students who speak a language other than English at home. This ruling, in addition to other influential court cases and pursuant educational policies, has established the necessity of providing ELLs with instruction that allows 24

Examining High School English Language Learner Teacher Agency  25

them meaningful access to education. Among other significant outcomes of this ruling, school districts are required to provide services to ELL students. However, there exists tremendous variation at the state and district level about what these programs should look like. It follows that the ELL teachers who teach in these programs have roles that vary widely from state to state, district to district and from one school to another. This variation in the roles of ELL teachers, coupled with an everincreasing and diversifying population of ELL students in public schools, requires better understanding of the work that ELL teachers do. I focus in this chapter on ELL teacher agency, an aspect of their work that is often overlooked. Given the context of their work, ELL teachers are likely called upon to act independently, creatively and autonomously, exercising their agency in ways that their non-ELL teacher peers are not. The chapter explores the agency of high school ELL teachers at two large, urban high schools within the same district by addressing the following research questions: (1) How does agency shape the work of high school ELL teachers? (2) What facilitates or constrains high school ELL teachers’ agency in professional practice or at work? English education in the United States is, and has been, deeply intertwined with other pressing and controversial issues such as immigration policies, school funding, disparities in educational outcomes, teacher preparation and equitable access to education. The education of ELL students exists within a context of tension that allows us to more clearly see agency and the opportunities for agency in the work of ELL teachers (e.g. Kayi-Aydar, 2015; Varghese et al., 2005), and the need for developing these teachers’ understanding of their agency within the context of ELL education. The underlying importance of language teacher agency is rooted in understanding the experiences of these teachers, which is critical in addressing the educational opportunities (or lack thereof) of the students they serve. Literature Review

The work of high school teachers is an important area of study, given both the high stakes for students and the resulting reforms aimed at the high school level. However, most research on high school teachers has focused on content area teachers, leaving a gap to fill in the research about high school ELL teachers’ work. This section describes important research on the context and structure of high school ELL teachers’ work, as well as some of the applicable research related to the agency of teachers, and that of ELL teachers in particular. Figure 3.1 illustrates the multiple contexts that situate high school ELL teachers’ work, with the teacher and the department context in bold to emphasize the focus of this study.

26  Part 1: Language Teacher Agency in K-12 Contexts

Figure 3.1  High school teachers’ location within multiple contexts

How departments shape high school teachers’ work

Part of the research into the various influential aspects of teachers’ work at the high school level has included research into the organizational and structural determinants (Little & McLaughlin, 1993), which at the high school level is most visible in the existence of departments. The high school department is a crucial aspect of students’ learning experience, and serves as a link between the broader school context and student outcomes (e.g. Gutiérrez, 1996), with potentially increased relevance for ELL students, for whom achievement and outcomes have been historically lower than for their non-ELL peers (e.g. Callahan, 2005). Given the significance of the existence of departments, the variation between different subject areas, as well as the highly specialized work of ELL teachers (Harper & De Jong, 2009), this chapter contributes to a deeper understanding of ELL departments and teachers. In relation to the amount of literature available on secondary content area teachers who teach ELL students (e.g. Echevarria et al., 2008), there is less about ELL teachers themselves and their organization in departments. Research that specifically addresses the work of high school ELL teachers includes that of del Carmen Salazar (2008, 2013), which investigates the relationship between ELL policies and the ‘humanizing practices’ and the ‘pedagogical stances’ of ELL teachers. Research in the Canadian context tells us about effective English as a second language

Examining High School English Language Learner Teacher Agency  27

(ESL) program design and policy implementation related to the integration of ESL students and their academic success (e.g. Derwing et al., 2006; Roessingh, 2004). These areas of research include ELL policy implementation, the practices of ELL teachers and the success of ELL students. To contextualize and extend this work, we need to know more about both the agency of the teachers and its interplay with the organization of ELL departments. Agency and language teacher agency

Giddens’ (1979) theory of structuration emphasizes the way that human agency is constrained by the structures in which we act. Relevant to the current discussion of teachers’ work within schools and departments, Giddens (1979: 161) emphasized the ‘rules and resources’ of structures, and how they might constrain agency. Similarly, Sewell (1992) makes a number of salient points in defining and describing agency in its relationship with structure: first, that agency enables the ability to act and even exert control in social settings. In his view, agents necessarily have the ability to transform structures. Second, all humans have the capacity for agency, but it varies greatly from person to person and depends on the context. Finally, agency exists both at the individual and collective level. This conceptualization of agency, embedded in its relationship with structure, provides a useful lens for viewing the work of ELL teachers whose teaching context is so different from teachers of other subjects. Expanding on Vygotsky’s (1987) conceptualization of the way that learning is mediated by sociocultural forces, Wertsch et al.’s (1993: 339) understanding of agency is based on two premises: (1) while agency has long been conceived as a property of the individual, it extends ‘beyond the skin’ and does not operate independently; and (2) that agency is mediated by tools and the individuals around them. An understanding of agency as socioculturally mediated also underscores the importance of collective agency; an individual view of agency would miss the importance of agency that occurs when individuals work together, such as teachers within a department. The other point of emphasis, that agency is facilitated by mediational tools, is applicable in a school setting where teachers often rely on the tools available to them (i.e. curriculum, technology, materials). Finally, writing from the perspective of linguistic anthropology, Ahearn (2001: 112) defines agency as ‘the socioculturally mediated capacity to act’. This perspective of agency lends itself to the discussion of ELL teachers’ work within their schools and departments, work that focuses on language learning within the larger context of the high school. I draw from these theories to develop a conceptualization of high school ELL teacher agency that is presented in the following section. Employing a sociocultural lens that relies on the role of mediational tools in shaping

28  Part 1: Language Teacher Agency in K-12 Contexts

learning (Vygotsky, 1987), and Wertsch et  al.’s (1993) conception of socioculturally mediated agency, Lasky (2005) considers the interplay between teacher agency, identity and the school context. Her study addresses two mediational systems that influence teacher agency: teacher identity and the current reform context. She also attends to the unique nature of the secondary setting, noting that secondary school departments ‘are both an expression of agency and shared identity while also being elements that shape agency and professional identity’ (Lasky, 2005: 902). This study found that the reform context of the school constrained teachers’ agency in a way that impacted their work with students, which, while not specific to ELL teachers, is relevant to the study at hand as I seek to understand not only what mediates ELL teacher agency, but what might constrain it as well. Synthesizing the theories and literature above, I provide the following conceptualization of high school ELL teachers’ agency: • It is mediated by the school and department context, including policies, available resources, support and curriculum (Ahearn, 2001; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001; Siskin & Little, 2001; Wertsch et al., 1993). • It shapes and is shaped by school and department structures (Giddens, 1979; Sewell, 1992). • It is collective in nature, relying on collaboration with other ELL teachers, content area teachers and school leaders (Lasky, 2005; Vygotsky, 1987). Methods

Data for this chapter were gathered as part of a larger, qualitative study that was designed to understand the complexity and context of high school ELL teachers’ work. Using purposeful sampling (Merriam, 2009; Patton, 2005), I selected a single school district and two comprehensive high schools within that school district as the sites for my study. I focused on the department head for a number of reasons: first, in their role as department heads, they had knowledge about program-level decisions and planning that was helpful for understanding the structure of the department and the roles of the ELL teachers. Second, as the department head, they had a variety of roles beyond classroom instruction that helped me to understand the ELL program and department structure. Finally, during initial interviews, both department heads described their experiences with agency, which allowed me to explore the phenomenon from a perspective where it was present, rather than absent. However, I recognize that as department heads, their experiences of agency may have been different than that of other ELL teachers in the department. The presentation and comparison of the two ELL departments and the

Examining High School English Language Learner Teacher Agency  29

roles of the department heads provide focused and detailed information that can help the reader make sense of ELL departments and the work of high school ELL teachers. District context: Lake Valley School District’s ELL program

In accordance with federal guidelines, states provide approved ELL program models, and each district within the state has the purview to adopt a program model that best suits their ELL population and available staffing and resources. In the case of Lake Valley School District (LVSD), the district chose a transitional bilingual program model, which indicated that English was the language of instruction and that instruction was focused on academic content. Sampling and time frame

The study was conducted in three phases over a year and a half. During preliminary fieldwork, I collected information about district size and student demographics over the previous several years, with particular attention to the percentage of students within the district that were identified as ELL. After selecting the district, I identified two high schools within the district using the following criteria: • Schools with the largest percentage of ELL populations among the high schools in the district. • Schools with different ELL program service models and structure. • Schools where there had been a service model in place for ELLs for three or more years. Participants

As mentioned, the main participants in this study were the ELL department heads at each of the two schools in the study. I also conducted interviews with district ELL administrators, building administrators and, in the case of one high school, additional teachers who worked with the ELL department. There were four full-time ELL teachers at Metro and one full-time and one part-time ELL teacher at Fields. These three groups of participants, in their different roles, represented important actors responsible for ELL instruction and services (see Table 3.1 for a complete list of participants and roles). At the district level, the ELL director Ms Theodore was responsible for policy, staffing and budget issues, the flow of information to buildings, supporting administrators and designing and providing professional development (Field notes, 12/8/15). Working directly with the high schools was a secondary ELL specialist, Ms Sapora. She worked with administration around program

30  Part 1: Language Teacher Agency in K-12 Contexts

Table 3.1  District and school ELL personnel Role

Lake Valley School District

Metro High School

Fields High School

ELL director

Ms Theodore

Secondary ELL specialist

Ms Sapora

Administrator

Mr Aaron (principal)

Ms Harper (assistant principal)

ELL department head

Mr Bloomquist

Ms Bryant

ELL teacher(s)

Ms Gregor Mr Vola Ms Wong

Ms Russell

No. of ELL teachers (FTE)

4.0

1.5

No. of paraprofessionals

5

4

structure and organization, as well as the needs of individual secondary schools, curriculum and materials, testing and professional development. She considered herself the liaison between the district and the schools and worked closely with the ELL teachers at both buildings in this study. Data sources and analysis

Primary data sources for this study were semi-structured interviews with ELL department heads, district administrators, building administrators and teachers, which lasted between 40 and 80 minutes. I conducted an initial interview with district ELL administrators, the building administrator who supervised the ELL program and ELL teachers in both high schools during the fall and winter of the 2015–2016 school year. In the spring of the same school year, I conducted follow-up interviews with all participants. All interviews were audio recorded and transcribed in their entirety. To supplement and triangulate (Merriam, 2009) the interview and artifact data, I conducted observations of classes taught by ELL teachers, and I also observed ELL meetings at the department, building and district level. During these observations, I took detailed field notes and meeting observations were also audio recorded. I also collected artifacts, such as district policies, handouts from meetings and pictures of classroom and school sites. Throughout data collection, I engaged in both open and thematic coding, deriving my coding scheme from the important concepts framing this study: high school departments, teacher roles and teacher agency (specifically, socioculturally mediated agency, collaboration and the interaction between structure and agency). To help identify themes (Ryan & Bernard, 2003), I created thematic documents to compare participants’ various perspectives on the school and department structures and organization, and teachers’ roles.

Examining High School English Language Learner Teacher Agency  31

Findings

In this section, I present data on the differences in the roles of the ELL teachers at each high school, with a focus on the work of the ELL department head, as well as the role of agency for high school ELL teachers, with an emphasis on the opportunities and constraints of agency for agency. Similarities and differences in the ELL departments at Metro and Fields high schools

To understand the external forces shaping the work of ELL teachers, I focused in part on the structure and organization of the ELL department in each school. While I anticipated differences between the two schools, what I found were major contrasts rooted in the history of the school and department, the experience and tenure of the teachers and administrators and the way that the departments and teachers were positioned within the broader school context. Ultimately, the differences in the departments resulted in different courses being available to the ELL students. Metro High School’s ELL department

The presence of large numbers of ELL students was not new for Metro High; the school had been home to a large ELL population for over a decade, the department was well established and many of the current teachers had been there for close to a decade. The long-standing ELL program had undergone many changes over the years, and was also characterized by a fluctuating population of ELL students: The ELL teachers at Metro have all lived through multiple incarnations of ELL assessment and shifting initiatives: SIOP,1 PLCs… and the waves of immigrant and refugee students… most ELLs were white in 2003, then came Turkish and Russian, then from Burma, Nepal… There’s a lot of student turnover, more so than most places. Turnover in the school is colossal and endemic. The ELL numbers change every day, sometimes by as many as four or five students. (Field notes, 11/18/15)

The ELL teachers divided teaching duties between them, each teacher responsible for multiple courses that targeted different English proficiency levels and language skills. They all taught English language development (ELD) courses and literacy courses geared toward both language development and alignment with core English language arts (ELA) courses. With the exception of Mr Bloomquist, the department head, the majority of their responsibilities were teaching and assisting with the annual administration of the English proficiency assessment. Later in the chapter, I analyze these roles in relation to the department and school structure and organization.

32  Part 1: Language Teacher Agency in K-12 Contexts

A key component of the ELL department at Metro was their weekly meeting. The teachers gathered every week to discuss instructional strategies and look at student data and work samples. They were lauded by administrators for their productivity and as Mr Bloomquist described, ‘because the [ELL teachers] in there are such vigorous thinkers, we were from time to time able to take our PLC work to a very high level’ (Interview 1, 10/7/16). This well-established collaborative space would prove to be one salient difference between Fields and Metro high schools and was perhaps a function of having a department of veteran teachers supervised by a veteran administrator. Fields High School’s ELL department

While there were similarities in the home languages and ethnicities represented, the ELL population at Metro was much more transient than that of Fields. That said, both schools frequently received new and newly arrived ELL students throughout the school year (Field notes, 11/18/15). In contrast to Metro’s long-standing ELL population, well-­established ELL department and veteran teachers and administrators, Fields was in the midst of changes in student demographics, a newly established ELL department and a new administrator and ELL teachers. Ms Harper, Ms Bryant and Ms Russell were all in their first year working at Fields and were also all in their first year in their respective roles. Ms Bryant, the ELL department head, had previously taught for one year in a middle school in the same district before coming to Fields. Prior to the school year when data were collected, the ELL department at Fields had been largely non-existent, poorly organized and not integrated into the school. Ms Harper described the state of affairs when she had arrived as follows: The person supervising ELL had no idea what they were doing… the teacher they put into ELL was mostly selected for the job because they were certificated in the area and they were isolated so they wouldn’t have to interact with any other teachers because they were not doing well in their current department. That is what we walked into. (Interview  1, 11/30/15)

At the time of the study, the ELL department at Fields comprised one full-time ELL teacher and one part-time ELL teacher, Ms Russell, who was a content area teacher for the other portion of her teaching day. There were four paraprofessionals who worked with the ELL teachers in their classes, but who also worked in different content area classes based on a matrix that identified where ELL students were clustered and which students needed the most assistance in which classes. In this way, the paraprofessionals were strategically placed in classrooms with high

Examining High School English Language Learner Teacher Agency  33

numbers of ELL students, as well as in classes where the ELL students typically needed more assistance, either because of their English proficiency level or their grade in the class or both. Similar to Metro, the ELL department at Fields offered an ELD course for beginner- and intermediate-level ELL students, as well as support classes designed to align with ELA classes. The department head taught blocks of two classes at both the beginning and intermediate level where one half of the block was an ELD class for which students received elective credit, and the other half was an ELA support class for which students received an ELA credit, something imperative for their transcripts. In addition to these two blocks, she also taught an elective advanced support class for ELL students. Other differences between the two schools’ ELL departments were related to the size of the school and ELL population, the tenure of the ELL teachers and the administrators they worked with, as well as the history of the ELL department within each school. The structural and organizational differences depended on the context of each school, and consequently the different structures of the ELL department in each building created different roles for ELL teachers. Key components of the ELL department’s structure and organization were the administrators in each building who worked with ELLs (and the nature of this collaboration), and the roles of the ELL department head. During the year of this study, the district had adopted a new curriculum to be used by the ELL departments and had also designed new policy wherein ELL teachers would not only teach ELD but would also teach ELA support classes to mirror the mainstream ELA curriculum. One explanation for these differences lay in the differences in tenure of administrators and teachers. At Metro, both the administrator and ELL teachers had been working in the building for a decade and had been doing things a certain way for many years; whereas at Fields, the new administrators and ELL teachers were in the process of redesigning the ELL department and implementing changes to the ELL program. There are affordances and constraints for both established programs and new programs, and it is beyond the scope of this study to comment extensively on this. However, it was clear that at Metro, the department organization, the relationships between ELL teachers and administrators and the positioning of the department within the school were stable and had not changed recently. In contrast, at Fields, the new department and personnel were building the department and developing relationships with other staff, and importantly, working proactively to improve the positioning of the ELL department within the building. Understanding the differences in the departments at two schools within the same district allowed me to understand the context and conditions (Lee & Smith, 2001; Little, 2002) of ELL teachers’ work, as well as the reasons for variation between the departments.

34  Part 1: Language Teacher Agency in K-12 Contexts

Differences in roles and responsibilities of ELL teachers at Fields and Metro

The most significant differences in the roles of the ELL teachers were revealed by the nature of the ELL department’s and teachers’ positioning within the school and their relationship with other departments and teachers; the relative independence or integration of the department influenced how the ELL teachers interacted with other teachers. Table 3.2 displays the roles and responsibilities of the two ELL department heads, both within the ELL department and within the larger school setting. One of the most readily observable differences in the roles of ELL teachers in each school could be seen in the courses taught by ELL teachers. At Metro, all the ELL teachers taught ELD classes and ELA support classes. At Fields, one ELL teacher taught ELD and ELA support classes, and the part-time ELL teacher co-taught in two content area courses. While the courses offered in each school could in part be attributed to the size and resources available in each school, the difference in courses taught at Fields and at Metro signaled a difference in the way that ELL teachers were positioned and utilized within the building (Arkoudis, 2006; Dabach, 2014). At Fields, two content area courses were co-taught with an ELL teacher, which meant that the ELL teacher was working with non-ELL teachers in other departments, as opposed to schools like Metro, where the teaching assignments of ELL teachers were solely located within the ELL department. This kind of structure related to course offerings demonstrated the interaction of the Fields ELL department with other departments. Table 3.2  Roles and responsibilities of ELL department heads in two high schools Mr Bloomquist (Metro High School)

Ms Bryant (Fields High School)

Courses taught

Beginning ELL skills (1 period) Intermediate ELA support (3 periods) Instructional coach (1 period)

Beginning ELL skills & beginning ELA support (2 period block) Intermediate ELL skills & intermediate ELA support (2 period block) Advanced ELL support (1 period)

Other roles and responsibilities within ELL department

Coordinated ELL assessment Curricular decision-making Organized and led ELL PLC

Coordinated ELL assessment Curricular decision-making Supervised and scheduled paraprofessionals

Roles and responsibilities within school building

Collaborated with administrator Supported ELL students with content area work Provided professional development for staff Organized family night for the parents of ELL

Collaborated with administrator Supported ELL students with content area work Provided professional development for staff Assisted with content area assessment Participated in after-school homework sessions (open to all students)

Examining High School English Language Learner Teacher Agency  35

The opportunities and constraints of high school ELL teacher agency

Shifting now to another factor shaping the work of high school ELL teachers, I discuss the opportunities and constraints of ELL teacher agency at Fields and Metro. I highlight the collective nature of their agency, and the way that agency was employed related to curricular decision-making. These opportunities for agency in teachers’ work are consistent with the existing literature, but these findings highlight teacher agency in the specific context of the work of high school ELL teachers, and also describe the flipside of the coin: the constraints of agency. During data analysis, I noticed that the agency of the ELL teachers (specifically, the ELL department heads) was challenging in some instances because of the related increase in roles and responsibilities, and this appeared to be linked to the substantial capacity that these teachers had to act. The opportunities for high school ELL teacher agency

Across both schools, I observed frequent collaboration among the ELL teachers within a department, and also with the building administrator who was assigned to the ELL department. Absent clear support and guidelines in terms of district policy (in an interview, Mr Aaron shared that there had been substantial turnover of district ELL administrators in recent years), the ELL department heads were in a position within their buildings to exert teacher agency and leadership and use their knowledge to make decisions that were appropriate for their students and the needs of the program. This agency was also promoted by the school administrators with whom they worked. In the case of Metro, Mr Aaron said this of the ELL teachers: I really trust my specialists, my teachers that are ELL teachers… I really trust them that they know better than I, and so when they say, this is what they need, or this is that’s going on, then you know, I sit down and I really go to bat for them. (Interview 2, 8/31/16)

While he was knowledgeable about the ELL students in his building and the issues related to ELL instruction, Mr Aaron looked to his ELL teachers for their input and recommendations related to the ELL program and services, from student placement to curricular decisions. At Fields, the department head Ms Bryant, described the latitude that she was given in her position, where she was called upon to make decisions regarding scheduling, courses offered and assessment practices, because she ‘had the background’ knowledge about the students (Interview 1, 12/15/15). I also observed ELL teachers seeking support and advice from fellow ELL teachers and building administrators when needed. Part of this was an opportunity for exercising agency that was built into the existing

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structure of professional learning community (PLC) meetings that met once a week. These groups were an incredibly important resource for ELL teachers’ work, and Mr Bloomquist (Metro High School) articulated the role of collaboration and agency: Agency seems to be a product of the groups that you associate with yourselves with. The stronger your support system, then the more agency you seem to have. The amount of agency that the teachers can personify seems to increase as the function of the networks that you populate. The networks and groups that you are a part of have everything to do with how much change you can make. (Mr Bloomquist, Interview 2)

At Metro, the teachers in the ELL department had been working together for many years both as a department and within the high school. Mr Bloomquist’s comment regarding his perception of his agency reflects the importance that he and the other ELL teachers at Metro placed on their relationships as a department and their support for one another. At building- and district-level meetings, the Metro ELL teachers were always seated together, whereas teachers from other departments and buildings were mixed throughout the room. At Fields, the ELL department head, Ms Bryant, spoke about her frequent collaboration with an assistant principal, absent a large ELL department to work with: [She] definitely is the one that I work with the most. We try to meet every week or two, and I feel like we take care of business, but then we have a whole new list of stuff that we have to go through. She and I are both learning together. It’s ridiculous how much she helps, because I didn’t get that support before. (Interview 1, 1/25/16)

In this quote, Ms Bryant talks about her collaboration with a building administrator, and how by working together they were able to accomplish important tasks of running the ELL program and services. This collaboration provides support and opportunity for Ms Bryant’s agency; in other words, working closely with the administrator mediates her capacity to act (Ahearn, 2001). With the support and resources provided to her by an administrator, Ms Bryant was able to exercise more agency through her collaboration. An example of this was seen in Ms Bryant’s decisions regarding the placement of ELL paraprofessionals in mainstream classrooms, her creation of a homework club for ELL students and her input in the scheduling of newly arrived ELL students. As both Ms Bryant and the administrator were new to the district and were both working together to create a functioning ELL department where previously there hadn’t been one, their collaboration and agency were necessary, and allowed them to do

Examining High School English Language Learner Teacher Agency  37

work that individually would have been more difficult to accomplish. For Ms Harper and Ms Bryant, their collaboration extended beyond their weekly PLC meetings, and both participants indicated that they would meet frequently, often informally, throughout the week to address issues and problem-solve. In this section, I describe two ways that opportunities for teacher agency were present in aspects of the previously described conceptualization of high school ELL teacher agency: first, through the structures of the ELL department, and secondly, through the collaboration of ELL department heads with administrators, other ELL teachers and content area teachers. This marks an important departure from a conceptualization of teacher agency that is located in the individual or private agency exercised by teachers, and, I argue, is a result of the unique context and nature of high school ELL teachers’ work. The constraints of high school ELL teacher agency

Returning to the previously mentioned constraints of agency for ELL teachers, I describe here how the same conditions and context that provided opportunities for agency, may also have provided constraints that shaped the roles and responsibilities of ELL teachers. It is important to recognize the potential constraints related to teacher agency so that our understanding of their work does not assume and account for only the positive aspects (similar to the way that possibilities need to be considered along with limitations). One such constraint was the lack of a clear district policy regarding the ELL services to be provided at the school level. As previously mentioned, LVSD’s ELL program policy stated that instruction would be in English and led by teachers through content. Beyond this, there were no specific guidelines for how each school building should organize their ELL services, and as such, decisions were made at the building level by the administrators (in collaboration with the department head). While this provided room for each school to make decisions that were most appropriate given their student population and available resources, it also placed a burden on the ELL teachers to design and implement ELL program services. This is a potential constraint in that ELL teachers may be the ones responsible for many aspects of ELL services beyond teaching, which may shortchange the amount of time teachers spend on instruction. There was evidence of this in the way that the roles and responsibilities of the ELL department heads at both Metro and Fields ranged far beyond instruction, and both Mr Bloomquist and Ms Bryant discussed their myriad responsibilities outside of teaching. Another potential constraint could be found in the curricular decisionmaking and implementation by ELL teachers. At the time of data collection, the district had recently adopted a new curriculum to be used by the ELL

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departments at the secondary level, and ELL teachers at both Fields and Metro were using the curriculum, although Mr Bloomquist and Ms Bryant reported different experiences with the curriculum. While Ms Bryant was very positive about the curriculum and used it as her primary source of instruction, Mr Bloomquist found some aspects of the curriculum useful, but reported (and was observed) spending a lot of time modifying the curriculum so that it was accessible for his students (Field notes, 1/21/16, 2/11/16, 3/18/16). In classroom observations of other ELL teachers at Metro, I did not see them using the curriculum, but rather using resources that they had developed themselves (Field notes, 2/12/16, 4/26/16). At Metro, it was clear that while the ELL teachers had agency in their curricular implementation, there was a constraint related to the amount of time spent either modifying the curriculum or developing other materials. Similar to the way that we were able to see various opportunities for agency connected to the aspects of the framework of high school teacher agency that I proposed, there were also constraints on teacher agency. Along with the opportunities, the structures of the school and the department constrained teacher agency (i.e. lack of curricular decisionmaking), and the way that the school context mediated teacher agency was in some ways a constraint for teacher agency. Specifically, districtand school-level ELL program policy resulted in the creation of schoollevel structures and policies that constrained teacher agency (i.e. ELL teachers being required to teach courses that supported the ELA curriculum as opposed to ELD courses). Discussion

The three main components of the conceptualization of high school ELL teacher’s agency that I presented in the literature review are as follows: first, it is mediated by the school and department context, including policies, available resources, support and curriculum (Ahearn, 2001; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001; Siskin & Little, 2001; Wertsch et al., 1993). Second, it shapes, and is shaped by, school and department structures (Giddens, 1979; Sewell, 1992). Third, it is collective in nature, relying on collaboration with other ELL teachers, content area teachers and school leaders (Lasky, 2005; Vygotsky, 1987). Examining the work and experiences of the ELL department heads at Metro and Fields high schools in light of this conceptualization allows us to more fully understand the complex and unique work of high school ELL teachers (Table 3.3). Factors mediating the agency of high school ELL teachers

The findings support the understanding of teacher agency as socioculturally mediated by the school context and department organization (as described above), as well as available resources, support and curriculum (Ahearn, 2001; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001; Siskin & Little, 2001;

Examining High School English Language Learner Teacher Agency  39

Table 3.3  Findings related to conceptualization of high school ELL teacher agency Aspect of teacher agency

Examples from Metro High School

Examples from Fields High School

Mediated by school and department context

ELL department head had ELL department head had opportunity to design and deliver opportunity to design and deliver professional development for staff professional development for staff

Shapes and is shaped by department structures

ELL teachers exclusively taught ELD ELL teacher co-taught content courses area courses

Collective in nature

Collaboration between ELL teachers in PLC; collaboration between administrator and ELL department head

Collaboration between administrator and ELL department head

Wertsch et al., 1993). It was evident that the agency of the high school ELL teachers at both schools was shaped by the people they worked with, the materials available and the policies that guided the ELL program at the building level. This type of socioculturally mediated agency is significant because it illustrates the way that while agency resides within an individual, it can be effective when informed and influenced by the human and material resources around them. One specific instance of this was seen in the ELL teachers’ interactions with others, which I turn to now in a discussion of the collaborative nature of teacher agency. ELL department structure and teacher agency

Bringing together the two main bodies of literature that frame this study, the work of high school teachers and department organization, and teacher agency, I found that the agency of high school ELL teachers was shaped by, and shaped, the organization of the ELL department and program. This is consistent with the recursive loop of structure and agency wherein structure and agency influence one another (Giddens, 1979; Sewell, 1992). The ELL teachers in both high schools were organized into departments and taught specific courses that were decided at the building level; in this way, their work and agency were shaped by the structure of the ELL program and building-level policies. However, within the classroom and department, the ELL teachers (especially the ELL department heads) were able to influence the structures, using their capacity to act in order to provide additional services beyond the courses and to advocate for the ELL program in ways that would serve the ELL students (an example of this was the initiative in both schools of the ELL department to offer after-school ELL support). The collective and collaborative nature of ELL teacher agency

The agency of the high school ELL teachers in this study was collective in nature, and relied on collaboration and support from school

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leaders and other ELL teachers (seen in the collaboration between school leaders and department heads at both schools in efforts to improve the experiences and opportunities of high school ELL students, especially during PLC meetings). The ELL teachers at both schools worked closely with other ELL teachers and the supervising administrator. At Metro, this was observed in the close-knit nature of the ELL department and their interaction in formal weekly meetings, and informally throughout the school day; at Fields, the ELL teachers also interacted frequently with other content area teachers, seen in the way that Ms Bryant frequently interacted with other departments, and both she and Ms Russell attended other PLC meetings. In settings such as Fields and Metro where the ELL teachers work in departments, and in the context of increased integration of ELL students into mainstream classes, the collaborative nature of ELL teacher agency is an integral part of their work, and also the experiences of the students they serve. These findings provide crucial information about the work of high school ELL teachers, as well as their agency, which is a key aspect of their work. What is significant about this is that while there is research about various ELL policies, program structures and instructional strategies, the work of high school ELL teachers themselves has yet to be thoroughly explored. As the field continues to seek ways to improve instructional outcomes and equitable opportunities for ELLs, knowing more about the context and work of their teachers can help take us in that direction. Conclusion and Implications

I undertook this study to better understand the complexity and the forces that shape high school ELL teachers’ work, specifically their agency and the organization of ELL departments. Using a three-fold conceptualization of high school ELL teacher agency, I uncovered some of the more salient aspects of this phenomenon, namely the factors that mediate their agency, the interplay between their agency and structure (such as the department organization) and the way that working collectively with other teachers contributed to their sense of agency. What is especially useful about this conceptualization is the way that it accounts for context so that it does not necessarily limit the agency of teachers, which, given the intense variability of context that exists in the work of ELL teachers across states, districts and schools, is helpful in understanding their work. At Metro, the school with the larger, more-established ELL department with veteran ELL teachers, ELD courses were offered and other services were provided in a way that positioned ELL teachers as experts within the building, but also somewhat separate from the other departments. This type of separation can create (or perpetuate) the existence of ‘two-schools-in-one’ (Valdés, 2004) where the ELL students and teachers

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exist in one environment and set of courses, and non-ELL students and teachers in another. Viewed as an affordance, this separation provides the opportunity for ELL teachers to act independently and with agency, using their expertise to serve ELL students in the ways they see best. However, viewed as a constraint, this type of isolation can affect the teachers and further marginalize the students. At the school with a smaller and newly revamped ELL department with novice teachers (and a novice, yet knowledgeable, administrator), ELD courses and co-taught ELL content area courses were available, which provided different opportunities for ELL students, and also shaped the work of the ELL teachers in that building. In some ways, the opportunity for this ELL department to redesign their program provided affordances for the teachers who were able to teach and provide services in ways that were responsive to the students, without feeling beholden to a status quo or previous way of doing things. This type of autonomy was ideal for a teacher like Ms Bryant who was told when she was hired that the program was a ‘clean slate’ (Interview 1, 1/25/16). The understanding of ELL teachers’ work and the organization of ELL departments have important implications for the students they serve: the availability and type of courses that students have access to are salient factors in ELL students’ course-taking, academic achievement and outcomes, graduation rates and post-secondary opportunities (e.g. Callahan, 2005). At both the district and school building level, it is necessary to be intentional about the organization of ELL departments and the work of ELL teachers to provide appropriate opportunities for ELL students. In addition to understanding the intersection of high school ELL teachers’ work and issues of equity for ELL students, it is also worthwhile to consider the different roles and types of work that high school ELL teachers are engaged in, above and beyond their contract hours and explicitly stated duties. In both schools, I observed ELL teachers using their agency in ways that were responsive to the changing circumstances and needs of ELL students through their curricular decision-making and implementation, their expansive roles and responsibilities and their collaboration with one another as well as school administrators. The ELL teacher participants acknowledged that their work looked different from one day to the next and one hour to the next, and the variety of roles that they filled within the building and department speaks to the different work they were doing in service of their students. As the field of secondary ELL education continues to grow and change, we can learn from the responsive agency of these teachers as we conduct research, develop policies and prepare teachers for working with this important population of students.

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Note (1) The acronym SIOP stands for Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (Echevarria et al., 2008), a specific set of strategies used to shelter instruction for ELLs, especially at the secondary level.

References Ahearn, L.M. (2001) Language and agency. Annual Review of Anthropology 30, 109–137. Arkoudis, S. (2006) Negotiating the rough ground between ESL and mainstream teachers. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 9, 415–433. Callahan, R.M. (2005) Tracking and high school English learner: Limiting opportunity to learn. American Educational Research Journal 42, 305–328. Dabach, D.B. (2014) ‘I am not a shelter!’: Stigma and social boundaries in teachers’ accounts of students’ experience in separate ‘sheltered’ English learner classrooms. Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk 19, 98–124. del Carmen Salazar, M. (2008) English or nothing: The impact of rigid language policies on the inclusion of humanizing practices in a high school ESL program. Equity & Excellence in Education 41, 341–356. del Carmen Salazar, M. (2013) A humanizing pedagogy: Reinventing the principles and practice of education as a journey toward liberation. Review of Research in Education 37 (1), 121–148. Derwing, T., DeCorby, E., Ichikawa, J. and Jamieson, K. (1999) Some factors that affect the success of ESL high school students. Canadian Modern Language Review 55, 532–547. Echevarria, J., Short, D. and Powers, K. (2008) Making content comprehensible for nonnative speakers of English: The SIOP model. International Journal of Learning 14 (11), 41–50. Giddens, A. (1979) Agency, structure. In A. Giddens (ed.) Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis (pp. 49–95). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gutiérrez, R. (1996) Practices, beliefs and cultures of high school mathematics departments: Understanding their influence on student advancement. Journal of Curriculum Studies 28, 495–529. Harper, C.A. and De Jong, E.J. (2009) English language teacher expertise: The elephant in the room. Language and Education 23, 137–151. Kayi-Aydar, H. (2015) Teacher agency, positioning, and English language learners: Voices of pre-service classroom teachers. Teaching and Teacher Education 45, 94–103. Lasky, S. (2005) A sociocultural approach to understanding teacher identity, agency and professional vulnerability in a context of secondary school reform. Teaching and Teacher Education 21, 899–916. Lee, V.E. and Smith, J.B. (2001) Restructuring High Schools for Equity and Excellence: What Works. New York: Teachers College Press. Little, J.W. and McLaughlin, M.W. (1993) Teachers’ Work. New York: Teachers College Press. McLaughlin, M.W. and Talbert, J.E. (2001) Professional Communities and the Work of High School Teaching. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Merriam, S.B. (2009) Qualitative Research: A Guide to Design and Interpretation. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Patton, M.Q. (2005) Qualitative Research. New York: John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Roessingh, H. (2004) Effective high school ESL programs: A synthesis and meta-analysis. Canadian Modern Language Review 60, 611–636. Ryan, G.W. and Bernard, H.R. (2003) Techniques to identify themes. Field Methods 15 (1), 85–109.

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Sewell Jr, W.H. (1992) A theory of structure: Duality, agency, and transformation. American Journal of Sociology 98, 1–29. Siskin, L.S. and Little, J.W. (eds) (1995) The Subjects in Question: Departmental Organization and the High School. New York: Teachers College Press. Valdés, G. (2004) Between support and marginalisation: The development of academic language in linguistic minority children. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 7 (2–3), 102–132. Varghese, M., Morgan, B., Johnston, B. and Johnson, K.A. (2005) Theorizing language teacher identity: Three perspectives and beyond. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 4, 21–44. Vygotsky, L. (1987) Zone of proximal development. In L. Vygotsky (ed.) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (pp. 52–91). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wertsch, J.V., Tulviste, P. and Hagstrom, F. (1993) A sociocultural approach to agency. In E.A. Forman, N. Minick and C.A. Stone (eds) Contexts for Learning: Sociocultural Dynamics in Children’s Development (pp. 336–356). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

4 ‘What If You Don’t Have Boots’, Let Alone Bootstraps? An ELL Teacher’s Use of Narrative to Achieve and Generate Agency in the Face of Contextual Constraints G. Sue Kasun, J. Spencer Clark, A. Jyoti Kaneria and Emmie Staker

Our chapter focuses on one English language learner (ELL) high school teacher’s use of narrative to navigate and selectively challenge the constraints of her classroom. Ms Staker, the teacher and a co-author, was able to achieve and generate agency by using narrative to build relationships, demonstrate love for others and initiate personal introspection in a predominantly white, rural school in the Western United States. We used an ecological theory of agency (Biesta & Tedder, 2006) to examine the entire context that shaped Ms Staker’s actions and use of narrative in her classroom, school, district and community to achieve agency. We also used Anzaldúa’s (1987, 2002) work on ‘nepantla’, the Nahuatl word for inhabiting the space-between-worlds (a space of both discomfort and ambiguity), and also her idea on becoming a ‘nepantlera’, a person who inhabits the in-between. This complement to ecological theory enabled us to further extend our understandings of the emotional components of Ms Staker’s work and her agency. We approached Ms Staker’s work through observation and oral history. It was evident that Ms Staker used narratives to achieve agency for her teaching, and that she also enabled her students to use narrative to generate agency for themselves. Ms Staker was able to make sense of the numerous constraints in her ELL classroom and then develop opportunities for agency despite the challenges of these constraints. We identify several implications based on 44

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Ms Staker’s teaching. Primarily, we recommend that pre-service teachers engage with the scholarly literature regarding the use of narratives and how impactful they may be on teaching. The use of narratives will better enable pre-service teachers to reflect on and develop personal introspection, demonstrate empathy and love for others and develop purposeful decision-making in the classroom. Introduction I was helping [a Latina high school] student write her English essay for another class… it had to be a complaining letter. She chose to write her letter … to an employee who follows her around for being Latina… She was really getting into it and she’s finally understanding these microaggressions, because before she was like, ‘Oh, it doesn’t bother me’. We were finally getting to this point like, ‘Yes this has happened to me, and I need to work through it’. She took the letter to her teacher and the teacher said, ‘Are you sure that [store] employee was following you around because you’re Latina, or could it be because you’re a teenager?’ She took a second, she looked back at it, and said, ‘Oh maybe. Maybe I’m not experiencing this thing. Maybe it’s not real. Maybe I’m just imagining things’. And it made me so, so angry. So for me to show that anger and to say, ‘No. This is valid, you are experiencing this. Don’t let anyone take that from you, that is yours. Don’t let anyone change what is yours’. And so no matter what, just listening to them and even helping them understand their own experiences. – Ms Staker

The anecdote above, produced by our co-author Ms Staker, illustrates her ecological agency – as defined in detail in the theoretical framework below – where she critically responded to and acted on a ‘problematic situation’ in order to validate the student’s experience despite another teacher’s erasure of it (Biesta & Tedder, 2006: 11). This chapter explores and theorizes how Ms Staker achieves ecological agency in her classroom, school and community in relation to her Western US rural high school context where English language learners (ELLs) were a minority, both linguistically and racially. We ask: (1) How do impactful ELL teachers enact ecological agency? (2) What does ecological agency look like; what forms does it take? We extend these questions within the scope of the contextual constraints on teacher purpose or intentions. In this way, we explore the extent to which Ms Staker achieved ecological agency within the constraining structures and problematic situations of her classroom’s ecological context. Kasun, a university researcher, spent two years in

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Ms Staker’s classroom to learn with Ms Staker and her students as a co-participant. Kasun engaged her own observations to help inform the testimonial presented in this chapter based on two oral history interviews conducted with Ms Staker, alongside Clark’s insights, the other university researcher and co-author. Our study illustrates how teachers can critically shape their responses to teaching in a highly constrained ELL context and will add to the literature on ELL teacher agency. Theoretical Framework

We approached our inquiry ‘ecologically’, wanting to better understand the interrelations and connectedness of the sociocultural context (Wideen et  al., 1998) in which Ms Staker taught. By interrelations we mean the relationships among those present in Ms Staker’s context – students, teachers, administrators – as well as the contextual conditions of the school, community, public spaces and personal places. The connectedness and disconnectedness of these relationships created possibilities and opportunities for agency within her ecological context. Therefore, this study was informed by an ecological theory of agency (Biesta & Tedder, 2006). There has been much recent research on the topic of teacher agency (Biesta et al., 2015; Buchanan, 2015; Kayi-Aydar, 2015), including the use of ecological agency (Oolbekkink-Marchand et  al., 2017). Ecological agency theorists define agency as action in the context of structures, or an actor’s capability to ‘critically shape their own responsiveness to problematic situations’ (Biesta & Tedder, 2006: 11). In an ecological view, ‘actors always act by means of their environment rather than simply in their environment [so that] the achievement of agency will always result from the interplay of individual efforts, available resources and contextual and structural factors as they come together in particular and, in a sense, always unique situations’ (Biesta & Tedder, 2007: 137). Agency, in the ecological sense, maintains that actors constantly achieve agency in response to the ecological conditions of the context, even for those who seemingly have the most affordances. We find value in an ecological theory of agency because, as Priestley et  al. (2012: 196) note, it ‘renders the question of “What is agency?” sterile, supplanting it with better questions such as, “How is agency possible?” and “How is agency achieved?”’. An ecological theory of agency is relevant to our work with Ms Staker because it prioritizes individuals’ reflexive and creative counteractions to cultural, economic, political and societal constraints that open inquiry into new possibilities (Pantić, 2015). We consider all individuals to be reflexive because they are influenced by, but not determined by, structures of society (Archer, 2000). However, through reflexive processes, such as constructing narratives and inner dialogue (Archer, 2000), and the ‘manoeuvre amongst repertoires’ (Biesta & Tedder, 2006: 11), individuals can change their relationships to society

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and contribute to an ongoing emergent process of societal reproduction as well as transformation. While a teacher can reproduce limited notions among youth about what it means to be a citizen (for instance, an anemic sense of citizenship as merely casting a vote every four years for the US president), he or she can also be doing transformative work where students develop empathy such as when they write a first-person narrative of what it would take to have stood up to Nazis during World War II. Such reproductive and transformative elements are not oppositional but constructive elements in the possibilities of an ecological space for individuals to achieve agency. In addition to agency theory, we draw from Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987, 2002) work on ‘nepantla’, the Nahuatl word for inhabiting the spacebetween-worlds (a space of both discomfort and ambiguity), and of her idea on becoming a ‘nepantlera’, a person who inhabits the in-between. A nepantlera is one who engages in a long and cyclical journey toward this political work of creating social transformation. For Ms Staker, an example of two worlds that she inhabits would be the world of her classroom, where she and her students co-construct the space, and the world of faculty and administration. Anzaldúa was a Chicana feminist and postcolonial scholar; she theorized social transformation throughout her life. We recognize social transformation as one of the key objectives of teacher education for social justice and thus draw upon her work as a complement to Freire’s (2008) work. The embodied, hard-earned wisdom of Anzaldúa provides support in the somewhat alchemistic spaces of agency, which can result in social transformation. Of nepantla, Anzaldúa (2002: 569) explains, ‘When you’re in the place between worldviews (nepantla) you’re able to slip between realities to a neutral perception. A decision made in the in-between place becomes a turning point initiating psychological and spiritual transformations, making other kinds of experiences possible’. These ‘other kinds of experiences’ can be considered ‘other-worldly’ spaces of possibility where social transformation can occur, often as a result of ecological teacher agency, and specifically as teachers respond to the constraints they encounter in their classroom contexts and to their students’ experiences. Anzaldúa (2015) explains that the process of working as a nepantlera also includes spiritual components and an interconnectedness with others in both knowing and being: Dwelling in liminalities… las nepantleras cannot be forced to stay in one place, locked into one perspective… or one picture of reality. Las nepantleras… construct alternative roads, creating new topographies and geographies of hybrid selves who transcend binaries and de-polarize potential allies. Nepantleras are not constrained by one culture and or world but experience multiple realities… Nepantleras use competing systems of knowledge and rewrite their identities. (Anzaldúa, 2015: 82)

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Working as a nepantlera engages the possibilities of ecological agency to embark on new ways of knowing and being to transform the problematic recursions of systems. We use Anzaldúa’s work with an ecological sense of agency to better understand the dimensions that dynamic educators utilize in achieving agency. In tandem with the aspects of nepantleras discussed above, other agency theorists (Biesta & Tedder, 2006; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Oolbekkink-Marchand et al., 2017) have described three primary dimensions in agency: iterational, projective and practical-evaluative. We exercise the iterational dimension when we reflexively select and utilize values and beliefs related to past experiences and life histories, past instances of achieving agency and realizations and actions that we recognize are important. We draw upon the projective dimension when employing intentions to transform and bring about a future that is different from the past and the present. We apply the practical-evaluative dimension when situated in the present, where agency involves interacting with the ecological context and being influenced by both past reflexive knowledge and future projective intentions. Most recently, Pantić (2015: 763) illustrated these three temporal dimensions associated with ecological agency, as ‘influences from the past (e.g. adopted routines), orientations towards the future purposes (e.g. hopes, fears, desires) and engagement with the present (e.g. judgments about the limits and opportunities provided by the present structural contexts)’. We use these dimensional elements of agency in framing Ms Staker’s narratives in a structurally constrained ecological context. Methodology

We write this, incorporating the perspective of Ms Staker, using two years of weekly observations and conversations by Kasun, and two formal oral history interviews conducted with Ms Staker, each lasting approximately two hours (Clandinin & Connelly, 2004; Chase, 2005). The interviews were conducted in the summer of 2016, based on questions that focused on the nature of her sense of agency and how she connected with students. The second interview focused heavily on student narratives in her work. We view it as critical to include Ms Staker as an author of this case study (Yin, 2009), in a similar vein to the work on teacher agency by Charteris and Smith (2017), which also included a researcher and in-service teachers as authors, in an attempt to challenge and minimize the power imbalances that often occur in academic research (JohnsonBailey, 2004). At the same time, we recognize her knowledge and skills as co-author to be equal to, if not more important than, the positionality of the researchers in this scholarship. She was recognized in a university alumni magazine cover story as a leader in multicultural education; she was also her district’s 2014 Teacher of the Year. Our methodology is

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both reflexive and interpretive, recognizing the multiple truths in reality (Behar, 1995), and that through our careful reflection and co-writing, we were able to come to a portrayal that is as honest as we can make it. Our epistemological stance is one of critical reflexivity, wherein we engaged our understanding of the interview transcripts and Staker’s and Kasun’s reflections with a critical lens, never trying to portray ‘victory narratives’ while at the same time maintaining an interest in equity in education (Marx & Saavedra, 2013). Most observations of Ms Staker’s class occurred during a special elective course we call the ‘Latino Exploration’, in which Ms Staker allowed the students to explore their identities. All students were either formally designated as ELLs or former ELLs. Students could rotate through the course for three years, and it turned into a multigenerational course wherein the elder students often helped foster the younger ones’ participation and inclusion in the course. Kasun also observed Ms Staker’s ELL instruction and her daily, informal lunchtime mentoring. Her room, never empty during lunch, was clearly a safe space where students from marginalized backgrounds felt they could go for her creative guidance and also to relax among other young people. This was all in the context of a larger high school of about 1500 students, mostly white, in a rural, agricultural town in the Western United States. Our co-author, Ms Staker, was in her seventh year as a public high school ELL and English teacher. She grew up in a white, working-class household and had lived most of her life in the same region where she taught. She had spent most of her adult life seeking to learn from other perspectives beyond the white, Christian, heteronormative context in which she grew up. Kasun witnessed Ms Staker liaising with teachers across disciplines and with administrators to improve their understanding and expectations of ELLs in the school. We reviewed the interviews and coded for emergent themes (Saldaña, 2009). After the initial round of coding, we recognized several themes, which initially included, for instance, stories, emotions, love, relationships, whiteness, awareness (of students and self) and critical work. We recoded for larger cohesive themes to see how the smaller themes fit together. We then reviewed these against the initial data to establish coherence among the themes. We also made sure that the themes were resonant with our critical reflections, both through Kasun’s observations of Staker’s classes and Staker’s internal sense of what she was teaching and why; this was achieved through several phone and email discussions between Kasun and Staker. In the next section, we explore the main themes and how they are related. We recognize that Ms Staker stands out as both an experienced and nuanced teacher. We caution that among the challenges of case study research are the issues of not being able to generalize findings nor being assured that the case could ever be representative of a larger sample. Not all language educators would have Ms

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Staker’s level of sophistication, but we point to her work as an example of the possible. Findings

We identified four interwoven themes regarding how Ms Staker engaged her ecological agency: (1) the importance of using narratives, (2) relationship building as a nepantlera, (3) loving others (including the difficult people in the systems) and (4) personal introspection. Figure 4.1 illustrates the interwoven quality of the themes where relationship building, personal introspection and loving others are interconnected – against the backdrop of the primary theme of using narratives. The use of narratives is present in the other three themes and serves as the primary way Ms Staker engaged her agency. Narratives

Both Ms Staker’s own use of narrative and the fact that she provided space for her students to use narrative was the central, underpinning and interwoven theme throughout the data and functioned as an iterative and projective dimension of agency (Biesta & Tedder, 2006; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Oolbekkink-Marchand et al., 2017). Ms Staker identified narratives as one of the most effective ways to exercise her ecological agency – in relating to others, responding to problematic situations and impacting the construction of their shared realities, echoing Kayi-Aydar’s (2017) findings of how one teacher-professor storied her own life toward

Narratives

Relationship building as a nepantlera

Personal introspection through subversion

Loving despite systems of oppression and structural barriers

Figure 4.1 Narratives

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and with agency. She stated, ‘I’m a believer in the power of the narrative and people’s stories and that’s what we connect with and that’s how we have empathy for others’ (E. Staker, personal communication, July 2016). Her beliefs are similar to the ways Taylor (2017) showed how a teacher educator and in-service teachers used narratives to create classroom community. Similar to other research on language teachers showing that they employ narrative to construct agency (e.g. Charteris & Smith, 2017), our study found that the use of narrative enabled Ms Staker to be a productive agent toward change and provided the most substantive means for her to achieve agency in her ecological context, which included relationship building, loving others despite systems of oppression and structural barriers, and her own self-development. Her narratives were shaped by the constraining district ELL curriculum and demonstrated a generative attempt to both resist her curricular constraints and empower her students. Ms Staker intentionally and purposefully provided space for her ELL students to develop their own narratives and helped them situate their narratives as relevant and important in the context of their multiple cultures and societies. It was in narrative that Ms Staker created the possibility for agency, and subsequently achieved it. Relationship building as a nepantlera

Despite Ms Staker’s positioning as a white, English-speaking woman, she was able to find ways to build nepantlera-like bridges that spanned cultures and differences with her students. She actively sought and created ways to connect with her students – often by creating safe spaces and new spaces for narratives – as a form of agency (Biesta & Tedder, 2006; Pantić, 2015) and to transform their risks of exclusion and underachievement into inclusion and improved outcomes. Ms Staker was able to allow her understanding of stories to be somewhat malleable, like our histories, as Anzaldúa indicated is possible for the perspective-shifting nepantlera. This sort of relationship building, or bridging, was not sanctioned in the assimilative district curriculum that Ms Staker was expected to teach and document. We next provide examples of this bridging. Ms Staker’s students were guest speakers at a local university’s multicultural education class in 2013, speaking about their lives as Latinx and former ELL students. One student, Alfredo (a pseudonym), narrated how both his parents had been deported from the United States at two separate times in his early childhood. He shared the depths of pain and the strength required for him to endure the deportations. Ms Staker described the experience of this student sharing his story: it happened to be … when his parents were deported when he was in 3rd grade. And you know he just broke down. And it made me realize that

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these stories are very protected for these students, they hold them very closely, they don’t let anyone hear them, they’re very distrusting.

It was the first time this student had shared that story with any of his peers or with Ms Staker, and it was honored by Ms Staker who took it up in her class once they returned to her high school ‘Latino Exploration’ class; it was a story he reworked over several years. In Ms Staker’s class, as a practical-evaluative dimension of agency (Biesta & Tedder, 2006; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Oolbekkink-Marchand et  al., 2017), the students discussed how strong he was to share the story as a means to teach others, how powerful it was to be able to speak to power (to future teachers in this case) and how hard but powerful it was to be vulnerable. The students were able to explore their feelings, in large part, because of the dynamic and daily rhythm of the class community that Ms Staker had created. Ms Staker used a pedagogy built on critical race theory, which centered the usually marginalized narratives of people of color toward illuminating lived realities, including experiences of oppression and resistance (e.g. Delgado, 1989; Ladson-Billings, 1998), personal and community resilience and self-exploration. Most classes began with students writing a journal entry on a topic provided by Ms Staker, brief group sharing and small group work related to her pedagogy (sometimes through articles, short novels or creative works such as posters or short narrative essays). Often, rituals were involved, such as celebrating each other’s work through applause and formal beginning-of-year resolutions each January, including ‘champagne’ toasts celebrating these resolutions. In Alfredo’s case, Ms Staker recognized a great deal of growth in commenting, ‘By his senior year [after three years of participation in the class] he could tell the story… but he was more secure in himself’ (E. Staker, personal communication, July 2016). Ms Staker explained the transformative agency she witnessed in this student and others when they shared their stories in noting, ‘And the more that they practice opening up and sharing their stories with certain people, with trustworthy people, the more they become confident in who they are and how to handle that’. In this way, Ms Staker used her own agency in an overarching way, through the modeling of narrative that fostered her creation of a collective, which in this case is a projected dimension of agency (Biesta & Tedder, 2006; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Oolbekkink-Marchand et  al., 2017). This also demonstrates her nepantlera ability to create space for her students to understand and demonstrate their own agency to themselves, in their school and their communities. This reflects what Anzaldúa (2015) refers to as establishing a ‘new tribalism’, wherein various groups merge and find affinities. Anzaldúa (2015) explains: [T]he new tribalism is about being part of but never subsumed by a group, never losing individuality to the group nor losing the group to the

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individual. The new tribalism is about working together to create new ‘stories’ of identity and culture, to envision diverse futures. It’s about rethinking our narratives of history, ancestry, and even of reality itself. (Anzaldúa, 2015: 85)

Ms Staker used narratives to develop trust with her ELL students and establish new ‘stories’ about the students’ lives. For example, initially, many of her students were not willing to engage or share because they did not want to appear vulnerable at the beginning of the course. As a tool, Ms Staker leaned into her own narratives, modeled how to be vulnerable and reflective and illustrated how to develop a powerful narrative. She explained, ‘I really try to open up to the students… and I do tell them stories about my relationships in the past and my struggles… just opening up to them, they realize I’m trusting them with that and that I care enough about them that I trust them, and then they trust back’ (E. Staker, personal communication, July 2016). Ms Staker was clear that the purpose of using her own narratives was to build trust with the students and to ultimately shift the focus back to them and their stories. She states, ‘… there’s a fine line of not talking about myself too much though. Just modeling enough and then get it connecting back to them. Just enough to build trust. Because I ultimately don’t want it to be about me, I want it to be about them and their experiences… I do it mostly just to create that safe place’ (E. Staker, personal communication, July 2016). Her modeling and vulnerability allowed many students to trust her and enabled her to exercise agency to a greater degree because students opened up, which allowed her to engage them even more. The agency exercised through sharing stories strengthened her relationships with her students and promoted authentic learning. Loving others despite systems of oppression and structural barriers

Deeply connected to the way Ms Staker developed relationships was a heavy focus on love, a love rooted in her critique of structures of power and that persisted despite anger over injustices (Freire, 1994). This love manifested itself despite numerous constraints. It is as if Ms Staker took the constraints as her point of departure to establish how and where to develop her agency. She initially eschewed what she deemed an overly rigid and prescriptive curriculum toward implementing a culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2009) in her first years. The narratives she used, based on her introspection, situated her in her ecological context to act with her students and colleagues, which enabled her capacity to act within cultural and structural constraints. When explaining how she decided to stop teaching the mandated curriculum, Ms Staker discussed the point at which she invoked her agency to make a change

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to enhance her classroom. This ultimately led to a deeper expression of loving others, her students and even her administrators: So the [ELL] language program that was assigned, mandated, it’s hard to articulate this exact common sense thing that happened. But as a teacher you’re really supposed to go with your feeling in the classroom and [ask] ‘are the students engaged?’ And if they’re not, change what you’re doing. And they were not engaged and I was not engaged and it was just very, very mandated and superficial and wasn’t working. (E. Staker, personal communication, July 2016)

Kasun agreed that the original curriculum was situated neither in the current literature on how best to teach English learners nor in culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2009), which could have activated students’ interests toward learning. We note that Ms Staker’s discussions with district administrators, along with the professional development of administrators themselves, led to an eventual shift in the curriculum toward more research-based and effective instruction of ELLs. Ms Staker decided to stop teaching an ineffective and non-researchbased curriculum, and she took the time and care to become involved at the district level and connect with administrators through inquiry and narratives to create change despite the often oppressive nature of the systems. She used the curriculum she had created, one that centered on narratives of overcoming obstacles, often through community, as key texts (e.g. Barefoot Heart [Trevino, 1999] and Enrique’s Journey [Nazario, 2006]), to help expand the vision of her peers in her district. She created positive working relationships with administrators, probed their beliefs through thoughtful questions and ultimately was the catalyst for change. Concretely, her district shifted to a new curriculum, which leaned into students’ lived experiences as a foundation for what was taught, instead of prescriptive, worksheet-based lessons. What was key was building a relationship with the district person who mandated the curriculum and by getting to know her and talking with her and working with her, then she understood the deficits of the program… And in the process … we vetoed the curriculum… you know, I end up really loving the people I work with too. And I do love the administration and administrator I have. (E. Staker, personal communication, July 2016)

With a different, newer faculty member and administrator in her building, Ms Staker created these shifts and spaces of love. She used her love to bring them to see outside of their own lenses toward an understanding of the students’ experiences. She described this administrator as being a

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‘pull yourself up from the bootstraps’ type of person, one who tended to say that students needed more ‘grit’ and more focus. When engaging with the ‘bootstrap’ mentality in the field of education, Ms Staker often referred to what one of her mentors once asked her, ‘Well, what if you don’t have boots?’ Ms Staker used that question throughout her work when educating her colleagues and administrators in general and specifically with those mentioned above on students’ experiences of intersectionality. Ms Staker remembered a conversation when the same faculty member noted above told a story of her own white grandmother being an immigrant. Ms Staker asked her about the grandmother’s experience and if it would have been easier if she’d had someone to guide her and make sense of it. The faculty member and administrator shifted their lens through Ms Staker’s deep caring and saw how the experience of their students was akin to that of the grandmother. Their perspectives and beliefs grew and changed in support of the students. Ms Staker described the experience as follows, And I said, ‘Did she [the grandmother] have a hard time being Italian and American?’ [And she said], ‘Oh yeah, it was really rough’. And I said, ‘Wouldn’t it have been great for her … to understand those issues and learn how to survive and learn how to [be] resilient at an earlier age?’ … And slowly, making her feel the point. And they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, okay’. (E. Staker, personal communication, July 2016)

Ms Staker’s ability to be a bridge between the world of the students and of the administrators is not only a representation of building relationships, but of her ecological agency and role as a nepantlera. Ms Staker used narrative to demonstrate love to and with her ELL students. Her ability to demonstrate love through narrative modeled an openness to those who were different than her. Ms Staker achieved agency when she demonstrated love because she was being generative in how she chose to interact with people. She had many choices between being culturally assimilative or empathetically loving, and by choosing empathetic love she was developing new ways of interacting in her ecological context, while modeling this way of being for her ELL students. She expressed this love in the following quote: I really, really care. And I went into teaching ESL and ELL students and I had heard over and over again that the burnout rate was really high … and so I went in saying …I will never quit on them. And I don’t know if that affected it but they’re actually my favorite students … oh I love them. I really love them and I love all my students but it’s more fun because I get to have them longer, I get to work with them through the years. (E. Staker, personal communication, July 2016)

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For Ms Staker, having the ELL students over many years was an opportunity, rather than a problem. Kasun observed over the course of two years how Ms Staker delighted in the students’ triumphs and puzzled over and worked among students with some daunting challenges. She celebrated students’ new jobs, their scholarships into college, their departures from unhealthy relationships as well as their entering into healthy ones. She also worked very closely with guidance counselors and social workers with deep care toward not just finding resources but helping create them for students who often had deep needs, such as needing clothing, emotional help when parents were deported or funding for college if they were undocumented. Personal introspection through subversion of power

Ms Staker continually formed her narratives through introspection and with a tendency toward subverting others’ narratives for her own growth. Her introspection allowed her to be reflexive and maintain autonomy, while also helping her revise her own narrative according to the ecological needs of her classroom. In this way, her introspection was highly valuable when filtering the societal influences and curricular constraints on her agency in her ELL classroom and beyond. She constantly had to filter her experiences in relation to the spaces of her community and school that reinforced her white privilege, and the ELL curriculum that did the same. Ms Staker spoke of how reflecting on her white privilege and white guilt (Bonilla-Silva, 2003; Marx, 2006; Thandeka, 2000) through a multicultural literacy course more than 10  years before had guided her to become more aware of her own agency and how she had shifted her own positioning. She reflected on Barbara Kingsolver’s (1998) The Poisonwood Bible, wherein a white minister takes his family from Georgia to ‘convert’ people from Congo in what can be characterized as a classic portrayal of colonization through religion and whiteness, wherein such efforts not only wreaked havoc on locals – as is the case with colonization in general (Anzaldúa, 1987; Said, 1979; Smith, 2006) – but also among the family members attempting to do this work of the ‘White savior’: I remember one of the characters… and she’s fighting the cause right there in the trenches and I was like, ‘…she’s me and I love her’. And I went to class… and the professor… came in and said, ‘Let’s talk about the hero of the book today…’ and someone brought up this other young girl … and I was like, ‘What? No it can’t be her she’s not doing anything for the cause’. And I was really, really hurt that the girl I identified with was not the hero of the book… but as I was listening to the discussion and how she was more self-punishing and taking a role of white guilt. So sometimes I learn things through literature about myself that I never

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would’ve done otherwise. (E. Staker, personal communication, July 2016)

Similar to Anzaldúa’s (2015: 82) invoking of the importance of how nepantleras use ‘competing systems of knowledge’ and they thus ‘rewrite their identities’, in this case, Ms Staker learned her role was not to be a ‘White savior’ as the character she admired was: ‘I learned a lot about myself that I didn’t have to have a biracial baby to be a part of that movement, that action… You know, I don’t have to claim that friend [of color]… to be part of work, the work that I want to do’ (E. Staker, personal communication, July 2016). Ms Staker was able to recognize ways in which she reframed her own narrative of self, particularly her whiteness and its links to her role as a teacher. She reflected on how bell hooks (e.g. 1994, 2010) made an impact on her thinking as an educator: I remember [hooks] … talking about the detriment of White teachers for Black communities… very bluntly, things we do wrong as white communities, and I need to hear that. White people need to hear that, we don’t want to hear that all the time, but we need to hear it … I’ve had some really, ‘Hey, I’m White’ moments. Or even feeling that resistance for a minute and realizing, ‘Whoa, I just felt that and now I can get over it…’ and it’s uncomfortable for White people and then we can move on. I like uncomfortable moments. They’re good learning moments. (E. Staker, personal communication, July 2016)

Ms Staker showed a depth of understanding regarding her positionality. She understood the richness of her community and applied her introspection toward understanding who she was in the context of her work and how her work was directly impacted by her ability to revise her own narrative. She built relationships with her students, colleagues and herself to deepen her agency and expand her role as a nepantlera. Discussion

Despite the constraints of increasingly standardized education reforms (Ravitch, 2016), spaces of agency are possible for individuals (Clark, 2013). Ms Staker is one example, an outlier, perhaps, of such agency. We see her willingness to engage as a nepantlera toward action – and all the ambiguities, which the vulnerabilities and risks of those actions may include – as underlying her sense of agency (Anzaldúa, 2002). The narrative work that Ms Staker did with her students and colleagues may not be the type of action that we typically associate with agency, yet it resulted in new possibilities and opportunities for agency, for both Ms Staker and her students.

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Ms Staker embraced the importance of connecting to others through narrative, just as Bruner (1991) identified the foundational importance of narratives in our relations. Narratives have been recognized as foundational for millennia in native wisdoms (Cajete, 2000), as well as for healing (Anzaldúa, 2015: 24). Ms Staker was able to endure the discomforts of her changing understandings, and the liminal states of being wherein she explored shifts in who she was and what she believed (Anzaldúa, 2002). The personal shifts in her college literacy class that influenced her as a teacher pushing curricular boundaries, provide an example of an iterational dimension of agency as described above (Biesta & Tedder, 2006; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Oolbekkink-Marchand et  al., 2017). The data demonstrate that she was able to be an agent of social transformation by using her narratives to draw upon experience and enact her purposes in the ecological contexts of her classroom and school. In a practical sense, Ms Staker’s liminal nepantlera shifts as a student, teacher and colleague helped her grapple with the constraints of her ecological context. She used the narratives of her life to appropriate the constraints of her ecological context (classroom, school, community) and generate agency for herself and her students (Biesta & Tedder, 2006). Ms Staker was able to evaluate the constraints of her context and draw upon her narratives to develop realistic intentions that could transform the present for her students, a demonstration of the practical-evaluative dimension of agency (Biesta & Tedder, 2006; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Oolbekkink-Marchand et al., 2017). Similarly, she transformed her professional reality too, by using narratives to work with and around her colleagues and administrators. In this way, constraints became opportunities for Ms Staker to achieve agency in her context. Turning the constraints into opportunities did not make them cease to be constraining, but they provided a path and a focus for her purposeful and intentional agency. This was Ms Staker’s response to the constraints of her ecological context (Biesta & Tedder, 2006). In providing what could be considered structures for her agency, these constraints in effect made agency possible. Viewing constraints as opportunities opens up continual possibilities for achieving agency in the classroom. Using narratives provided the most common catalyst for achieving agency in Ms Staker’s ecological context. She used the narratives of her past where she confronted challenges and constraints to demonstrate her intentions for her students in the present. In the process, Ms Staker modeled how her students could begin making new narratives and possibilities for the future – an expression of the projective dimension of agency (Biesta & Tedder, 2006; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Oolbekkink-Marchand et al., 2017) – out of the seemingly endless constraints in their lives. In this chapter, we described the ways that Ms Staker achieved agency over a long period of time. This is not to say she did not achieve agency on a daily basis, but that

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daily she was also making agency possible, creating new opportunities and possibilities for her and her students in the short term (over a unit or course) and long term (over a school year or two). In this way, narratives allowed Ms Staker to resourcefully achieve agency in multiple temporal dimensions (Pantić, 2015) – daily, short term and long term. She used her narratives daily to achieve agency by building relationships, demonstrating empathy and love and practicing personal introspection. Ms Staker’s daily achievements of agency led to sustainable changes in her students’ personal and academic lives, as well as her own personal and professional life over these two years. In other words, her daily achievements of agency were foundational to her and her students’ long-term success. Implications

Further research regarding the impact of other teachers who manage to exercise agency despite constraining systems will be useful in determining if Ms Staker’s agency is unique to her. If it is not (and we suspect it is not, particularly among those who have managed to keep subjugated knowledge alive despite, for instance, the impacts of colonization), we would like to see teacher education programs engage with this literature with pre-service teachers to help them understand the ways that they may be able to use narratives for increasingly agentic purposes in their schools. Teacher educators should start with the simple questions that Priestley et  al. (2012) asked: How is agency possible? How is agency achieved? Initial responses to these questions would all begin with the teacher, but Ms Staker demonstrated that agency involves much more than the teacher. It is the symbiotic relationships that the teacher creates with others in her ecological context that produce the highest degrees of agency through empathy, love and continual introspection, and Ms Staker developed these areas through her narratives. We argue that the use of narratives is particularly important because it is one of many ways that teachers can demonstrate empathy and love. There is much recent research on teachers’ ability to empathize with their students, especially in terms of white teachers teaching multicultural students (Rojas & Liou, 2017; Warren, 2014, 2015). Research demonstrates the deeply difficult task of developing genuine empathetic regard for others, but also highlights the incredibly productive effects of demonstrating genuine empathy in the classroom. If narratives are indeed used to co-construct reality (Bruner, 1991), why not the reality of the classroom space? We believe that helping pre-service teachers understand the power of narratives, both personally and pedagogically, will provide them with a practical tool for demonstrating empathy and love for their students, despite and because of the vulnerability required in such acts. The use of narratives is also valuable for promoting introspection and reflective action in the classroom. Ms Staker demonstrated how her

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constant introspection helped her create spaces for agency among the constraints of her ecological context. Ms Staker’s use of personal narratives was part of her constant introspection, even if and because her narratives were challenged and changed, because they illustrated the various dimensions of her agency (nepantlera, iterational, projective, practicalevaluative) and allowed her to evaluate past and present to change reality for her and her students, amid the constraints of her ecological context. Teacher educators can help pre-service teachers understand that we rationalize our decisions, and thus they can find ways to exercise agency, through narratives. Thus, putting those narratives at the forefront of one’s pedagogical decision-making will only solidify the purpose and intentions that are at the heart of one’s agency. Lastly, Ms Staker further demonstrates the need to focus on developing pre-service teachers’ purpose for teaching, and the need to make purpose an explicit part of their decision-making process (Clark, 2016; Darling-Hammond, 2017; Pantić, 2015). Ms Staker demonstrated that having a strong purpose and intentions for one’s students are vital for achieving agency in the face of ecological constraints. Ms Staker had a strong purpose for social justice and social transformation, which underlay each of her narratives, as well as the critical introspection she engaged in. Without this dimension of her agency, the other dimensions would have been directionless in attempting to create culturally sustainable shifts (Paris, 2015; Paris & Alim, 2014) for her students’ personal and academic realities. References Anzaldúa, G. (1987) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute. Anzaldúa, G. (2002) Now let us shift… the path of conocimiento… inner work, public acts. In G. Anzaldúa and A. Keating (eds) This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (pp. 540–578). New York: Routledge. Anzaldúa, G. (2015) Flights of the imagination: Rereading/rewriting realities. In A. Keating (ed.) Light in the Dark Luz en Lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (pp. 23–46). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Archer, M. (2000) Being Human: The Problem of Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Behar, R. (1995) Introduction: Out of exile. In R.G. Behar and D.A. Gordon (eds) Women Writing Culture (pp. 1–32). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. bell hooks (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. bell hooks (2010) Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. New York: Routledge. Biesta, G. and Tedder, M. (2006) How is agency possible? Towards an ecological understanding of agency-as-achievement. The Learning Lives Project, Working paper 5. See https​://ww​w.res​earch​gate.​net/p​rofil​e/Mic​hael_​Tedde​r/pub​licat​ion/2​28644​383_H​ ow_is​_agen​cy_po​ssibl​e_Tow​ards_​an_ec​ologi​cal_u​nders​tandi​ng_of​_agen​cy-as​-achi​ eveme​nt/li​nks/0​0b495​2cadd​9bd2b​6a000​000.p​df (accessed 15 August 2017. Biesta, G. and Tedder, M. (2007) Agency and learning in the lifecourse: Towards an ecological perspective. Studies in the Education of Adults 39, 132–149.

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Biesta, G., Priestley, M. and Robinson, S. (2015) The role of beliefs in teacher agency. Teachers and Teaching 21 (6), 624–640. Bonilla-Silva, E. (2003) Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Bruner, J. (1991) The narrative construction of reality. Critical Inquiry 18 (Autumn), 1–21. Buchanan, R. (2015) Teacher identity and agency in an era of accountability. Teachers and Teaching 21 (6), 700–719. Cajete, G. (2000) Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence. Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers. Charteris, J. and Smith, J. (2017) Sacred and secret stories in professional knowledge landscapes: Learner agency in teacher professional learning. Reflective Practice 18 (5), 600–612. Chase, S. (2005) Narrative inquiry: Multiple lenses, approaches, voices. In N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln (eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (3rd edn; pp. 651–679). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Clandinin, D.J. and Connelly, F.M. (2004) Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Clark, J.S. (2013) ‘Your credibility could be shot’: Preservice teachers’ thinking about nonfiction graphic novels, curriculum decision-making, and professional acceptance. The Social Studies 104 (1), 38–45. Clark, J.S. (2016) Critical intentions and ‘Care of the Self:’ Reconsidering the role of agency in preservice teachers’ thinking. Journal of Curriculum and Teaching 5 (1), 1–10. Darling-Hammond, L. (2017) Teacher education around the world: What can we learn from international practice? European Journal of Teacher Education 42 (2), 1–19. Delgado, R. (1989) Storytelling for oppositionists and others: A plea for narratives. Michigan Law Review 87 (8), 2411–2441. Emirbayer, M. and Mische, A. (1998) What is agency? American Journal of Sociology 103 (4), 962–1023. Freire, P. (1994) Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed (R.R. Barr, trans.). London: Bloomsbury Academic. Freire, P. (2008) Pedagogy of the Oppressed (M. Bergman Ramos, trans., 30th anniversary edn). New York: Continuum. Johnson-Bailey, J. (2004) Enjoining positionality and power in narrative work: Balancing contentious and modulating forces. In K.B. DeMarrais and S.D. Lapin (eds) Perspectives and Approaches for Research in Education and the Social Sciences (pp. 123–138). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Kayi-Aydar, H. (2015) Teacher agency, positioning, and English language learners: Voices of pre-service classroom teachers. Teaching and Teacher Education 45, 94–103. Kayi-Aydar, H. (2017) A language teacher’s agency in the development of her professional identities: A narrative case study. Journal of Latinos and Education. doi:10.1080/153 48431.2017.1406360. Kingsolver, B. (1998) The Poisonwood Bible. New York: Harper Collins Publisher. Ladson-Billings, G. (1998) Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education? Qualitative Studies in Education 11 (1), 7–24. Ladson-Billings, G. (2009) The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teaching of African American Children (2nd edn). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Marx, S. (2006) Revealing the Invisible: Confronting Passive Racism in Teacher Education. New York: Routledge. Marx, S. and Saavedra, C.M. (2013) Understanding the epistemological divide in ESL education: What we learned from a failed university-school district collaboration. Urban Education 49 (4), 418–439.

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Nazario, S. (2006) Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother. New York: Random House. Oolbekkink-Marchand, H.W., Hadar, L.L., Smith, K., Helleve, I. and Ulvik, M. (2017) Teachers’ perceived professional space and their agency. Teaching and Teacher Education 62, 37–46. Pantić, N. (2015) A model for study of teacher agency for social justice. Teachers and Teaching 21 (6), 759–778. Paris, D. (2015) The right to culturally sustaining language education for the new American mainstream: An introduction. International Multilingual Research Journal 9 (4), 221–226. Paris, D. and Alim, H.S. (2014) What are we seeking to sustain through culturally sustaining pedagogy? A loving critique forward. Harvard Educational Review 84 (1), 85–100. Priestley, M., Edwards, R., Priestley, A. and Miller, K. (2012) Teacher agency in curriculum making: Agents of change and spaces for manoeuvre. Curriculum Inquiry 42 (2), 191–214. Ravitch, D. (2016) The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education. New York: Basic Books. Rojas, L. and Liou, D.D. (2017) Social justice teaching through the sympathetic touch of caring and high expectations for students of color. Journal of Teacher Education 68 (1), 28–40. Said, E. (1979) Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Saldaña, J. (2009) The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. London: Sage. Smith, L.T. (2006) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books Ltd. Taylor, L. (2017) How teachers become teacher researchers: Narrative as a tool for teacher identity construction. Teaching and Teacher Education 6, 16–25. Thandeka (2000) Learning to Be White: Money, Race, and God in America. London: Continuum. Trevino Hart, E. (1999) Barefoot Heart. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingue. Warren, C. (2014) Towards a pedagogy for the application of empathy in culturally diverse classrooms. The Urban Review 46 (3), 395–419. Warren, C. (2015) Conflicts and contradictions: Conceptions of empathy and the work of good-intentioned early career white female teachers. Urban Education 50 (5), 572–600. Wideen, M., Mayer-Smith, J. and Moon, B. (1998) A critical analysis of the research on learning to teach: Making the case for an ecological perspective on inquiry. Review of Educational Research 68 (2), 130–178. Yin, R.K. (2009) Case Study Research: Design and Methods (5th edn). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

5 Language Teacher Agency and High-Stakes Teacher Evaluation: A Positioning Analysis Amber N. Warren

The emphasis on high-stakes teacher evaluation (HSTE) in policy and practice in US public schools creates potential sources of tension for teachers of multilingual students, who may draw on these discourses but may also look to their area-specific knowledge or other sources of experience in positioning themselves. Thus, it is important to examine how these teachers negotiate these various available discourses and enact their agency within the evaluation process. This study uses positioning analysis to understand one teacher’s agency during her evaluation process. Analysis revealed how this teacher positioned herself with respect to district policies and her evaluators through moments of narration and declaration in interviews. Findings suggest the importance of recognizing the distinct knowledge that teachers working with multilingual students possess for supporting their work and agentic possibilities. Introduction

High-stakes teacher evaluation (HSTE) policies adopted in light of US education policies align teacher efficacy with student achievement as measured by standardized assessments and emphasize a peers-as-mentors evaluation model. These policies are designed to encourage teacher learning through engaging principals and teacher leaders (mentors) in evaluating colleagues to identify areas of strength and for targeted improvement. For example, recent legislation as part of the Every Student Succeeds Act (2015: 11) emphasized ‘a rigorous, transparent, and fair evaluation and support system for teachers, principals, or other school leaders’ as a requirement for receiving federal funds. However, the effects of such legislation on diverse settings, including those serving ‘differentially advantaged populations’ may vary (Donaldson et al., 2016: 183). Although multilingual students have been one of the fastest growing populations in the United States for over a decade, few teachers receive 63

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professional development or have taken an education course targeted specifically at working with multilingual students (often referred to in US education policy as English learners) (Lucas, 2011; Menken et  al., 2001). This lack of preparation among the general teacher population is widely acknowledged by those familiar with multilingual student education (Coady et  al., 2016). However, it is rarely acknowledged by those developing teacher evaluation models, where teachers and principals unfamiliar with multilingual education are frequently asked to evaluate their colleagues using a general teaching rubric. Given this political and professional landscape, the school, with its institutional expectations for how to ‘do teaching’ becomes a potential site of tension, where teachers of multilingual learners are positioned within policy documents and locally circulating discourses about effective teaching. In their own positioning, these teachers may draw on these discourses, but may also look to their area-specific knowledge or other sources of experience. Thus, how these teachers negotiate the various available discourses and enact their agency has become an area of interest (e.g. Hamid & Nguyen, 2016; Hökkä et al., 2012; Vongalis-Macrow, 2007). To date, most studies have focused on classroom settings (e.g. Kayi-Aydar, 2015; Reeves, 2009; Yoon, 2008). Research is needed to better understand how teachers of multilingual learners negotiate the potentially fraught teacher evaluation process, or risk essential practices of working with linguistically diverse students being misunderstood by evaluators underprepared to work effectively with multilingual populations. Drawing on evaluation documents, observations and interviews, this chapter presents a single case study (Yin, 2003) of how one teacher, Mary (a pseudonym), certified to teach multilingual students, narrates her peer evaluation process and what these stories convey about her ongoing positioning within this process. Situated in a discussion of policy, I use positioning theory (Davies & Harré, 1990) to focus on ‘dynamic aspects of selfhood’ (Kayi-Aydar, 2015: 95) at two levels: (a) in the stories Mary tells about her evaluation process and (b) by examining the interview itself as a site of agentive construction. Specifically, this study asks: (1) How does Mary position herself discursively in response to HSTEs implemented in her district? (2) What agentive positioning is visible in the stories Mary tells about the evaluation process? Background: Education Policy and Teacher Evaluation

Education legislation and policy in the United States has increasingly included a focus on holding teachers accountable for student growth and progress toward educational goals. Since the 1990s, policy initiatives and social discourse have increased the emphasis on accountability policies

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that emphasize measurable performance on the part of both teachers and students, including attempts to link teachers’ effectiveness as instructors to students’ learning as calculated by their performance on standardized tests. In turn, decades of ‘standardization, tight coupling, and ubiquitous testing practices have begun reshaping the nature of many teachers’ professional identities’ (Buchanan, 2015: 700). Concomitantly, teachers’ agency is also a key issue, as shifting educational policies affect and influence opportunities for teachers to construct their agency. Teachers of multilingual students in HSTE and contemporary policy discourse

Teacher quality discourses have been present in US education policy since at least the 1980s with the publication of A Nation at Risk (Gardner, 1983). The emphasis on teacher quality, however, has typically been limited to value-added accountability measures aimed at evaluating teachers based on students’ test scores and HSTEs. Although many factors contribute to student academic achievement in schools, there is increasing focus on the role that teachers play in this success (Buchanan, 2015). For example, some states weight students’ test scores up to 50% of teachers’ overall qualification of effectiveness (Braun, 2005). Policies like these assign a numerical value to individual teachers and use these values as a means of evaluating their effectiveness or ‘value added’ (Buchanan, 2015; Cuban, 2013; Harris, 2011). This quantification is intended to facilitate comparing teachers against one another and evaluating human capital within a labor market (Ball, 2013). However, ‘quality’ as defined this way is difficult to measure (Cohen, 2010; Kennedy, 2010a). At their best, these policies attempt to offer support for struggling teachers through targeted professional development designed to improve the quality of instruction (e.g. Heneman & Milanowski, 2007). Underlying policies like this, however, is a tendency to foreground an instrumentalist view of teaching, deprofessionalizing the work of teachers (Mockler, 2011). HSTE for practicing teachers typically involves a combination of observed lessons, self-assessments and test-score analysis. Observation protocols based on rubrics or checklists are typically used to create a sense of objectivity on these measures of ‘quality’ or effectiveness. However, this assumes that competency is self-evident and visible through observation, that teachers’ thinking and moment-to-moment decisionmaking can be inferred from their actions, that observers are familiar with individual situations that affect classroom performance, and that teachers and their observers have access to and agree upon the same limited range of possible and appropriate actions (Kennedy, 2010b). In fact, the language of observation instruments themselves positions the observer and the teacher being observed; for example, as more or less agentic within particular domains (Caughlan & Jiang, 2014). HSTEs

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are therefore not at all straightforward measures, and ‘researchers have widely documented the multiple sources of variance in observational scores due to the sampling of lessons, differences among raters, and even the characteristics of the observational instrument itself’ (Hill et al., 2012: 56). Thus, despite their widespread use, results from observations should be interpreted with caution. HSTE policies tend to position teachers as largely responsible for students’ growth and progress. However, in HSTE documents, teachers are not always positioned as knowledgeable experts. For example, Thomas (2008) examined policy documents in Australia and found that educational leaders were often positioned in contradictory ways, raising for question otherwise common-sense definitions of leadership (i.e. as being supportive, as leading not regulating). Thus, one concern with current HSTE models is the autonomy or sense of agency that the teachers being evaluated (and those administering the evaluations) feel with respect to the areas in which they are evaluated (Caughlan & Jiang, 2014). The issue of agency in HSTE documents is further complicated by the fact that most HSTEs are focused on general education. Implementations of HSTEs have particularly struggled to identify effective teaching when a teacher’s responsibilities fall outside the teaching of specific grade-level content (Norris et al., 2017). That is, they fail to acknowledge the precise circumstances of area teachers (i.e. music, art, physical education) or those who work with special populations (e.g. gifted, special education, multilingual learners). Furthermore, studies of special area teachers have found that these teachers lack confidence in their evaluators’ knowledge of their work (e.g. Norris et al., 2017). Increased accountability has led several states to increase the number of observations new and even experienced teachers receive (Ford et al., 2017), but unfamiliarity with specific pedagogical or content knowledge can lead to issues between the observer and the teacher being observed. For teachers of multilingual learners, whose profession already suffers from a pervasive lack of recognition for their specialized pedagogical knowledge (Harper & de Jong, 2009), current political discourse can be particularly problematic. For example, studies by language education researchers overwhelmingly suggest that content area teachers are underprepared to work with multilingual learners (e.g. Escamilla, 2006; Karabenick & Noda, 2004). Yet, these same teachers are – in some cases – stepping into mentorship roles in which they are asked to evaluate the performance of teachers certified to work with multilingual learners. Language teacher agency in an era of accountability

The embedded and contextualized nature of teachers’ agency has been demonstrated in research (e.g. Buchanan, 2015; Kayi-Aydar, 2015). For example, Buchanan (2015) explored how nine teachers’ professional

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agency was shaped by education reforms in California, and how these teachers created a place for themselves amid the policy reforms. In studies of language teacher agency specifically, Feryok (2012) showed how an English as a foreign language teacher’s experiences outside the classroom contributed to her developing sense of agency, making visible how the teacher’s agency was constructed across a variety of experiences, not limited to classroom professional development. Kayi-Aydar (2015) explored how one language teacher, Janelle, constructed and negotiated identities and how her multiple identities interacted with her agency as a beginning teacher of multilingual students. Despite growing interest in the importance of agency for teacher research, there is still a dearth of studies examining language teacher agency (Kayi-Aydar, 2015). Looking specifically at the relationship between agency and education policy, an edited volume from Ng and Boucher-Yip (2017) focused on foreign language teacher agency as they negotiate education policies and reforms related to language policy such as English-medium or English-only instruction in tertiary education settings (e.g. Glasgow, ­ 2017; Ng, 2017). In the book’s forward, Ann Burns (2017: xi) wrote that ‘[i]t is not too far-fetched to claim that nowhere does the impact of educational policy making seem to be so keenly and perplexingly felt than in English language teaching’. Though Burns was writing specifically about English language policy in non-Anglophone countries, this statement holds true beyond such contexts. In the United States, for example, this observation readily extends beyond language-specific policies (such as English-only legislation) to the impact (intentional or otherwise) that accountability legislation has on the ability of language teachers to follow research-based best practices in teaching their students. By focusing on a focal teacher’s experiences with HSTE in the United States, this study offers a look at one teacher’s experience and invites further study. Theoretical and Methodological Approach

In this study, positioning theory (Davies & Harré, 1990) was used to make sense of the focal teacher’s narratives about her HSTE experience. As a poststructural theoretical lens, positioning theory assumes that the world and participants’ places within it are socially constructed. According to positioning theory, ‘the discourse we produce is shaped by our multiple selves while at the same time discourse shapes our multiple identities’ (Kayi-Aydar, 2015: 95). Positioning theory is oriented to making sense of how positioning the self or others is discursively produced and the social actions that this positioning achieves. Positioning theory was developed as a poststructural approach to identity negotiation, in which identity was understood not as an individual construct, but as socially constructed, fluid and interactionally negotiated (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999). Unlike roles, which are

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static and fixed, positioning is situation specific and dynamic. Positioning is understood as the ongoing negotiated situation in and through talk of one’s self and others’ rights and/or obligations (Rex & Schiller, 2009). As people are positioned in everyday settings, their choices for how to behave are correspondingly limited (Reynolds, 2007). An actor’s positioning can be disputed or challenged, either by the actor themselves or by the others in the interaction. A person can respond in any number of ways from any available repertoire, but the potential repertoires are restricted by the ongoing discursive interaction (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999). Further, it is important to note that while positioning is sometimes intentional, it may not always be. One may posit a position through an action; however, that act is only successful insomuch as the position is taken up by other participant(s) in the interaction. It is through this ‘constant interplay of mutual recognition of one’s own and the other’s position that the particular version of public self, appropriate to the occasion is constructed’ (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999: 9). Recognizing identity construction as a process of positioning is useful because it offers a perspective on teachers as active constructors of their own teacherly identities and allows interpretation of these positionings as multiple, changing and oriented toward accomplishing social actions. Positioning theory, then, acknowledges the cultural and relational aspects of any action in the social world and provides a means of accounting for the relative positioning of the participants within an interaction. In this approach, no distinction is made between social and psychological phenomena (as in cognitive psychology). Both are understood as manifesting in and through social interaction. The analysis of social acts involves three mutually interdependent features of a conversation: the actual doings and sayings (‘action’); the positioning of actors; and the conversational ‘storylines’ (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999). Additionally, in narrating an occurrence or event from one’s life, a person’s positioning during the storytelling can be understood as acts of narration and declaration (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999). Narration occurs when speakers recount events during which they position themselves and others (e.g. as bullied victims or as powerful evaluators). Declaration, by contrast, occurs when a speaker makes a direct claim about their attributes (e.g. ‘I know what’s best for my students’) or a claim about how things appear to that speaker from their point of view (e.g. ‘They just don’t know how hard it is’). As an illustrative example, by understanding Mary’s storytelling in the interviews as involving both narration and declaration, it was possible to observe Mary’s relational positioning (e.g. herself in relation to the evaluators); as well as to take note of more ‘theoretical’ positioning, in which Mary revealed her stance toward the narrated events by providing an observation or ‘upshot’ – a kind of evaluation of the narrated event.

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Agency and positioning

Broadly, agency has been defined as ‘the capacity of people to act purposefully and reflectively on their world’ (Rogers & Wetzel, 2013: 63). Although agency is understood as negotiated locally, it is recognizably shaped by ‘macro level discourses and historical forces’ (Buchanan, 2015: 705). Teachers’ agency is understood as constructed interactionally in relation to both the ongoing social context and past personal experiences (Lipponen & Kumpulainen, 2011). Conceptualized this way, teacher agency both shapes and is shaped by the ongoing social interaction. Teacher agency includes the agency to apply and expand one’s own professional decision-making as a part of building one’s own teacherly identity (Calvert, 2016). It involves the ability to act in ‘new and creative ways’ (Toom et al., 2015: 615) and to recognize one’s own pedagogical expertise (Pyhältö et al., 2012). Most importantly for the present study, teacher agency involves the ability to resist external regulations when policies as written diverge from this expertise (Lasky, 2005). Poststructural notions of both agency and positioning emphasize the ways in which both are discursively constructed and constantly negotiated. Positioning, understood as the ways that ‘people situate themselves and others with particular rights and obligations’ through conversation (Rex & Schiller, 2009: 6), emphasizes the possibility for speakers to ‘actively and agentively position themselves in talk’ (Kayi-Aydar, 2015: 96). In other words, through positioning, which actively occurs through interaction, participants’ agential possibilities are realized over and over again as people actively position themselves. At the same time, a participant may have a limited number of subject positions made available to them (Davies, 2000). Therefore, as Kayi-Aydar (2015: 96) writes, ‘while certain positions may enable one to become agentic, agents can also actively resist certain positionings’. By using positioning theory as a theoretical lens for the study of language teacher agency, this study builds on previous work to explore the link between teacher agency and positioning through analysis of a teachers’ narratives of evaluation told during open-ended interviews. It is important to consider teachers’ positioning related to these evaluations, as teacher evaluations are increasingly high stakes and, though intended to provide formative feedback, can only be effective as learning opportunities if teachers are able to agentively position themselves and their practices within them. Research Approach

Since the aim of this study was to provide as full a picture as possible of the specific situation, a single case study (Yin, 2003) was chosen to allow as much detail be described as possible. Non-participant

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observations (Merriam, 1998), two semi-structured interviews and document analysis were used for triangulation. This chapter focuses on findings from the interviews, with document analysis and observation data used for background. Participant and setting

At the time of the study, Mary was a fifth-year teacher in a suburban school situated in a large school district in the Southeastern United States. She self-identified as a white, cisgender, native English-speaking, US citizen. In addition to a bachelor’s degree, she held a master’s degree in education from a major research university located in the US regional south. I got to know Mary as a colleague in our master’s program where we were both enrolled at the same university. Following our graduation, she and I both taught multilingual students (described in the district as an ‘English language learner [ELL] teacher’) in the same southern school district, though at different schools. I later left the district to pursue a doctoral degree in education but stayed in touch with Mary. Mary’s degree was focused on teaching multilingual learners and included courses in second language acquisition theory alongside general learning theory and pedagogy. Given both her educational and teaching background, she could be considered to have attained a level of recognizable expertise in her area. In her lesson planning, Mary described a preference for following a content-based instructional approach in which content area literacy and language proficiency are viewed as intertwined and both are developed simultaneously by teaching language through content (e.g. Brinton et al., 1989). Researcher positioning

When I began this project, I was interested in teachers’ reactions to the political climate and emphasis on accountability through HSTE occurring in the district I had left behind. I immediately thought of Mary as I knew of her experience with this transition, and believed her story was important to share. Therefore, I recognize that my interpretations of these data are influenced by my personal interests in the topic, both as a researcher and as a former teacher. My intention in focusing on Mary is to offer an in-depth look at how one language teacher negotiated the HSTE process to provide important insights for teacher educators, administrators and policymakers involved in designing performance assessments for language educators. The findings reported here are not meant to be generalized, but are understood to be personal, partial and dynamic (Mauthner & Doucet, 2003). I acknowledge that my interpretations are influenced by my prior relationship with Mary. To make my analytical process visible, I have included significant selections from the data whenever possible. In doing so, I invite the reader to draw their

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own conclusions from the data. I also ground my claims within existing research by way of providing support for my interpretations. Data collection

Data collection involved two semi-structured interviews, each lasting approximately 90 minutes. These interviews were conducted after I had left my own position as a teacher in the district where Mary worked at the time. Both interviews were conducted via web conference. With Mary’s permission, each call was recorded and archived for analysis. The interviews focused on Mary’s experiences as a teacher of multilingual students both generally and specifically regarding her experiences with the then-new teacher evaluation system. Guiding questions were used to structure the interview, and follow-up questions were sometimes used to probe more deeply into Mary’s responses. Through the interviews, I learned that the district’s HSTE procedures included observations by mentor teacher evaluators, two unannounced and one announced. As the HSTE rubrics became an important part of Mary’s talk during the interviews, I considered these documents as background information for my analysis. Finally, because I was not able to be present for the evaluations described by Mary in her interview, I conducted non-participant observations (Merriam, 1998) four times over a year in Mary’s classroom. As part of these observations, I made field notes of classroom interactions, which were used mainly to provide deeper contextualization for Mary’s teaching practice and for the site itself. Data analysis

I describe the analytical process as a series of steps, although it is important to note that the process moved fluidly, and frequently involved relistening to the interview recordings or returning to the literature as I worked to make sense of the data. The interviews were transcribed in full and sections were selected for additional coding using Jefferson’s (2004) transcription (see Appendix). I used a modified transcription system so as not to detract from the reading of the transcript, while still maintaining for the reader the dynamic nature of talk (Ochs, 1979). Paralinguistic features identified in the transcripts for this study included such features as emphasis and pauses. Although not a discourse analysis per se, I situate this work within broader conversations about discourse that attend to multiple aspects of language (e.g. Hammersley, 2010). I acknowledge that decisions about transcription, like all analytical decisions, are theory laden. The transcript, therefore, was viewed as one layer of analysis. I read through the transcripts several times, noting what ‘stood out’ in the data. I focused particularly on moments of storytelling in Mary’s responses and coded these to return to for closer analysis. During the

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second phase of coding, I returned to the storytelling instances, focusing on how the stories were framed and what they described. In other words, to understand Mary’s agentive possibilities, I identified how positioning occurred through discourse, who or what was being positioned and the upshot of each interaction. Findings

These findings focus on moments of storytelling in Mary’s interviews. In particular, I focus on narratives in which Mary (a) positioned herself with respect to the evaluators and (b) positioned her practice with respect to district policies. In so doing, I attend to moments of narration (in which Mary mainly described an incident as she recalled it happening) and declaration (in which she offered a comment or critique of the event to me as the interviewer) within Mary’s narratives. Within these moments of narration and declaration, I also attend to Mary’s use of membership categories (e.g. grade-level teacher) and deixis (e.g. they, them) to provide evidence for how Mary’s linguistic choices worked to make visible Mary’s construction of her agency at different moments. Positioning in relation to evaluators

Across the interviews, I observed how Mary used moments of declaration to position herself as a knowledgeable expert within her interview, while moments of narration revealed a struggle to accomplish this positioning with her observers. For example, when describing plans for her evaluation, Mary said: Excerpt 1 I think I need to have everything really clear when I’m teaching for her (.) like say ‘this is me modeling for you’ (0.4) because she doesn’t pick up on terms like that as much (0.4) but I have to explicitly say what I’m doing (0.2) like ‘I’m giving you a visual cue at this moment (0.2) here is your visual cue’ (0.4) ‘we’re gonna use [ ] uh (.) TPR or whatever’ (0.4) ‘this is me (.) giving you an opportunity to use a non-linguistic representation to understand main idea and detail’ (0.6) like I’m gonna have to do that (0.2) while I teach

The use of me/you is particularly significant here as it indexed Mary’s oppositional positioning of the evaluators and her own practice. Through this phrasing, Mary explicitly differentiated her knowledge about teaching multilingual learners from that of the evaluators. In moments of declaration like this one, Mary provided reflexive commentary on the HSTE process. She reasserted her position as a knowledgeable expert by contrasting her knowledge with that of the evaluators.

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After her first observation, she revealed that the evaluators suggested her expectations for her multilingual students’ ‘learning science vocabulary’ were ‘too high’ and she should ‘stick to [the reading curriculum]’. Excerpt 2 Int: Mary:

So (.) tell me about how your observation went I did a whole group instruction (0.2) and then I pulled them in pairs (0.6) an- and I was told- after the observation when I talked to [the evaluators]- I was told that my expectations for them were way too high (1.0) like (0.8) it was too hard and I mean (0.2) I had done my lesson and we were doing more science kind of vocabulary and my [observer] said ‘well where’s the [reading] vocabulary? why don’t you have them reading the [leveled-reader] books?’ And I said ‘well because um, I was told that that wasn’t the best practice for ELL instruction’ (.) umand she said ‘well, I politely disagree with you (0.6) I politely disagree with that and you need to stick to [the reading curriculum] and the reading vocabulary now let’s move on’

Mary’s use of reported speech and deixis (I/she) makes clear that despite attempting to position herself as a knowledgeable expert, stating ‘I was told that wasn’t the best practice’ for multilingual learners, the evaluator’s response effectively cut off Mary’s gambit, rejecting this potential position. A few lines later, Mary added that she had ‘given in’ to the evaluators’ assessment that the work was ‘way too high’ for her students. She elaborated on this, declaring to me: Excerpt 3 And then there’s the question of how easy it is to differentiate when they’re mandating a curriculum that isn’t even meant for (0.6) ELLs or their best interests (1.0) because I would rather focus on (0.2) it would be harder (.) but I would rather focus on what they’re doing in science and social studies and use that academic vocabulary (.) that I was starting to do last year (.) but that I was encouraged not to use (2.0) because (0.2) I don’t know if they understand the need for children to receive more academic kind of instruction

In this excerpt, Mary pivots from describing the experience of her evaluation to critiquing the results of her evaluation. Through the relational pronouns ‘I’ and ‘they’, Mary positioned her mentor teachers as lacking knowledge of what multilingual students really ‘need’ to succeed. By positioning her own teaching as ‘academic kind of instruction’, and through the repetition of this phrase, she set up an implicit contrast between her teaching goals and the expectations of her evaluators who follow the mandate of ‘a curriculum that isn’t even meant for ELLs’. By

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distancing herself from this sort of teaching, she positioned herself as an agentic expert who possesses the specific knowledge necessary to provide multilingual learners with the quality instruction they need, even when ‘it would be harder’. Though Mary positioned herself as a knowledgeable expert in her interview with me, moments of narration revealed that she struggled to position her expertise as clearly in conversations with her evaluators, and ultimately affected her instructional decisions. Positioning in relation to district policies

Mary displayed a deep concern for the pressure that standardized assessments placed on her to focus on language arts at the expense of other subjects. In particular, she problematized the emphasis on scripted lessons as a part of this. When there was a disconnect between what Mary saw as best practices for multilingual students and the district policies, one way that she sought to resolve this was by creating space for teaching practices that aligned with her pedagogical beliefs. Though not overtly contradicting district policies, at times Mary described herself as going beyond the policies to include practices that she believed were important to her students’ ultimate success. This is visible in the following exchange: Excerpt 4 Int.: Mary:

Can you tell me a little about how it’s been going? I’ve been trying to teach from [the reading books] (.) because that’s what my principal wants me to do so I’m trying to make it (1.4) interesting and do like (0.2) my own thing with it (2.0) so I’ll do fun things (.) like (0.4) I did an inference graphic organizer where it was like a clue and you had to lift up a card to see what the clue was (0.2) and none of that kind of stuff’s in the curriculum I just add it

The pause before the word ‘interesting’ (1.4 seconds) as well as the stress on the term itself highlights a possible conflict between the mandated curriculum that her ‘principal wants [her] to do’ and Mary’s version of what is best for her students – in her words, her ‘own thing’. This contrast is suggestive of Mary’s concern that the scripted curriculum could not offer her students the sort of learning experience they needed, which became visible throughout the interview. This concern was made even more explicit when she said: Excerpt 5 I’m certified to teach ELLs and that’s what I enjoy doing (0.6) but these kids aren’t gonna know what they need to know (0.2) except if we have fifteen minutes where they can go to a content area center and learn math

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vocabulary and (.) because I have all these cool cards and stuff (.) and I hold ‘em when we go down the hallway and that’s when they learn (0.6) because I can’t spend the time if I’m doing the reading curriculum all the time

Mary positioned herself as a knowledgeable expert by asserting the fact that she is ‘certified to teach ELLs’. The underlined section of text indicates that the first syllable of this word was emphasized beyond a ‘typical’ pronunciation of this word. The stress on this syllable worked to underscore her emphasis of the fact that her certification was a significant factor in her right to determine what her students ‘need’ to be successful beyond the ‘reading curriculum’. Further, she positioned herself not just as someone who is certified, but someone who enjoys her work and who wants to ensure that students will find learning enjoyable as well. Time and again, Mary iterated her role as someone who provided multilingual students with the instruction they ‘need’. Most often, Mary positioned herself as fitting her curricular goals in around the mandated reading policies as in the excerpts above. While at first blush, this might suggest a lack of agency, compliance and negotiation with policy mandates are also forms of agency (Robinson, 2012). Mary implicitly positioned the mandated curriculum as not meeting students’ needs when she stated that they ‘aren’t gonna know what they need to know’ unless she engaged in the content area instruction she described. This moment is marked by a tension between the district reading policy and Mary’s pedagogical knowledge, which emphasized content-based instruction (i.e. teaching language through content). For example, she highlighted her use of content centers where students could ‘learn math vocabulary’. While Mary positioned herself as not able to choose her own curriculum, she also reported managing to negotiate within the confines of the curriculum to make space for the learning she viewed as essential. Mary’s emphasis on content was visible in my observations of her teaching as well. For example, I observed a writing lesson in which students described the geography of the region and vocabulary activities focused on science and social studies content, not strictly language arts. At other times, I observed Mary configuring school policies to align with her own practices. For example, although Mary reported that her evaluators gave her a rating of 3 (out of 5) on the environment scrimmage, Mary herself described her classroom environment as aligned with the expectations on the rubric: Excerpt 6 Mary:

Ok, so for the um the environment scrimmage that I did, it’s got four indicators that I had to- that I had to do and ummm ((getting out the document)) So this is what it looks like (0.4)

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Int.: Mary:

and um (.) when I did it (.) it was expectation, managing student behavior, environment and respectful culture (0.4) Respectful culture (0.6) what does that mean (0.4) can you say more about that Um (.) well (.) it means having an environment where student work is displayed (0.2) um (0.4) students are (.) um equally respected and equally welcomed and made to feel at home (1.0) which I would consider like (.) one of my greatest strengths (0.6) so (.) I’m not always the best at (.) at asking the right kind of questions or- or doing (2.0) other things (1.0) but I know (0.2) I know I do a good job at making the kids feel at home and welcome and safe

It is clear from this statement that Mary felt herself particularly strong at creating a positive classroom environment, particularly at establishing a respectful culture. The emphasis on the word ‘know’ underscores her position that she is strong in this area. The use of near-synonyms (at home, welcome, safe) also works to emphasize this, illustrating her understanding of effectively creating a respectful culture. She added: Excerpt 7 I scored myself for the respectful culture part at a five because (2.0) because I thought it was a five (.) because (0.6) I have a map with all my students- like as little people on it (.) I’ve got student work displayed (0.2) I have a K, 1, 2 word wall I have a 3, 4, 5 word wall (.) I have a big inflatable globe (0.2) I have multicultural books and bookshelves and centers and everything [lines omitted] and um (0.4) they said that it wasn’t as respectful as it could be because there was one girl that was more quiet than others and- I have these little like cat- cat things on popsicle sticks that I pull out for people to answer questions- and I didn’t pull her name out and they said ‘oh that’s when you have to fake it and act like you’re calling her name’ so (.) ‘you have to act like you’re pulling her name out when you’re really pulling [another student’s] name out’

Excerpts  6 and 7 illustrate how Mary drew on the rubric to position herself as exceeding the goal of creating a ‘respectful culture’. In reproducing the language from the policy in this way, Mary asserted her work as consistent with the rubric. At the same time, she revealed a contrast between her own stance and her evaluators’ response to her classroom practices. While Mary creatively constructed her classroom as aligned with the evaluation rubric, her evaluators’ focus on turn-taking was used to construct Mary’s instructional practice as ultimately misaligned with the expectations for establishing a ‘respectful culture’ in the classroom.

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Discussion and Implications

Like Kayi-Aydar (2015), I found that Mary’s sense of agency was tightly linked to her ability to be recognized as the kind of teacher she thought herself to be. When Mary displayed a sense of successfully enacting her agency, she highlighted moments of pedagogy aligned with her beliefs about best practices such as the ‘content area centers’ in her classroom. Mary also agentively rewrote the discourses of accountability and professionalism from the district policies through moments of declaration in the interviews. While she reported pushing back against some of these discourses somewhat during her evaluation (e.g. ‘I told them…’), she also used the retelling of these events as an opportunity to reassert her position as a knowledgeable expert. Though Mary’s agentic positioning of herself as a knowledgeable expert was consistently visible throughout the interviews, moments of narration revealed that Mary found herself limited by the subject positions made available to her by her evaluators (Davies, 2000). Ultimately, this affected her instructional decisions at times. However, while it may be easier to identify teachers’ agentic actions in moments of critique, agency may also be visible in moments that align with external demands or policies (Pyhältö et al., 2012; Toom et al., 2015). While Mary reported not always finding success in asserting her position with her evaluators, Mary’s depiction of her practice as aligned with the environment rubric can be interpreted also as a moment of visible agency. Thus, while policies that overlook the specific knowledge that teachers working with multilingual learners possess may pose a threat to teacher autonomy, findings from this study illustrate how teachers may still find room for agency within such reforms. This aligns with Buchanan’s (2015: 700) finding that ‘while this new discourse of accountability is pervasive in educational policy texts and contemporary media representations of teachers, it is not an all-encompassing force’. Teachers who can make sense of evaluation policies and successfully negotiate recognition for their expertise in light of these policies may hold continued authority over their practice (Wills & Haymore Sandholtz, 2009). However, findings from this study demonstrate that teachers like Mary may not always experience a sense of enacting their agency, perhaps in part due to the fact that those who would evaluate them are unfamiliar with pedagogies appropriate for multilingual learners. One suggestion may be to mandate professional development specific to educating multilingual learners for teacher-leaders who will be responsible for the evaluation of teachers like Mary. Finally, as Emirbayer and Mische (1998: 194) observed, ‘agency is always a dialogical process by and through which actors […] engage with others within collectively organized contexts of action’. The findings from this study emphasize the need for teachers to engage in dialogical

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processes that support their understanding of one another’s practices in context. Thus, another implication may be that teachers of multilingual learners need opportunities to talk together by connecting in person or online with others in similar roles to increase opportunities for these teachers to participate in positive social contexts and provide occasions to agentively construct their roles as educators. Conclusion

Toom et al. (2015: 616) claim that ‘environments that promote active participation and belonging also promote the construction of professional agency’. It is therefore important that new evaluation procedures designed to promote active participation through inviting teachers to learn from one another and to respond to feedback from observations also aim to promote belonging for all teachers. When new procedures and policies recognize the specific pedagogical knowledge (Coady et al., 2016) that language teachers possess, those teachers can form positive identities and enact agency. The findings above highlight the importance of requiring evaluators to have experience in the area they are assigned to strengthen the quality and value of the feedback. References Ball, S.J. (2013) Foucault, Power, and Education. London: Routledge. Braun, H.I. (2005) Using Student Progress to Evaluate Teachers: A Primer on Value-Added Models. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service. Brinton, D.M., Snow, M.A. and Wesche, M.B. (1989) Content-Based Second Language Instruction. New York: Newbury House. Buchanan, R. (2015) Teacher identity and agency in an era of accountability. Teachers and Teaching 21 (6), 700–719. Burns, A. (2017) Forward. In P.C.L. Ng and E.F. Boucher-Yip (eds) Teacher Agency and Policy Response in English Language Teaching (pp. xi–xii). New York: Routledge. Calvert, L. (2016) Moving from Compliance to Agency: What Teachers Need to Make Professional Learning Work. Oxford, OH: Learning Forward and NCTAF. Caughlan, S. and Jiang, H. (2014) Observation and teacher quality. Journal of Teacher Education 65 (5), 375–388. Coady, M.R., Harper, C.A. and de Jong, E.J. (2016) Aiming for equity: Preparing mainstream teachers for inclusion or inclusive classrooms? TESOL Quarterly 50 (2), 340–368. Cohen, D.K. (2010) Teacher quality: An American educational dilemma. In M. Kennedy (ed.) Teacher Assessment and the Quest for Quality (pp. 375–401). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Cuban, L. (2013) Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice: Change Without Reform in American Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Davies, B. (2000) A Body of Writing: 1990–1999. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press. Davies, B. and Harré, R. (1990) Positioning: The discursive production of selves. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 20 (1), 43–63. Donaldson, M.L., Woulfin, S., LeChasseur, K. and Cobb, C.D. (2016) The structure and substance of teachers’ opportunities to learn about teacher evaluation reform: Promise or pitfall for equity? Equity & Excellence in Education 49 (2), 183–201.

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Emirbayer, M. and Mische, A. (1998) What is agency? American Journal of Sociology 103 (4), 962–1023. Escamilla, K. (2006) Semilingualism applied to the literacy behaviors of Spanish-speaking emerging bilinguals: Bi-illiteracy or emerging biliteracy? The Teachers College Record 108 (11), 2329–2353. Every Student Succeeds Act (2015), Pub. L. No. 114-95, S-1177-2 Stat. (10 December 2015). Feryok, A. (2012) Activity theory and language teacher agency. The Modern Language Journal 96 (1), 95–107. Ford, T.G., Van Sickle, M.E., Clark, L.V., Fazio-Brunson, M. and Schween, D.C. (2017) Teacher self-efficacy, professional commitment, and high-stakes teacher evaluation policy in Louisiana. Educational Policy 31 (2), 202–248. Gardner, D.P. (1983) A Nation at Risk. Washington, DC: The National Commission on Excellence in Education, US Department of Education. Glasgow, G.P. (2017) Policy, agency and the (non)native teacher: ‘English classes in English’ in Japan’s high schools. In P.C.L. Ng and E.F. Boucher-Yip (eds) Teacher Agency and Policy Response in English Language Teaching (pp. 58–73). New York: Routledge. Hamid, M.O. and Nguyen, H.T.M. (2016) Globalization, English language policy, and teacher agency: Focus on Asia. International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives 15 (1), 26–44. Hammersley, M. (2010) Reproducing or constructing? Some questions about transcription in social research. Qualitative Research 10 (5), 553–569. Harper, C.A. and de Jong, E.J. (2009) English language teacher expertise: The elephant in the room. Language and Education 23 (2), 137–151. Harré, R. and van Langenhove, L. (eds) (1999) Positioning Theory: Moral Contexts of Intentional Action. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Harris, D. (2011) Value-Added Measures in Education: What Every Educator Needs to Know. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. Heneman, H., III and Milanowski, A.T. (2007) Assessing Human Resource Alignment: The Foundation for Building Total Teacher Quality Improvement. Madison, WI: Consortium for Policy Research in Education. Hill, H.C., Charalambous, C.Y. and Kraft, M.A. (2012) When rater reliability is not enough. Educational Researcher 41 (2), 56–64. Hökkä, P., Eteläpelto, A. and Rasku-Puttonen, H. (2012) The professional agency of teacher educators amid academic discourses. Journal of Education for Teaching 38 (1), 83–102. Jefferson, G. (2004) Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction. Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 125, 13–34. Karabenick, S.A. and Noda, P.A.C. (2004) Professional development implications of teachers’ beliefs and attitudes toward English language learners. Bilingual Research Journal 28 (1), 55–75. Kayi-Aydar, H. (2015) Teacher agency, positioning, and English language learners: Voices of pre-service classroom teachers. Teaching and Teacher Education 45, 94–103. Kennedy, M.M. (2010a) Approaches to annual performance assessment. In M.M. Kennedy (ed.) Teacher Assessment and the Quest for Teacher Quality: A Handbook (pp. 225–250). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Kennedy, M.M. (2010b) Attribution error and the quest for teacher quality. Educational Researcher 39, 591–598. Lasky, S. (2005) A sociocultural approach to understanding teacher identity, agency and professional vulnerability in a context of secondary school reform. Teaching and Teacher Education 21 (8), 899–916. Lipponen, L. and Kumpulainen, K. (2011) Acting as accountable authors: Creating interactional spaces for agency work in teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education 27 (5), 812–819.

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Lucas, T. (2011) Language, schooling, and the preparation of teachers for linguistic diversity. In T. Lucas (ed.) Teacher Preparation for Linguistically Diverse Classrooms: A Resource for Teacher Educators (pp. 3–17). New York: Routledge. Mauthner, N.S. and Doucet, A. (2003) Reflexive accounts and accounts of reflexivity in qualitative data analysis. Sociology 37 (3), 413–431. Menken, K., Antunez, B., Dilworth, M. and Yasin, S. (2001) An Overview of The Preparation and Certification of Teachers Working with Low English Proficiency Students. Washington, DC: National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education. Merriam, S. (1998) Qualitative Research and Case Study Applications in Education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Mockler, N. (2011) Beyond ‘what works’: Understanding teacher identity as a practical and political tool. Teachers and Teaching 17 (5), 517–528. Ng, P.C.L. (2017) Sociocultural factors affecting teacher agency in English-medium instruction in Japan. In P.C.L. Ng and E.F. Boucher-Yip (eds) Teacher Agency and Policy Response in English Language Teaching (pp. 160–173). New York: Routledge. Ng, P.C.L. and Boucher-Yip, E.F. (eds) (2017) Teacher Agency and Policy Response in English Language Teaching. New York: Routledge. Norris, J., van der Mars., H., Kulinna, P., Amrein-Beardsley, A., Kwon, J. and Hodges, M. (2017) Physical education teacher perceptions of teacher evaluation. Physical Educator 74 (1), 41–62. Ochs, E. (1979) Transcription as theory. In E. Ochs and B.B. Schieffelin (eds) Developmental Pragmatics (pp. 43–72). New York: Academic Press. Pyhältö, K., Pietarinen, J. and Soini, T. (2012) Do comprehensive school teachers perceive themselves as active professional agents in school reforms? Journal of Educational Change 13 (1), 95–116. Reeves, J. (2009) Teacher investment in learner identity. Teaching and Teacher Education 25 (1), 34–41. Rex, L. and Schiller, L. (2009) Using Discourse Analysis to Improve Classroom Interaction. New York: Routledge. Reynolds, J. (2007) The Single Woman: A Discursive Investigation. London: Routledge. Robinson, S. (2012) Constructing teacher agency in response to the constraints of education policy: Adoption and adaptation. Curriculum Journal 23 (2), 231–245. Rogers, R. and Wetzel, M.M. (2013) Studying agency in literacy teacher education: A layered approach to positive discourse analysis. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 10 (1), 62–92. Thomas, S. (2008) Leading for quality: Questions about quality and leadership in Australia. Journal of Education Policy 23 (3), 323–334. Toom, A., Pyhältö, K. and Rust, F.O.C. (2015) Teachers’ professional agency in contradictory times. Teachers and Teaching 21 (6), 615–623. Vongalis-Macrow, A. (2007) I, teacher: Re-territorialization of teachers’ multi-faceted agency in globalized education. British Journal of Sociology of Education 28 (4), 425–439. Wills, J.S. and Haymore Sandholtz, J. (2009) Constrained professionalism: Dilemmas of teaching in the face of test-based accountability. Teachers College Record 111 (4), 1065–1114. Yin, R.K. (2003) Case Study Research: Design and Methods (3rd edn). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Yoon, B. (2008) Uninvited guests: The influence of teachers’ roles and pedagogies on the positioning of English language learners in the regular classroom. American Educational Research Journal 45 (2), 495–522.

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Appendix

Jeffersonian transcription Symbol

Example

Explanation

(0.6)

that (0.6) is odd?

Length of silence measured in tenths of a second

(.)

right (.) okay

Micro-pause: less than two-tenths of a second

___

She didn’t do that

Underlined text indicates emphasis

-

I was- I mean

An ‘n-dash’ indicates a break in the speech where the speaker either broke off abruptly or was interrupted

(( ))

((trails off))

Double-parentheses indicate observer comments

Source: Adapted from Jefferson (2004).

6 Using Actor-Network Theory to Problematize Agency and Identity Formation of Filipino Teachers in Japan Alison Stewart

A significant change in Japan’s language teaching policy within the 21st century has been the acceptance of English teachers from outside the so-called ‘inner circle’ of English-speaking countries (Kachru, 1985). As Japan expanded compulsory English education to elementary schools, a change in the law that devolved responsibility for hiring new teachers to ‘dispatch companies’ (haken gaisha) has brought with it a rapid increase in the number of teachers not previously regarded as native English speakers, particularly Filipinos, into Japanese public schools as assistant language teachers (ALTs). Alongside this change in hiring policy, a number of teacher associations have sprung up to provide support and training for new teachers, the largest of which is Filipino English teachers of Japan (FETJ). In this complex and rapidly changing social context, one way of framing and exploring critical questions about teacher identity and agency is actor-network theory (ANT) (Latour, 1987, 2005). From an ANT perspective, agency is understood as occurring whenever one actor causes another to change. In ANT, agency is not regarded as a uniquely human force. Actors can be individuals or groups, but they can also be objects, technologies or belief systems. Thus, this broad and critical view of agency necessitates a sensitivity and open-mindedness to all possible sources of change. An ANT view of agency is applied to an analysis of career narratives and other ethnographic data in a study regarding the FETJ association and its members in order to explore the factors that have led to the formation of the group, and to the professional identity of its members.

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Introduction

In 2011, I interviewed Aurora Dobashi,1 a Filipino teacher of English working in Japan, and asked her how she came to set up a support group for fellow Filipino teachers: Why did I start it? At the time I was the coordinator of another teaching association in Saitama. I noticed that the other Filipinos didn’t take an active part in these meetings. I said, ‘Why don’t you speak up?’ And they said, ‘We feel that we don’t have the right to speak out in front of native speakers’. ‘OK, in that case, let’s have our own group to encourage Filipino teachers’. At first, I was just inviting teachers to my home. ‘I’m free on Sundays, we’ll have a study group meeting’. So they came and asked, ‘How do I pronounce this, how do I teach this, what do I do?’ But then so many people were coming, I thought, I cannot do this alone.

In Japan, a significant change in the 21st century has been the acceptance of teachers from outside the so-called ‘inner circle’ of English-speaking countries (Kachru, 1985) to work in public schools alongside Japanese teachers of English. Many of these new assistant language teachers (ALTs) are Filipino, and a large number of them have engaged in professional development activities led by the Filipino English teachers of Japan (FETJ): an organization that grew out of the informal Sunday study groups that Aurora mentions. A network of 26 local chapters stretching across Japan, the FETJ can be considered highly successful as an organization that has brought Filipinos into the teaching profession in Japan. From Aurora’s words, we can see that the FETJ’s formation and development were spurred by other Filipinos’ demand for help. But, what processes led to the organization’s development? And, what role does it play in enabling Filipinos to exercise agency in choosing a career that was previously closed to most ‘non-native’ speakers of English? In the complex and rapidly changing social context of English education in Japan, one way of framing and exploring such kinds of critical questions about teacher agency and identity is through actor-network theory (ANT) (Callon, 1986; Fenwick & Edwards, 2010, 2012; Latour, 1987, 2005; Law & Hassard, 1999). From an ANT perspective, agency is conceptualized as existing when any actor, human or non-human, causes someone or something to change. Agents – or actors in ANT terminology – comprise not only individuals but also material objects, such as technologies, and semiotic systems, such as beliefs or ideologies. What Latour (2005) calls ‘the social’ is made up of networks of actors, some more stable than others, but all subject to change by the action of any conceivable type of actor. The object of ANT is not to explain change so much as to problematize explanations of cause and effect. Rather than a theory or a method, ANT

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has been described as ‘a sensibility, an interruption or intervention, a way to sense and draw nearer to a phenomenon’ (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010: ix). For educational researchers, ANT approaches can provide thick descriptions of phenomena that highlight their complexity. Starting from a moment of change or innovation, the object of ANT is to try to describe the ‘concatenation of mediators’ (Latour, 2005: 62) that are implicated in that action. Thus, agency can be traced backward and outward, for example, from an important organizational change in a language teaching association to participating in a teacher training session, or from starting a new job in a language school to multiple diverse sources. In this chapter, I employ an ANT perspective to explore agency in both the formation of the FETJ and in the professional development of two of its members. I begin by explaining how agency and identity are described in ANT, and how these conceptualizations differ from the way these terms have been understood in recent literature. Agency, Identity and ANT

Teacher agency has been extensively discussed in recent years, with numerous publications and a special issue devoted to the subject in the journal Teachers and Teaching in 2015, in which various different definitions of the concept of teacher agency are proposed. Among these, the conceptualization that comes closest to that of ANT is an ecological view (Biesta & Tedder, 2007; Priestley et al., 2013) in which agency is regarded as an emergent phenomenon of the ecological conditions through which it is enacted. Actors act by means of rather than in an environment, and thus ‘the achievement of agency will always result from the interplay of individual efforts, individual resources, and contextual and structural factors as they come together in particular and, in a sense, always unique situations’ (Biesta & Tedder, 2007: 137). As with the ecological view, agency in ANT is also seen as emergent rather than latent. Indeed, agency is only ever present when an actor causes, or is understood to cause, another to change. As Latour (2005: 52–53) explains, ‘An invisible agency that makes no difference, produces no transformation, leaves no trace, and enters no account is not an agency’. The changes effected may be very minimal, but if there are no changes, then there is no agency. Thus, where teachers effect or negotiate a change, we can say that they have exercised agency. One significant difference between ANT and the ecological view, however, lies in the fact that for Biesta and Priestley and their colleagues, agency involves intentionality, and is thus inevitably a human factor. In ANT, by contrast, human beings are given no special privilege; inanimate objects or ideas can also be agents of change. Moreover, where change occurs, it is most likely to be caused by multiple actors, rather than a single one. Latour does not deny the existence of intentionality, but

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disregards it as a salient characteristic of agency. Instead of intentionality, which he claims is difficult to ascertain, Latour posits ‘uncertainty’ as a basic principle of ANT. As he observes, ‘If an actor is said to be an actor network, it is first of all to underline that it represents the major source of uncertainty about the origin of the action’ (Latour, 2005: 46). Another marked contrast between ANT and recent thinking about agency is the treatment of context or structure. Current conceptualizations of agency and structure, particularly those that take an ecological view, highlight the ‘interdependency’ of the two (Biesta & Tedder, 2007; Lai et al., 2016). However in ANT, the duality of agency and structure is rejected altogether. A teacher can change his or her context, and a context can change a teacher. More pertinently, a teacher can be an agent of change, but so too can a picture, a new classroom or an advertisement. Analytically, all these things are treated equally as actors. Actors and whoever or whatever cause them to change together form a network, hence the term actor-network. Much of the recent work on teacher agency is also concerned with identity. Researchers have explored agency in the development of professional identity and have reported on the struggles that individual teachers face to exercise agency in ways that are commensurate with their sense of professional identity in increasingly demanding educational contexts (Buchanan, 2015; Lasky, 2005; Tao & Gao, 2017). Agency has also been investigated in cross-cultural settings by Lai et al. (2016) who examined the relative influence exerted on each other by native English-speaking and Chinese teachers in an international school. Finally, agency has been explored in the formation of collective identities (Hökkä et  al., 2012, 2017). Hökkä et al. (2017) claim that marginalized individuals can enhance their agency via the collective, which leads them to reconceptualize agency as identity–agency where the two concepts are fundamentally intertwined. In ANT, however, the distinction between agency and identity is somewhat clearer: whereas agency is present in a change affected by one actor over another, identity can be thought of as the effects of that change (Hamilton, 2012). Seen in this way, identity is extremely fluid and mobile – a view that reflects a poststructuralist account of identity that is widely accepted in identity research (Block, 2007; Norton & Morgan, 2012). However, ANT also permits a quest to understand the processes that precede identities that have become relatively stable. ‘Stable mobiles’ permit representations of the world to become transportable, so they can be realized in other contexts and used to coordinate action from centers of power (Callon, 1986). Examples of stable mobiles can be human or inhuman, such as a teacher organization or a curriculum; and they can be tangible or intangible, such as a website or a cultural belief. These identities arise from the effects of multiple actions, all of which are of relevance, according to ANT. Thus, in seeking to understand the identity of

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a stable mobile, it is necessary to try to trace as many of the translations as possible that occurred in its formation. This is, of course, an impossible task, but it implies a willingness to be open to the possibility that agency is exercised by more actors than may be immediately apparent. Research Questions

Taking ANT as my theoretical and methodological framework, this study explores the following research questions: (1) What agentive processes led to the formation of the FETJ? (2) What agentive processes led to the formation of professional identity in FETJ members? An ANT Study of Agency

In this section, I describe the social circumstances in which the FETJ emerged and my initial contact with the group. Additionally, I report on the type of data that were collected along with the analytical procedure employed for investigating agency. Social context and teacher identity in Japan

The formation of the FETJ in 2000 and its rapid expansion, particularly in the past decade, is of particular significance in the context of Japanese language education. Because of its strict and rigorous teacher licensing procedure, teachers in the public school system in Japan are almost, without exception, themselves products of the Japanese education system. Although grammar and translation remain the main focus of language teaching, successive government directives from the 1980s onward have called for language teaching to focus on English communicative abilities. Because native Japanese teachers were perceived to be lacking in these abilities, non-Japanese teachers have been hired to work alongside Japanese teachers as ALTs. From 1987, a majority of these teachers were brought in through the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) program under the auspices of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA). At the height of this scheme in 2002, the JET program invited 6273 young people from overseas to teach in Japanese secondary schools and to serve as coordinators of international relations from 40 countries (JET, 2017). None of the teaching posts were offered to Filipinos. Although Filipinos were excluded from the JET program, various other changes in the Japanese educational context over the past three decades have gradually opened up opportunities for Filipinos to work as English teachers. In response to calls for the increased internationalization

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of Japan, and criticisms of the type of teaching practice as well as the nationalistic ideologies regarding English in Japan (Kubota, 1998, 2002), the teaching of English was expanded into elementary schools from the end of the 1990s, becoming compulsory in the fifth and sixth grades (ages 10–11), to 2011. At the same time, a change in the law in 1999 meant that private dispatch companies (haken gaisha) could recruit teachers for public schools, and very quickly dispatch companies came to take over this role from boards of education. Local boards of education still continue to employ teachers; however, the majority of ALTs are now recruited and sent to schools by dispatch companies on shorter-term contracts and at lower salaries than ALTs hired directly by boards of education. Although dispatch companies also recruit abroad, they were instrumental in bringing large numbers of new Japan-based teachers into schools, many of whom were not ‘native speakers’ of English from ‘inner circle’ countries. In addition to the public school sector, English is also taught by a vast private sector of conversation schools (eikaiwa) and a ‘cottage industry’ (Nagatomo, 2013) of single-teacher classes. Filipinos have recently come to occupy a significant proportion of jobs in this expanded field of English education, particularly for younger learners. Comprising the third largest ethnic minority (Kyodo, 2017), the majority of Filipinos in Japan are women. Many of them came on ‘entertainers’ visas in the 1990s, and subsequently as descendants of Japanese who had settled in the Philippines in the early 20th century. Because of the large number of women who came as entertainers, a role that in the past was commonly regarded in Japan as japayuki – a derogatory term meaning foreign prostitute – the Filipino government and religious bodies have striven to enhance the status of their countrymen and women in Japan, particularly through education and training programs. Language teacher identity in Japan has come under scrutiny by researchers who have argued that a ‘native-speakerist’ ideology prevails in Japanese language education (e.g. Houghton & Rivers, 2013). One of the assumptions of this ideology is that those who are perceived as nonnative speakers, such as Filipinos, even though they have spoken English since birth and have been educated in English, are deemed unqualified to teach the language in Japan. The dominance of this view is arguable; however, as Japan becomes more multicultural and as its diversity is gradually accepted (Maher & Yashiro, 1995; Tsuneyoshi et  al., 2010), new paradigms begin to replace older ways of thinking about language and culture. Encountering Filipino teachers

In 2010, I attended a talk given by two Filipino teachers, one of whom was Aurora, about a support group that they were running to train teachers of English for young learners. I was struck by the presenters’ claim

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that their group was enabling Filipinos to obtain work in public schools as ALTs and intrigued to find out more. I asked the presenters if I could find out more about their group and follow their activities as part of an open-ended ethnographic study (Stewart, forthcoming). Career history narratives

Over the course of the next six years, I attended FETJ training seminars, anniversary celebrations and Christmas parties, planning meetings and retreats, and kept detailed field notes of my observations. I also met with several members of the group for long interviews in which I recorded long narrative accounts of their career histories, their current teaching situations and their association with the FETJ. The career histories were transcribed and the resulting text was amended to eliminate repetition, false starts and back channeling for the sake of readability. The transcripts were returned to the narrators to check for accuracy, and the final drafts were shared with the FETJ to use as inspirational stories for their membership. Five of the career histories are used as data for this study, supplemented by field notes from meetings I attended in 2012. In order to trace agency, I follow Latour’s (2005: 29) advice to researchers to avoid the path followed by social theorists of ‘setting up at the start which kind of group and level of analysis we will focus on’, and to start the exploration instead with ‘the traces left behind by their activity of forming and dismantling groups’. Accordingly, in this study, two different kinds of actors – one collective and the other individual – are set up for analysis: the FETJ association and two of its members. The career history interview transcripts and field notes were read iteratively: firstly, with a view to identifying passages concerned with moments of change, such as a decision, or a new practice; and secondly aiming to detect other sources of agency that contributed to that change of thinking or behavior. An overall objective was to search for agency in multiple sources, human and non-human, material and ideological. Tracing Agency in the Formation of the FETJ

In the opening paragraph of this chapter, I cited Aurora’s account of how she came to start the FETJ in 2000, and I also mentioned that the group subsequently grew into a large group with the distinctive organizational structure of an executive board and local chapters located throughout Japan. How did that transformation occur? What were the agents of change that turned an informal Sunday meeting into a structured organization with distinct practices, materials and tokens of identity? Three of the career narratives – by Aurora, Gloria and Rosa – specifically address the evolution of the group, and it is these I examine first for the different perspectives that they cast on the process.

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The first moment of change is the point at which Aurora starts to invite Filipinos to her home for study group meetings. As we have seen, she recounts that at the time she was coordinator of the regional chapter of another group, English teachers in Japan (ETJ), and it was because the Filipino participants felt ‘they didn’t have the right to speak out in front of native speakers’ at events conducted by that group that they decided to start a group of their own ‘to encourage Filipino teachers’. The ETJ was (and still is) an organization created to support language teachers and language school owners through regular events such as expos and workshops, as well as to promote teacher training courses. Another teacher, Gloria, who was conducting private lessons to groups of pre-school and elementary school children at that time recounts her experience of exclusion at these events: I was afraid to speak or to perform in front of a group. I was afraid to talk about my classes […] The other participants were mainly native speakers and I felt left out. English is their language and they are really outspoken. I felt I wasn’t at the same level as them.

Filipinos continued to attend ETJ workshops and expos and enroll in certificate courses. The ETJ also supported the FETJ by providing space on its website to advertise FETJ meetings and events. The prime agent in the formation of the new group was Aurora, but agency can also be traced to the Filipinos who wanted opportunities for professional development, but who, like Gloria, felt blocked at regular ETJ events. In 2005, a significant change in the trajectory of the FETJ was Aurora’s departure to the Philippines to undertake a master’s degree. At this point, Gloria started to play a leading role in the FETJ: I was also involved in FETJ, which started in Omiya in 2000. At first, I was just a participant in the workshops and I learned a lot about techniques and teaching materials. Then, in 2004, a missionary friend of mine asked me if I would run a similar workshop for women from the Philippines, like me, who wanted to become teachers. Our goal was to give women another choice in their lives, so they could get more self-esteem and be more accepted in Japan. I was doing that for two years, and then our group merged with FETJ and I was asked to be a trainer of teachers for FETJ. FETJ was starting to get really big, new chapters were opening in different places, and more and more teachers came each time.

From being an alternative ETJ for Filipino teachers, at this point, the FETJ acquires a more political character that aims specifically at providing Filipino women with higher status work to help eradicate prejudice against them. Gloria’s missionary friend was clearly an agent in this change. Sent to Japan as an ‘expert community worker’ by the United

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Church of Christ Philippines, he was also an activist against a migration policy that had encouraged women to undertake demeaning work in Japan for the sake of remittances that were meant to help shore up the Philippines economy. When Aurora returned to Japan and resumed her position as leader of the FETJ, the third moment of change can be detected, this time, more radical. In late 2006, Rosa arrived in Japan: My grandfather was Japanese, we’re sansei. A group of Japanese businessmen came to us saying they were an NPO, and they could get us a visa for Japan. We’re like ants. We said, ‘OK, we’ll go to Japan’, and we all came.

Rosa had been working for a large multinational corporation before taking a lucrative early retirement package and coming to Japan, expecting to be assigned work that matched her expertise. Instead, she and her siblings found themselves given only low-paid factory work. Rosa complained about the ‘NPO’ to the Japanese Labor Ministry and her local city office sent her to work in a junior high school as an ALT. Although not trained as a teacher, Rosa’s family all worked as teachers and she says her sisters helped her to find her feet in the first months of teaching. She also started to attend presentations on teaching methods and materials, including one by the FETJ. She was shocked at the lack of organization at the event and offered to help. Soon, she was teaching workshops for the FETJ and becoming an influential voice in its transformation into a more structured entity. It was at this point that a mission statement and logo were created along with drawing up a constitution that prescribes roles for officers of the organization in the national executive committee and in local chapters. It was established that an annual fee of 1000 yen would be levied on members, and the workshops themselves became more formalized. The appointed trainers would run all courses: the teaching guidelines seminar (for pre-service teachers particularly of young learners and elementary schools), advanced teacher training (for pre- and in-service teachers in junior high schools) and training of trainers as well as workshops on grammar, pronunciation, business English and job-seeking preparation. This was also the point at which I observed conflicts arising over the direction of the organization at a meeting I attended in the summer of 2012. Two proposals were put forward: one a venture capital scheme by the missionary who proposed providing start-up funds to Filipinos to start language schools with child care, and the other proposal, by a Filipino who was not part of the FETJ, proposed to start a teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) certificate course, which would be taught by internationally known (non-Filipino) teacher educators. Both proposals were turned down and the FETJ consolidated its role in

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organizing teacher training seminars. The adoption of a constitution, which delineated the role and purpose of the FETJ while at the same time rejecting alternative roles and purposes, effectively led to the creation, in ANT terms, of the FETJ as a stable mobile (Callon, 1986). The missionary and the TESOL course proposers were not able to exercise agency; Aurora and others who formed a new executive group were. The two most influential actors – apart from Aurora – were Paul, a businessman who stepped into the role of president, and Rosa. It is their efforts that led to the corporatization of the FETJ. However, the need for a clearer and stronger structure can be explained also by social factors, such as – most notably – the rapid expansion of the organization. Dispatch agencies had been employing Filipino teachers from the early 2000s, but from 2010, local boards of education in the Kanto area around Tokyo started hiring Filipinos directly too. This caused more Filipinos to be attracted by the career opportunities that English teaching presented. More Filipinos were also arriving in Japan. Whereas in the 1990s, most Filipino migrants were women who came on ‘entertainer’ visas, by 2010, the majority of migrants were, like Rosa, descendants of Japanese. Many of these migrants had higher education and professional qualifications and, again like Rosa, were keen to obtain work of a similar status. In its homepage, the FETJ started describing itself as ‘an association of Filipino English teachers in Japan which provides support to its members by facilitating regular education through trainings, continuous communication, and assistance in job placements’. The website goes on to state that ‘the organization aims to serve as [a] bridge between members and other related institutions including Japanese Board of Education, serving as a liaison’. Although it maintained a website that linked to the much larger network ETJ, FETJ’s main medium of communication with its members during this time was through Facebook, which started to become ubiquitous among Filipinos. The social and technical changes in Japan since 2000 can thus also be seen as agents of change in the formation and development of the FETJ. There were conflicts between agents in the creation of this structure: the missionary’s venture capital scheme for English language and daycare facilities, and the Filipino who wanted to set up a TESOL certificate course. These two initiatives that were rejected are examples of the FETJ becoming more fixed in its identity. Even Aurora was subject to the change. Rosa reports that when the structure for the FETJ was implemented, ‘That’s when Aurora and I started fighting’. Aurora’s individual agency was subsumed by the collective structure, which Rosa believed had to be enforced so the organization would be sustainable. As she commented, ‘With the young people coming up, in other regions we have strong leaders, it’s a question of dedication. If all of us go, FETJ will go on’. The FETJ was originally founded by a single Filipino teacher who retains the titles of ‘founder’ and ‘chairman’. Although it is undeniable

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that Aurora has had and continues to have a key influence over the group’s identity, by tracing agency in this history, it becomes apparent that the formation of the FETJ was shaped by conflicting agencies among other Filipinos, as well as by changes in the labor law, public school hiring policy, Filipino migration and technological innovations – such as Facebook. From an ANT perspective, all of these sources of agency must be seen as equally significant. Tracing Agency in Individual Identity Formation

With regard to the formation of a professional language teacher identity in individual members of the FETJ, two of the younger teachers are set up for analysis of where and how agency is exercised. Amelia and Kay were selected because their trajectory through the FETJ bears certain similarities. Both had been teaching for about five years at the time I interviewed them, and both had been selected by the FETJ to head a new initiative to provide Filipino teachers with hands-on training with language students. Amelia: ‘I’m doing it because it’s my passion’

Amelia came to Japan in the mid-2000s to join her Japanese husband. She had a bachelor of science in business administration, majoring in computer science, but, as she remembers, At that time, I realized that wasn’t my thing. When I was choosing my course, I was choosing not on what my skills were, what I really wanted to do. I just went along with my friends so we could hang out. I wasn’t that focused then.

Once she moved to Japan, she struggled to adjust to the language and culture as well as with feelings of homesickness and isolation. She discovered a community of Filipinos almost by chance when she went to church one day: I saw a lot of Filipinos there. There were Filipino foods being sold, Filipino newspapers, magazines, I felt overwhelmed. I was so happy, and ever since I go to church. That changed everything.

It was through the church that Amelia found her first job in Japan working as an English-speaking hostess in a restaurant, though at that time, she did not imagine becoming a teacher: [At the restaurant] Andrea became my best friend. She never told me that her mom was a teacher, and I didn’t tell her I wanted to teach. I thought that only native speakers could teach in Japan. It was my image. I never met any Asian or any Filipino that was a teacher at that time.

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But finally, her friend did mention that her mother was involved in the FETJ and suggested Amelia go along. Amelia went and was instantly hooked: Why didn’t I know about this ages ago? Oh my god, I wish I had known! I was really happy and I had fun. I learned things from Aurora and listened to her stories. Starting from that day, I devoted myself as an active member of FETJ.

In fact, Amelia was not able to teach for some time, as she became pregnant and her husband forbade her from working while pregnant or when the child was still young. However, she took the opportunity to attend as many workshops and classes as she could, in and through the FETJ. When her daughter started kindergarten, Amelia started teaching, first at a private language school where she taught kindergarten-age children, and then in her own home-based business. A year later, she was hired by an international school to teach children, including both nonJapanese and Japanese, in first and second grades. ‘I’m not an English teacher’, she stated, ‘I’m a schoolteacher’. At the same time, she was increasingly busy with the FETJ, where she was committed to training other teachers most weekends. She had also agreed to take on the role of head teacher at a new school that was set up by the FETJ that aimed to give novice teachers opportunities for teaching practice. Again, her husband pressed her to reduce the amount of work she was doing, but this time she resisted: ‘I don’t want to give up any. I’m showing him that I can do my best as a mom and as a wife while keeping all these jobs’. From Amelia’s narrative, social networks have played a key role first in her career choices and, subsequently, in her professional development as a teacher. Although English was her favorite subject at school, she did not consider teaching it as a career at that time because of peer pressure. Later, she did not consider teaching in Japan because she believed she was excluded from that career due to her identity as a Filipino. Her employment in a restaurant and entry into teaching were both facilitated by social networks: the church and the friend whose mother was an English teacher. Although she is still only a few years into her teaching career, Amelia has moved from her first job where she had to ‘follow the rules’ to jobs where she is able to experiment and teach in her own way. Of her homebased job, she says: I did it not for money but as a hobby, as my passion. The mommies always say thanks to me, but actually, I want to thank them because I got to practice all those things I learned at FETJ.

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Similarly, in the international school where she teaches 6- and 7-year-old children, she relates: I’m always excited to go to work, to plan what we’re going to do for the day. After work is also one of my best moments. It’s rewarding to finish and see the kids happy. To be able to teach the level that I want, my preference, I feel so lucky that I was able to work with those kids. I’m a kid-friendly person. I want to try different things with different kids.

Amelia’s training in the FETJ and her close relationship with Aurora are pivotal factors in her professional development. She relates her attitude to teaching back to advice she was given: ‘One of the things I learned from Aurora is that teaching is continuous learning, lifelong learning’. For Amelia, continuous learning as a teacher means continuous experimenting, something that she observes is true of children: Kids are very smart; they absorb easily; they are imaginative. They are also experimenting. It’s more interesting for me. You can manipulate them at that age!

As a teacher, Amelia is straightforward in her intention to change or ‘manipulate’ the children with which she works. However, her narrative also shows that her ability to ‘experiment’ is limited to certain contexts. Kay: ‘Wow! I can have a career in Japan!’

Kay arrived in Japan as a teenager in the mid-2000s. Her mother had married a Japanese man, and Kay went to live with them at the age of 17. Because she wanted to obtain a long-term visa in Japan, she gave up her studies in the Philippines and went to work with her mother in a food factory, ‘slicing bacon for food chains’. When she acquired the visa, she went back to the Philippines to finish high school, and then went on to college to take a bachelor’s degree in food management. She also took a minor in education, for which she completed 18 credits to enable her to obtain a teaching license in the Philippines. On graduating, she left the Philippines and rejoined her mother and stepfather in Japan. Kay’s initial efforts at job seeking were unsuccessful: When I first came I didn’t know where to start, so I applied by myself online to millions of companies but got no reply. Then one day I thought of calling one of my mum’s friends, Amelia, and she said, ‘Come to a grammar workshop tomorrow’. I’d already met Aurora’s daughter through Amelia so then I met Aurora and she was like a knight in shining armor. I realized, ‘Wow! I can have a career in Japan!’

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Within a few weeks of taking the FETJ courses, Kay had been hired by a large private chain of English language schools for young children. The school had their own lesson plans that teachers were obliged to follow, although ‘we could do different things provided we cover the target language’. At the time, she also received personal coaching from Aurora who taught her different activities, as well as how to do demo classes and write her resume for her next jobs. Kay applied for a job as an ALT with a local board of education: I thought they would really prefer a native speaker and they wanted two years of experience, but I thought there’s no harm in trying. I submitted my resume, got a callback and did a demo… then they gave me the job straight away.

As an ALT, her job involved team teaching with Japanese English teachers at several different junior high schools. The experience was not as satisfying as working for the language school, especially in classes taught by older Japanese teachers who used her only as a tape recorder in the class. She also found the students’ lack of engagement upsetting: There are students who think, ‘I’m not going to trouble myself; I don’t need this’. I was shocked because in the Philippines kids never disrespect teachers. If kids are angry, they are angry with their actions but never with speaking out unlike here. They’ll say ‘Urusai!’ [Shut up!] I never heard anything like that in the Philippines. Or you try to help them and they go ‘Iranai!’ [I don’t want it!] For me, because of my cultural background, it’s not acceptable. The Japanese teachers don’t react to it, but I get really angry inside.

Kay quickly started looking for a new job where she could make her own teaching plans. Her next job was as an ALT for another board of education, but unlike the first ALT job, she was teaching in just one elementary school. Although she was planning her own classes, the job entailed consultation and collaboration with the board of education and other teachers. In T City, they encourage expansion of speaking activities. In B company, we would teach ‘How’s the weather?’ But in T city, we’d teach ‘How’s the weather in different places around the world?’ T city wanted us to introduce the students to different cultures. ALTs in T city are not from one country but from many different countries, so students become familiar with different accents. We do team teaching and every morning we meet the teachers and discuss what we’re going to do.

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Whereas in her first ALT job, Kay resented the fact that Japanese teachers used her only to pronounce words in the class, in this job, ‘I encourage the homeroom teacher to help with pronouncing the words’. Working for a progressive board of education, Kay’s views are listened to, and she feels that the board’s policy results in effective teaching as students in her school reach higher levels of proficiency. At the time of the interview, Kay was about to take on additional responsibilities at the new FETJ school, but, unlike Amelia, she was more ambivalent about the prospect. Already charged with responsibility for keeping membership records for the FETJ, Kay worries about her ability: Membership is hard, because I ask for members’ names from the chapters, and they delay, and so when Aurora asks me, I can’t deliver. And then I feel that I’m not good at this. But she says it’s OK, that everyone is a volunteer and we can’t force people.

Also different from Amelia, Kay talks about her development as a teacher in terms of a career. Therefore, she thinks about her professional growth in terms of the diverse range of roles she could undertake, rather than more specifically in terms of her expertise in the classroom. Looking to the future, she says: As an ALT, I can’t really see a clear vision of where my career is going. I want to be an educator. I plan to study more, take a master’s degree, maybe try to be a lecturer in a university in the Philippines or maybe in Japan.

Kay is ambitious, and at this early stage in her career, it is difficult for her to know how to get to where she would like to be. Unlike Amelia, Kay does not appear to have ever felt blocked from teaching in Japan because of her nationality. From her involvement in the FETJ, she has met many people from different walks of life who have broadened her understanding of work and of possibilities for herself: I’ve met many people, not only teachers, but professors. It’s nice to know more people who are more experienced. If there are things I don’t know, I just have to ask. I have learned a lot just from asking. Problematizing agency in individual teachers

Both Amelia and Kay are recognized as successful teachers and rising stars in the FETJ. Both point to the FETJ, and particularly to the keen interest taken in them by Aurora, as crucial to the development of their teaching skills and to their entry into the teaching occupation. But, it is evident that their passionate commitment to teaching and to the

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FETJ underlies their dynamism as teachers and subsequently as teacher trainers. Both of them also acknowledge the importance of other social networks: the church, parents of learners, Japanese teachers with whom they team teach, ALT meetings organized by the T City board of education and, above all, Aurora. Each of these networks has an agentive effect on these two teachers, providing them with opportunities and encouragement, and in some cases injunctions, to act and change. As with the formation of the collective, agency can take the form of an ideology. For Amelia, who came just a few years earlier than Kay, English teaching was something she believed to be impossible for Filipinos. For Kay, by contrast, this was something that she could already take for granted as a potential career option. Implications for Teacher Agency Theory and Research

Adopting an ANT perspective on teacher agency means going against the grain of much recent research where agency is regarded as an attribute or a capacity of teachers (e.g. Barcelos et al., 2015). This view goes further than an ecological approach (Priestley et  al., 2015) or an activity theory approach (Feryok, 2012), both of which also problematize agency, but which ultimately acknowledge its existence as the interaction between the individual and his or her environment. As Fenwick and Edwards (2010) comment, ‘There is no a priori agent or agency. The human subject is not agentive and intentional but is itself an effect of a particular network of associations’. ANT posits a basic symmetry between humans and non-humans; thus, teachers, students, employers and parents are viewed as potential agents on the same level as Facebook, a written constitution and logo, lesson plans, the Japanese labor law and changing ideologies about Filipinos in Japan and about Filipinos as teachers of English as an international language. These non-human entities and ideas are not merely contexts that interact with or mediate human agency. Rather, any of these can be agents in their own right. Agency, in ANT terms, is infinitely complex. No change occurs in a vacuum; every change follows from a prior change. Where a group of Filipinos come together to gain knowledge and practice about teaching, prior changes in society, the education system, technology, ideologies and so on make this event not only possible but inevitable. There are two main implications for this way of thinking about agency. Firstly, because agency in the sense of a force for change is exercised by actor-networks rather than by individual actors, it makes no sense to speak of individual teachers as ‘agents of change’. As previous researchers have shown (e.g. Buchanan, 2012), making teachers primarily accountable for learning outcomes ignores the diverse and ubiquitous agencies over which individual teachers have no control. Amelia and Kay both worked in contexts where they were obliged to adhere to fixed

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plans, or where the Japanese homeroom teacher did not give them a role in the classroom, or where students had no interest in English and refused to engage in learning activities. Both of them were able to find other employment quite quickly, and this too can be explained as due to their connection with the FETJ rather than to their individual agency. In language teacher identity research, teacher training courses, such as the FETJ’s teaching guidelines seminar, have been largely ignored or subjected to criticism (Block & Gray, 2016). However, actor-networks, such as courses and the institutions behind them, empower teachers by providing and assessing knowledge and practice of teaching as well as lending their own reputation to the teachers who complete them. The second implication of an ANT perspective on teacher agency is that it implies an agnostic sensitivity to any changes in actor-networks. The formation of the FETJ was significantly impacted not only by changes in the personnel making decisions, but also by the advent of Facebook as well as a new way of thinking about English and English language teacher identity by local boards of education. Tracing agency entails looking for any change that might account for a reconfiguration of an actor-network. Yet, this also entails maintaining an open-minded attitude toward change and holding in abeyance beliefs about what changes are significant, how they are valued and what they mean. Finally, ANT provides a perspective from which to ‘unpick practices, processes and precepts and traces how they come to be’ (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010). The present study has explored teacher agency through the narratives of Filipino teachers, which searched for details that point to alternative sources of agency for change. The findings have pointed to macro changes, such as changes in the law, ideology and the widespread use of Facebook. Micro changes, such as agency exerted by physical objects in a classroom or by cellphone, for example, have not been noted in this study – but these suggest promising avenues for future research. Note (1) Aurora Dobashi and Filipino English Teachers in Japan are unchanged with their permission. Other members of the FETJ mentioned in this chapter have been given pseudonyms.

References Barcelos, A., Aro, M., Ruohotie-Lyhty, M. and Kalaja, P. (2015) Beliefs, Agency and Identity in Foreign Language Learning. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Biesta, G. and Tedder, M. (2007) Agency and learning in the life course. Studies in the Education of Adults 39 (2), 132–149. Block, D. (2007) Second Language Identities. London: Bloomsbury. Block, D. and Gray, J. (2016) ‘Just go away and do it and you get marks’: The degradation of language teaching in neoliberal times. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 37 (5), 481–494.

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Buchanan, J. (2012) Telling tales out of school: Exploring why former teachers are not returning to the classroom. Australian Journal of Education 56 (2), 205–217. Buchanan, R. (2015) Teacher identity and agency in an era of accountability. Teachers and Teaching 21 (6), 700–719. Callon, M. (1986) Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay. In J. Law (ed.) Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (pp. 196–223). London: Routledge. Fenwick, T. and Edwards, R. (2010) Actor-Network Theory in Education. London: Routledge. Fenwick, T. and Edwards, R. (eds) (2012) Researching Education Through Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Feryok, A. (2012) Activity Theory and language teacher agency. Modern Languages Journal 96 (1), 95–107. Hamilton, M. (2012) Unruly practices: What a sociology of translations can offer to educational policy analysis. In T. Fenwick and R. Edwards (eds) Researching Education Through Actor-Network Theory (pp. 40–60). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Hökkä, P., Eteläpelto, A. and Rasku-Puttonen, P. (2012) The professional agency of teacher educators amid academic discourses. Journal of Education for Teaching: International Research and Pedagogy 38 (1), 83–102. Hökkä, P., Vähäsantanen, K. and Mahlakaarto, S. (2017) Teacher educators’ collective professional agency and identity: Transforming marginality to strength. Teaching and Teacher Education 36–46. Houghton, S. and Rivers, D. (eds) (2013) Native-Speakerism in Japan: Intergroup Dynamics in Foreign Language Education. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. JET (2017) History. See http://jetprogramme.org/en/history/ (accessed 7 December 2017). Kachru, B.B. (1985) Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: The English language in the outer circle. In R. Quirk and H.G. Widdowson (eds) English in the World: Teaching and Learning the Language and Literatures (pp. 11–30). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kubota, R. (1998) Ideologies of English in Japan. World Englishes 17, 295–306. Kubota, R. (2002) Impact of globalization on language teaching in Japan. In D. Block and D. Cameron (eds) Globalization and Language Teaching (pp. 13–28). London: Routledge. Kyodo (2017) Record 2.38 million foreign residents living in Japan in 2016. The Japan Times, 17 March. See https​://ww​w.jap​antim​es.co​.jp/n​ews/2​017/0​3/17/​natio​nal/r​ecord​ -2-38​-mill​ion-f​oreig​n-res​ident​s-liv​ing-j​apan-​2016/​ (accessed 12 August 2017). Lai, C., Li, Z. and Gong, Y. (2016) Teacher agency and professional learning in crosscultural contexts: Accounts of Chinese teachers from international schools in Hong Kong. Teaching and Teacher Education 54, 12–21. Lasky, S. (2005) A sociocultural approach to understanding teacher identity, agency and professional vulnerability in a context of secondary school reform. Teachers and Teaching, 21 (8), 899–916. Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Law, J. and Hassard, J. (1999) Actor-Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell. Maher, J. and Yashiro, K. (1995) Multilingual Japan. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Nagatomo, D. (2013) The advantages and disadvantages faced by housewife English teachers in the cottage industry Eikaiwa business. The Language Teacher 37 (1), 3–7. Norton, B. and Morgan, B. (2012) Poststructuralism. Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Priestley, M., Biesta, G. and Robinson, S. (2013) Teachers as agents of change: Teacher agency and emerging models of curriculum. In M. Priestley and J. Biesta (eds) Reinventing the Curriculum: New Trends in Curriculum Policy and Practice (pp. 187–206). London: Bloomsbury. Priestley, M., Biesta, G. and Robinson, S. (2015) Teacher Agency: An Ecological Approach. London: Bloomsbury. Stewart, A. (forthcoming) Language Teacher Identity and Filipino English Teachers in Japan. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Tao, J. and Gao, X. (2017) Teacher agency and identity commitment in curricular reform. Teaching and Teacher Education 63, 346–355. Tsuneyoshi, R., Okano, K. and Boocock, S. (2010) Minorities and Education in Multicultural Japan: An Interactive Perspective. London: Routledge.

7 World Language Teachers Performing and Positioning Agency in Classroom Target Language Use Michele Back

Though second language acquisition theories encourage teachers to use the target language (TL) as much as possible in the world language (WL)1 classroom, many WL teachers have difficulty enacting this recommendation. While several studies have offered suggestions for maximizing TL use, here I examine the role of WL teacher agency. Using a comparative case study approach, I analyze discourse gathered from interviews, classroom observations and stimulated recall sessions with three high school Spanish teachers. Findings highlight the context-sensitive, performative nature of agency with respect to teacher TL use, as well as the potential role of participant–researcher interactions in this performance. I discuss implications for WL teacher education and professional development. Introduction

Standards and policies surrounding world languages (WL) education often include a statement on the importance of target language (TL) use. For example, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL, 2010) recommended that ‘language educators and their students use the target language as exclusively as possible (90% plus) at all levels of instruction during instructional time’. Reasons given for this percentage include limited student exposure to the TL outside the classroom (Kang, 2008) and approaches to second language acquisition emphasizing the importance of input (Ellis & Wulff, 2015). Yet, because the TL is ‘both the object and medium of instruction’ (Bale, 2016: 393, his emphasis), many WL teachers find it difficult to teach about the language while speaking the language almost exclusively.

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Given this disconnect between policy and practice, it is important to explore WL teachers’ agency regarding their own TL use. In this chapter, I draw from Ahearn’s (2001: 112) definition of agency as the ‘socioculturally mediated capacity to act’, as well as from positioning theory (Davies & Harré, 1990) and Bauman’s (1987) characterization of performance in order to highlight the context-sensitive nature of agency. I focus on three Spanish teachers working in distinct Connecticut high schools – rural English monolingual, urban Hispanic serving and suburban English monolingual – and discuss how these teachers both performed their beliefs about TL use during the interviews and positioned their and their students’ agencies as Spanish teachers and learners. These findings highlight how agency is produced in interaction, as well as the role of teacher attitudes in shaping these performances and the often-overlooked role of the researcher in performances of agency. Theoretical Framework

Ahearn’s (2001) definition from the previous section illuminates how the capacity to act can be both shaped and constrained by interaction and context. The role of these constraints, as well as individuals’ abilities to inhabit and reframe them, suggests the importance of examining discourse to determine agency in interaction. My theoretical framework therefore draws from notions of agency, performance (Bauman, 1987) and positioning (Davies & Harré, 1990; see Figure  7.1). Similar to Ahearn, I view agency as context sensitive and emergent, yet still shaped by previous experiences. Thus, WL teacher experiences of engaging with the TL shape their interactions and their capacities to act, while their beliefs regarding TL use are also both context sensitive and rooted in these prior experiences. In this chapter, I examine teacher beliefs and experiences as they emerge in interviews, observations and stimulated recall sessions. Researchers now view these interactions as situated social practices, rather than contexts wherein ‘objective’ data can be gathered (e.g. Talmy, 2011). Therefore, I view teacher expressions of agency as performances within these contexts. Following Bauman’s (1987: 8) definition of performance as a ‘specially marked way of speaking’ that opens itself up for audience scrutiny, I reflect on how my role as researcher and my history with each participant may have impacted their performances of agency. I analyze these performances through participants’ use of discursive features such as agentive language (e.g. ‘I do not use the TL’ versus the more passive ‘I was never told to use the TL’). I also highlight how participants position each other (interactive), themselves (reflexive) or absent others (reactive; Back, 2015) in interaction. Kayi-Aydar (2015: 96) described the role of positioning on agency thusly: ‘while certain

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Performance in interaction

Beliefs and experiences

Positioning of self, interlocutors, absent others

Agency in discourse Figure 7.1  Theoretical framework

positions may enable one to become agentic, agents can also actively resist certain positionings. Agency and positioning are therefore closely linked, one influencing the other’. Thus, positioning agency often results in conflicting performances, as interlocutors reflect on their own capacities and question how others have positioned them. Both positioning-foracting and resistance to positioning were key components of my data, as participants asserted their capacity to act and resisted both my and student positionings regarding this capacity. Figure 7.1 illustrates my theoretical framework: as a mix of teacher beliefs and experiences; their positioning of self, interlocutors and absent others; and the performances of these beliefs, experiences and positioning; all of which, when funneled together, shed light on how agency is expressed in discourse. Participants and methods

The three participants (Adelaide, Jenny and Paul) are high school teachers who have worked at their respective schools for their entire careers. All identified as non-native speakers of Spanish, with no home exposure to the language. Their experience in Spanish-speaking countries varied from several months studying abroad in Spanish-speaking countries (Adelaide and Jenny) to several week-long trips in these areas (Paul; see Table 7.1).

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Table 7.1  Participant demographics Pseudonym

Gender

Race

High school demographics

Years teaching Spanish

Adelaide

Female

White

Rural, English monolingual

21

Paul

Male

White

Suburban, English monolingual

11

Jenny

Female

White

Urban, Hispanic serving

5

I conducted two two-hour interviews with each participant: one before and one after classroom observations. I observed each participant’s Spanish 3 classes three times, totaling six observations (6–9 hours) per participant. I video recorded classes during the third observation, and the second interview with teachers included a stimulated recall session (Gass & Mackey, 2000) using these recordings. I observed Spanish 3 courses for two reasons; first, every participant taught the course, making it a logical point of comparison. Second, Spanish 3 at the high school level offers a challenging curriculum, including content such as aspect and subjunctive mood. Because of this, it is also a course that frequently frustrates students, and one in which TL use can break down. For data analysis, I combined quantitative counts of teacher language use with a qualitative content analysis from interviews, observations and stimulated recall sessions. I measured Spanish and English use in utterances, defined as speech occurring under one intonation contour, delimited by a pause and comprising a single semantic unit (Mackey et al., 2003). Utterances that occurred in both languages counted as one utterance in each language; however, utterances that contained words in another language used as either examples or fillers were counted only as utterances in one language. Sample utterances for each classification are shown in Table 7.2. I analyzed discourse from interviews, classroom observations and stimulated recall using thematic coding (Gibbs, 2007). After recording and transcribing data, I used open coding, followed by select coding and Table 7.2  Sample utterances in Spanish, English and both languages Language

Example

Counted as

Spanish

‘Hoy tenemos otra vez la clase para trabajar’

One utterance in Spanish

English

‘Before we go over it everyone has to have a different paper’

One utterance in English

Both languages

‘El otro lado es la tarea, not this question, this question’

One utterance in Spanish and one utterance in English

Both languages

‘Here you use tener’

One utterance in English (‘tener’ as example word)

Both languages

‘Alright, vamos a empezar’

One utterance in Spanish (‘alright’ as filler)

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analytic memo writing. Through this coding, I identified the discursive activity; then, I outlined the characteristics that defined it as both positioning and performance of agency. My objective for incorporating data from classroom observations was to triangulate my inferences of the interview and stimulated recall data and situate the interview data within my participants’ overall interactional histories. I chose a comparative case study approach to explore the similarities and differences of these interactions (Yin, 1994). While a comparative case study highlights common themes among cases, I first present these data in narrative form profiling each teacher to best highlight their performances of agency and positionings, after a brief section that presents the quantitative findings on TL use. I follow these sections with a discussion of common and divergent themes. Before this, I discuss overall findings for teacher TL use. Findings Overall teacher TL use

Teacher TL use varied for two participants and was consistent for one participant. As seen in Figure  7.2, the percentage of Adelaide and Jenny’s use of Spanish varied from 53% to 84% of classroom discourse, while Paul’s use was consistently 100%. This corresponded with participants’ estimates of TL use in the first interview; while Paul was sure he used 100% TL consistently, Adelaide and Jenny acknowledged that their TL use was far from optimal.

Figure 7.2  Participant TL use by percentage of utterances in Spanish

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The functions of each language were similar for Adelaide and Jenny, who used Spanish and English for the following tasks: procedural talk, introducing content, classroom management and building rapport. Adelaide used more English for classroom management, while Jenny used more Spanish for rapport. Both teachers used more Spanish to introduce content and more English for explicit grammar instructions, but overall both languages were used to complete similar functions. Of the two teachers who used English, Jenny had a stronger tendency to use both languages in the same utterance, while Adelaide’s utterances were normally either in English or Spanish. This may be because Jenny had native and heritage speakers in her class who used both languages in their utterances, as I discuss further on. While the teachers were aware of their level of TL use in the classroom, they framed their language use in different ways. In the following three sections, I discuss how these teachers positioned their agency with respect to TL use. Adelaide: ‘In a perfect world […] we would be doing everything in Spanish’

Adelaide was the most veteran Spanish teacher of the participants, having taught for 21  years. She received her teaching certification through the state’s alternative program for post-collegiate graduates. An avid traveler and language learner, Adelaide lived and worked in Spain, Ecuador and Brazil, learning Portuguese and French in addition to Spanish. She described her language learning experiences as positive and remembered her own Spanish teachers as ‘energetic and enthusiastic’ (Interview 1, 12/12/16). Adelaide’s high school is in a rural area next to the state’s flagship university, drawing students from four neighboring towns. The school offers several advanced placement courses, as well as courses that can be taken for college credit. Adelaide is frequently called upon to serve as a cooperating teacher for the university’s student teachers, and I first met her in this capacity. Our relationship was cordial, and our interactions were generally on an equal footing as two ‘experts’ with both theoretical and practical experience in WL teaching. Within Adelaide’s high school, students are placed into one of two tracks (A or B) for all academic subjects, including WLs. These tracks are structured as more (A) or less (B) academically rigorous; students are placed into A or B tracks based on recommendations from the middle school. Students in B track courses frequently have documented learning disabilities or mental health issues, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or anxiety. During the semester that I worked with Adelaide, I observed two of her Spanish  3B track classes. In her interviews, Adelaide frequently

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positioned her students as reluctant or anxious language learners. She sometimes linked this reluctance to anxiety or learning disabilities, while other times she related it to students’ negative experiences with Spanish in middle school. Within either context, Adelaide emphasized her perceived need to handle her students’ language learning ‘with kid gloves, because you want them to stay and have a good experience’ (Interview 1, 12/12/16). These factors also led to some student resistance regarding Adelaide’s own TL use, as she described: They think they’re not good at Spanish […] their anxiety goes way up when I speak in Spanish […] often I hear them comment ‘English please’ or ‘I have no idea what you're saying’ or ‘I don’t speak Spanish’. (Interview 2, 3/28/17)

Adelaide saw her role as finding a comfortable balance for her students, which meant that she used less of the TL than she would have liked: ‘Optimally I would love to speak 90 percent Spanish in the classroom—and I don’t’ (Interview  1, 12/12/16). During our conversations, Adelaide frequently used words like ‘optimal’ or ‘ideal’ with respect to maximum TL use, contrasting this with the reality of her classroom and students. Moreover, her use of the active voice (‘I don’t [speak Spanish]’) indicated an acknowledgement of agency regarding her TL use. Her directness on this issue also positioned me as a co-expert who could understand ‘ideal’ TL use versus the realities of the classroom. These realities included constraints on time and curriculum, which Adelaide referenced in both interviews. She stated that she had limited time to teach the full curriculum, especially if she was to fulfill the department’s goal of alignment with Spanish 3B courses taught by other teachers: ‘It’s the balance of “Okay, I have 58 minutes. There are certain things I want to accomplish”. You know, where do you give and take?’ (Interview 1, 12/12/16). Moreover, unscheduled visits from the administration, in which students were asked about the day’s learning objectives, sometimes resulted in more English usage. Adelaide explained: The learning target has to be very clear, because when we [the teachers] get observed literally they [the administrators] come in and they put their face in the kid’s face and say, ‘What are you doing?’ I watch my kids sort of freak, but I don’t want them to freak. I want them to be confident and be able to articulate what they’re doing. I could say it [the learning target] in Spanish. I mean I used to last year, I always did it in Spanish, well, then I stopped because then you know some kids […] might have an idea but not be able to articulate it or they get scared and they say I don’t know. I therefore have failed because they don’t know what the learning target is, so I feel that pressure a lot. (Interview 1, 12/12/16)

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While Adelaide again used agentive language to illustrate this situation (‘I stopped;’ ‘I therefore have failed’), I chose this quote to illustrate Adelaide’s perception of conflicting goals of maximum TL use, student articulation of learning objectives and alignment with other courses. Her use of aggressive, fearful vocabulary (‘put their face in the kids’ face;’ ‘freak out;’ ‘they get scared’) are performances (Bauman, 1987) that both diminish her agency and index the power of administrative demands, which frequently take precedence over her teaching goals. Adelaide’s Spanish  3B classes occurred early Friday mornings (the day I observed), and I frequently noticed her struggle to encourage student interaction in Spanish. She used many strategies to make her TL input comprehensible, including gestures, repetition and drawing on the board. She also used English for vocabulary translation, complex grammar explanations and procedural talk. Adelaide described her use of English for procedural talk as a method of calling her students’ attention back to the task at hand. Her recall of a recorded classroom activity, in which some students were not staying on task, illustrates this strategy and her agency in deliberately using English for this purpose: I can see it [in] her face. She’s tuned out, she’s like, ‘Oh my God, she’s speaking in Spanish’ […] and all of a sudden I say, ‘be prepared’ [in English] […] They hear me change and go, ‘be prepared’, they’re like, ‘Oh!’. (Interview 2, 3/28/17)

As seen in the quote, Adelaide’s discussion of her language choice portrayed her English usage as a performance that referenced her reactive positioning of the students as less responsive to Spanish and indexed their collective histories as a classroom, in which a switch to English merited additional attention. In this and other stimulated recall examples, Adelaide was nearly always able to clearly articulate her reasons for using Spanish or English. When she could not think of a reason (usually for using English), she would reflect on whether she could have performed the same task in Spanish. For example, during a recall of one task, I noted that Adelaide used English to discuss how the wording of certain questions might lead students to the wrong answer. She referenced an administrative goal of having students reflect on answers and feel confident to both give a response and not be devastated if that response was incorrect. Although at first Adelaide felt that encouragement and reflection were more effectively done in English, as she watched the recording she began to discuss how she might do this in Spanish: If they knew that vocabulary […] we could make it funny, like everybody [says] ‘engaño [trick]’ […] or ‘una trampa [a trap]’ […] that would

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actually be a really fun way to infuse little snippets of language. (Interview 2, 3/28/17)

My observations of Adelaide’s teaching practices highlighted that, although Adelaide positioned herself as an experienced teacher and user of Spanish, the contextual factors within which she taught constrained her capacity to act upon ‘ideal’ 90% TL use. Her reflective positioning as a teacher who provided a safe, comfortable learning environment for her students, many of whom had anxieties around school and language learning, often resulted in an easing off of TL input. Meanwhile, the challenging and sometimes conflicting demands of the administration compelled her to opt for expediency in English over input in Spanish. However, when Adelaide was given an opportunity to view her teaching and reflect upon her language use, she quickly came up with alternative strategies to expand her TL use, such as providing problem-solving language in Spanish. In Adelaide’s words, ‘[The video] is really good to watch. People should all have to do this. Because […] when you’re in the moment it’s not necessarily obvious’ (Interview 2, 3/28/17). Jenny: ‘No one was holding me accountable’

Jenny was the novice teacher of the three participants, having five years of experience at an urban high school linked to a local community college. Jenny had taken master’s-level courses at the flagship university, where I first came in contact with her as her professor. Like Adelaide, Jenny had Spanish teachers that she characterized as enthusiastic and energetic. After working with Teach for America, Jenny received her certification through the state’s alternative route and began teaching at her current school. Jenny’s high school is characterized by a large percentage of Spanish native and heritage speakers from Puerto Rico, Peru, Guatemala and other regions of Latin America. Nevertheless, Jenny positioned Spanish in her school as a ‘polarizing subject—I find students either love it or hate it’ during our first interview. When I asked her to elaborate, she stated: Many of [my students] are native speakers and this is the only language we offer at my school. So they feel pigeonholed and forced to take something that […] in their mind that they already know […] I feel that that alienates some students. (Interview 2, 5/19/17)

Jenny’s reactive positioning of her students as feeling ‘pigeonholed’, ‘forced’ and ‘alienated’ from Spanish courses in school correlated with what she viewed as their reluctance to speak Spanish in class. Although, like Adelaide, Jenny mentioned anxiety as a factor, especially for her non-native students, for her native speaker students the reluctance

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stemmed from an inability to see Spanish as a useful course. Social and familial pressures also may have played a part, as Jenny discussed: I think maybe certain parents might have said to their kids like that they don’t want them speaking Spanish outside the home […] I don’t have proof of this but I’ve gotten that feeling before because you know some parents who immigrate here […] their main goal for themselves is to learn English, and they want their children to be able to learn English […] So I’m wondering if that influence comes across in the Spanish classroom like they don’t want to be seen as the fluent kid who can speak it really well. (Interview 1, 12/15/16)

Although Jenny was careful to state that she had ‘no proof’ of her analysis, indexing her hesitation through several hedges (‘maybe’, ‘I think’, ‘I’m wondering’), she offered a detailed hypothesis of how an ‘English-only’ policy in school – even in the case of Spanish language classes – might be reinforced at home by Spanish-speaking parents. Another potential obstacle for student TL use was the bilingual nature of her students’ everyday interactions; for example, Jenny discussed how her Puerto Rican students are accustomed to using both English and Spanish in the same utterance; therefore, ‘[saying], “You have to be in this one language” is kind of a foreign concept to them’ (Interview 1, 12/15/16). When discussing her own TL use, Jenny used some agentive discourse to state that she did not use as much Spanish as she would like (e.g. ‘I don’t [use 90% TL] […] this is an area that I do want to work on’, Interview  1, 12/15/16). However, Jenny also positioned herself as both an inexperienced teacher and a non-native speaker unable to access certain TL words or phrases. Her teaching inexperience was framed in the context of her histories with Teach for America and alternative certification, as well as a lack of administrative supervision of her Spanish courses. She drew upon her identity as a non-native speaker to explain why she was unable to say certain things in Spanish; moreover, she felt that her students positioned her as a non-native speaker and therefore would not speak Spanish to her: ‘They see the blonde hair. They just want to speak English to me’ (Interview  2, 5/19/17). Throughout our two interviews, Jenny performed these positionings to explain why she did not use the TL as frequently as she would like. The following quote illustrates her perceived lack of experience as a teacher: Going back to the question about my preparation as a teacher, I was never told this upfront, like what has to be in Spanish and what has to be in English, and no one was holding me accountable in my early years […] Maybe I’ve fallen into like a bad habit now. If I had gone through like a traditional route [of certification] it might have forced me to increase my amount of time that I use Spanish. (Interview 1, 12/15/16)

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As seen above, Jenny attributed her lower TL use with the passive construction ‘I was never told’ to use the TL. Her discourse on this topic reinforced this passivity; she had ‘fallen into a bad habit’, and a more traditional route of certification might have ‘forced’ her to use the TL. With these constructions, Jenny shifted her capacity to act onto unknown agents from her alternative certification program and an unrealized, more traditional certification program. Perhaps her relative novice status as a teacher played a role in this shift in agency; in other words, Jenny was much closer, chronologically speaking, to her teacher training than the other participants. Yet, Jenny’s difficulties in performing agency came through in other topics during our discussions. She performed her perceived lack of experience on various topics through numerous hedges, such as ‘I think’ and ‘maybe’, and even showed slight discomfort or resistance to my questions (e.g. ‘this feels like a test’) or a desire to answer ‘correctly’ (e.g. ‘give me a hint’). This surprised me, as Jenny’s responses were as good as, if not better than, the more experienced participants. Moreover, due to Jenny’s experience with native Spanish speakers, she was keenly aware of the sociolinguistic factors surrounding the acquisition of Spanish and perceptions of the Spanish language, an issue that did not surface in my interviews with the other teachers. It is possible that my previous role as her professor led her to position me less as a co-expert and more as an interlocutor with superior knowledge and experience. This positioning would explain in part her hesitant performances of expertise regarding both teaching and the TL. Given Jenny’s responses regarding the position of Spanish among her students and the school community, I was also surprised by some of her teaching practices. I observed two of Jenny’s Spanish 3 classes – one that had a high percentage of Spanish native speakers, and one that had a lower, but still present, number of these students. Both classes took place three times a week for an hour and a half. The classroom itself was a language lab with computers at each desk, thereby prohibiting a great deal of movement or interaction among the students. However, Jenny made several efforts to get students up and moving through activities that included circulating around the class or using whiteboards to write a response. Despite these activities, I observed that most of the class time was dedicated to explicit grammar explanations in Spanish and English. While Jenny did use authentic materials to illustrate these grammatical concepts, there was very little focus on meaning-making, conversation or a deeper exploration of authentic materials for culture and comprehension. Jenny did acknowledge her reliance on these types of lessons in our first interview, stating, ‘I was taught in a very old school, traditional, grammar-based fashion, so I think I revert to that a lot when I’m not sure how to go about teaching a concept’ (Interview 1, 12/15/16). Yet, these

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practices seemed to contradict her observations in our interviews that her native speaker students tended to ‘tune out’ during explicit grammar lessons. Like Adelaide, Jenny appreciated the ability to observe her practice through the stimulated recall and noticed several instances where she could have used the TL instead of English. Jenny also stated that during the study she had incorporated more authentic resources, such as YouTube videos, ‘so that my voice is not the only accent that they’re hearing and the only source of comprehensible input’ (Interview 2, 5/19/17). However, Jenny did not reflect upon any specific ways that she could incorporate more TL into her own speech. Rather, she reactively positioned her non-native students as ‘needing’ input in English for explicit grammatical explanations (‘explaining it to him over and over in Spanish might not have been as effective as just giving him [the explanation in English]’, Interview  2, 5/19/17). During both interviews, Jenny also lamented her native speakers’ reluctance to use Spanish in the classroom. Perhaps due to this perceived reluctance and necessity, Jenny frequently positioned the entire class as being unfamiliar with certain concepts, such as vocabulary words. Given the demographics of the class, I found it interesting that Jenny assumed unfamiliarity with vocabulary and used English to provide translations, rather than using authentic resources as opportunities to probe student knowledge. Lastly, during the stimulated recall, Jenny again positioned herself as an inexperienced Spanish speaker, emphasizing the difficulty of explaining Spanish words such as ‘ojalá’ [I hope] and ‘tengo ganas de’ [I feel like] in a comprehensible manner using the TL (‘You can’t really act that one out […] besides just telling them what it means in English’, Interview 2, 5/19/17). In sum, Jenny exhibited performances that indexed her reflexive positioning as an inexperienced Spanish teacher and speaker, which may have been due to our previous relationship of student and professor, as well as her novice status. By positioning herself as inexperienced, while reactively positioning the administration and her histories with teacher education as absent or ineffective, Jenny’s performance of her teaching beliefs and practices shifted TL use agency to other players, which surfaced in some of her teaching practices. While Adelaide referenced her administration’s overbearing presence as having a negative effect on her TL use, Jenny instead saw a correlation between a lack of administrative accountability and low TL use. Although Jenny could see an overall benefit to reflecting upon her TL use, she was unable to come up with specific strategies that would help her use more TL in her classes. Paul ‘We have a huge advantage here’

Paul had 11 years of teaching experience in a suburban school district. After considering the possibility of being an elementary school teacher,

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as it would give him the opportunity to be involved with ‘a little bit of everything’, Paul realized that teaching Spanish would also allow him the opportunity to engage with multiple subject areas. He therefore enrolled in the traditional certification program at the state’s flagship university. As the head of his department and an active member of several of the state’s WL teaching organizations, he was also frequently called upon to act as a cooperating teacher. Similar to Adelaide, this was the capacity in which we met, and we again related to each other as co-experts. Unlike Adelaide and Jenny, Paul never had a long-term study abroad experience. However, rather than viewing this lack of experience as a detriment, Paul positioned this as an advantage for communicating with his students; ‘My kids all look at me and they go, “But you’re a Spanish teacher”, and I go, “And I learned [Spanish] the same way that you guys are learning”’ (Interview 1, 12/12/16). Paul attends short-term study abroad programs frequently with his students and takes trips on his own to Spanish-speaking countries. Similarly, although Paul stated that he was not ‘an expert in any way, shape, or form’ in the heavy cultural content that he teaches, he positioned his experiences as a teacher as having filled in many of the knowledge gaps in both TL use and cultural content that remained after his certification program (Interview 1, 12/12/16). Paul teaches in a relatively wealthy suburb; the district is known for its rigorous academic content and prestigious WL program. Like Adelaide’s school, Paul’s high school places students into two academic tracks, which are distinguished by Roman and Arabic numerals (e.g. Spanish 3 and Spanish III). The Arabic numeral-designated courses are considered more academically rigorous, while the Roman numeral-designated courses, like the B track at Adelaide’s school, typically contain a larger number of students with learning disabilities and mental health or behavioral issues. During the semester of the study, Paul taught two sections of Spanish III. Paul positioned himself as a firm believer in maximum TL use, recalling that he was exposed to a maximum amount of Spanish in his own language classes. Moreover, he stated that during his certification program it had been ‘drilled into [his] head’ that students need to hear the TL as much as possible in class: ‘You have to give kids input, input, input to expect to be able to get anything back from them’ (Interview 1, 12/12/16). Paul positioned himself as a strong and capable TL user, contrasting this with the abilities of many of his students: ‘My ability to use the target language in class isn’t the issue. It’s their ability to produce for me’ (Interview  2, 5/15/17). This contrasted sharply with Adelaide and Jenny’s approaches to TL use. During my observations of Paul’s class, I frequently witnessed conversations in which Paul would speak in Spanish while his students would respond in English. Students were not penalized for speaking in English, but were encouraged to complete their thoughts, while Paul offered feedback in Spanish. During our second interview,

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Paul emphasized that his goal for his students was their understanding, rather than TL production. The kids understand me. Whether or not they can produce, they understand me. […] I go, ‘Okay, you know what, if you need to go out into the world and have an interaction with someone […] the fact that you can understand is probably a good thing because at the end of the day you can probably gesture and put enough cognates together that you might be able to get something across to them’. (Interview 2, 5/15/17)

Paul’s discourse on his TL use indexed his TL expectations for both himself and his students. Rather than meeting students ‘at their level’ by using English, Paul spoke in the TL with the objective that his students would both understand him and be able to use additional strategies to ‘get something across’. These strategies were particularly relevant for his Spanish  III students, whom he described as ‘not the most academically focused kids’. Paul felt that these students’ overall academic performance and motivation impacted their ability to succeed in Spanish: ‘When you already have a kid who academically doesn’t necessarily have that same skill set in their native language […] it gets really dicey’ (Interview 1, 12/12/16). Thus, Paul stated that it was sometimes problematic for him to conduct some aspects of classroom discourse in the TL: ‘Not impossible but very difficult […] especially if you have a class of students who may not be the most academically motivated’ (Interview 1, 12/12/16). He discussed how he used strategies, such as modifying his language and course content, to remain in the TL: ‘Even though it might be really good to dive into something, if their language isn’t to the point where we can do most of it in the target language, I probably don’t do it’ (Interview 2, 5/15/17). Paul’s discussion of TL use in the classroom, drawing upon phrases such as ‘difficult, but not impossible’ and describing specific strategies, such as making content less complex while continuing to keep discussions in the TL, again indexed a strong performance of agency regarding both Paul’s TL use and expectations for his students. This agency was also reflected in my observations, in which Paul used Spanish constantly, from casual conversations with his students to formal lectures on content. The courses were content-heavy – the unit I observed focused on an encounter between indigenous populations and the Spanish in Mexico and South America – and there were no explicit grammar or vocabulary lessons, as these items were embedded in the readings and class activities. Paul’s classes were also extremely student focused, with Paul giving instructions at the beginning of the class and allowing students to complete the day’s work independently. Therefore, although Paul spoke less frequently than either Adelaide or Jenny, his discourse was entirely in the TL.

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During our second interview, I asked Paul how he could maintain such a high level of TL use, given that the other participants had more difficulty. Paul framed his response in the context of departmental and administrative expectations, his experience in the district and an overall willingness along with his colleagues to ‘push the envelope’ with respect to curriculum. Though he stated that his supervisor ‘sort of demanded’ that he speak in the TL, this expectation was complemented by the support of his department, his own teaching and learning histories and a sense of agency that allowed him to take risks with the curriculum. Paul frequently used ‘I’ and ‘we’ statements to discuss his decisions about TL use, his department and the curriculum. Paul’s reflection on his decision to stop using tests exemplifies this discourse: I tell my parents at open house, ‘How many of you walk into your job on a daily basis, sit down, take out a pencil, paper and take a test? No, you’re asked to perform, you’re asked to do something with your language or with your job skills’. I said, ‘That’s what I’m asking of your kids’. […] I have these great tests. They’re really good […] I haven’t touched them in years. They’re good stuff but that’s not what we are’. (Interview 1, 12/12/16)

In this excerpt, Paul gave justifications for a content-based curriculum, positioned himself as capable of articulating this with parents and other stakeholders and linked these justifications with the objectives of his district and department (‘that’s not what we are’). Thus, Paul positioned himself and his capacity to act in the classroom as in accordance with the overall goals of the district. Although, like Adelaide and Jenny, he reactively positioned his students as reluctant Spanish speakers, he did not demonstrate that this affected his agency to either use the TL or be creative with his curriculum. Whereas Adelaide viewed her administration as threatening and Jenny as absent, Paul viewed administrative policies as validations of his own beliefs, as well as those of his colleagues. Paul positioned his colleagues and district positively, using words like ‘advantage’, ‘collegiality’ and ‘collaboration’ to describe his department. He also positioned this collegiality as unique to his school, as seen in the following excerpt: We have a huge advantage here. We have a work room that that everyone sort of lives in, [so if] I didn’t know something I could turn around and go, ‘Hey what about this?’ ‘Hey, do you have anything for that?’ That doesn’t happen in most places. So to be able to have that, I mean it’s a huge advantage for us. (Interview 1, 12/12/16)

Paul’s positioning of department collaboration as unique and advantageous served to empower his own agency. The positioning indexed his

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value of the environment and allowed him to act in ways that supported the goals of this community, including maximum TL use. Discussion and Implications

Although each participant inhabited a particular teaching context, a comparison of their perspectives offers insight into the factors impacting teacher agency in TL use. First, all three teachers reactively positioned their students as reluctant Spanish speakers. Whether this was due to student learning disabilities, language learning anxiety or the complex identities of Spanish heritage speakers, each teacher viewed this reluctance as impacting their students’ performance. However, the teachers performed their own TL use in different ways to address this reluctance. While Jenny and Adelaide used English 20%–50% of the time to accommodate their students, Paul drew a line of separation between his abilities and his expectations for his students, speaking the TL 100% of the time. Parallel to the participants’ positionings of their students were their reflexive (self) positionings of agency (Davies & Harré, 1990). Whereas Adelaide and Jenny positioned themselves as somewhat forced to use English – Adelaide due to administrative demands and a desire to reduce student anxiety, and Jenny because of her own inexperience – Paul positioned himself as a frequent TL user, consistent with his positioning of departmental and administrative expectations. The participants’ reflexive positioning also indexed their sense of agency during the stimulated recall sessions. Adelaide seemed to benefit most from these sessions, reflecting upon her practice and proposing alternative ways of conducting classroom discourse to use more TL. Paul was also reflective, but his maximum use of the TL made it unlikely that he would propose alternative strategies. Jenny’s self-positioning as inexperienced seemed to correlate with a lack of reflection and ability to propose alternative strategies, even though she recognized her high level of English use and saw this as unlikely to be helpful for her students. As discussed previously, my relationships with each of these participants as either a co-expert or a professor with more perceived knowledge may have influenced these performances. When considering these findings, four implications for WL education are apparent. First, teacher positioning plays important roles in performing agency, but these positionings are also mediated by context and experience. Therefore, similar positionings may result in different actions. This finding corresponds closely to Kayi-Aydar’s (2015) linking of positioning and agency, as outlined previously (see also Chapter  2). Although all three teachers reactively positioned their students as reluctant learners, they acted upon this positioning in different ways. Whereas Adelaide and Jenny took this reluctance as a reason to incorporate more English into their instruction, Paul separated his own TL use from that

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of his students. Reflexive positioning, as well as interactive positioning between interviewer and participant, also played a role in teacher agency and seemed to correlate with years of experience. Both Adelaide and Paul used agentive discourse that indexed their decisions to use the TL as conscious; their positioning of me as an equal may have played a role in their usage of more agentive language. On the other hand, Jenny positioned herself as lacking experience and therefore less capable of using the TL, possibly due to her positioning of me as a superior or ‘expert’, given that I was her former professor. A takeaway from this finding is to carefully consider how the researcher may be positioned by participants when asking them about experiences the researcher may share, such as teaching practices. Second, and unsurprisingly given the large body of literature on language learning anxiety (e.g. Chen & Chang, 2004; Horwitz, 2000), all participants positioned their students as reluctant learners of Spanish. Both Paul and Adelaide’s students, who were in the ‘less-demanding’ academic track, were aware of their lower academic status. Although Jenny’s students were not tracked, they were no doubt conscious of the stigma surrounding heritage Spanish speakers, who are frequently viewed from a deficit perspective in the United States (Leeman, 2015). One wonders whether this repeated positioning of students as anxious or ‘imperfect’ learners contributes to a vicious cycle, in which students take on and augment these positionings to the point where successful language learning becomes all but impossible. WL teachers could help break this cycle by incorporating culturally relevant pedagogies (Ladson-Billings, 1995) and differentiated instruction. Both strategies acknowledge diverse student identities and build on student strengths and funds of knowledge, leading to a more meaningful engagement with content. Stemming from this recommendation is a third implication: the importance of curricular design to encourage maximum TL use. A curriculum focusing more on culturally relevant content for Spanish heritage speakers could help increase motivation among Jenny’s students. Even students who do not speak Spanish in the home could benefit from a curriculum focused on meaningful communication and intercultural citizenship, as recommended by Byram (2006) and Kramsch (2011). Such innovations emphasize what students can do in the language and how Spanish relates to their daily lives. These changes also encourage more TL use, as teachers spend less time on explicit grammar instruction. Teachers should not be afraid of ‘losing’ their students with a meaningbased curriculum; Paul’s TL use demonstrated how teachers can provide extensive, comprehensible input without confusing students or contributing to social distance. Of course, teachers need time for this type of curriculum revision, which leads to my final implication: the role of the stimulated recall exercise. Of the three participants, Adelaide was the most receptive to

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the sessions and their potential for bringing forth new strategies. Jenny was also positive about the experience, albeit in a more general manner. This was most likely due to her reflexive positioning as an inexperienced teacher with limited capacity to change her teaching practices, augmented in part by my own presence. Subsequent experience, combined with strong mentorship by an experienced WL teacher, could enable Jenny to reposition herself as capable of acting in ways that provide meaningful TL experiences for her students. Overall, stimulated recall can provide opportunity for reflection on WL teacher practice, which in turn could increase the capacity to act in ways that empower teachers to use the TL more frequently. Conclusions, Limitations and Future Research

In this comparative case study of three secondary Spanish teachers, I illuminate the workings of experience, context and interaction, offering new perspectives on how WL teachers perceive their own agency and that of their learners. Combining relevant theories of positioning and performance with an exploration of attitudes and practices, this research offers insights into how teachers perform their agency, as well as how they can reflect on these performances to modify classroom practices around TL use. This research also adds to the body of literature on interviews as a situated practice, reflecting upon the interviewer’s role in participant performances of agency. Though policies favor maximum TL use in the WL classroom, in practice this recommendation is often challenging for teachers. Differing perceptions of agency by WL teachers play a key role in realizing this recommendation. As seen here, teachers’ positioning of students as reluctant or anxious language learners can create a situation in which teachers use the first language to create a more ‘comfortable’ learning environment. However, some WL teachers can both reactively position their students as reluctant and demonstrate agency in their own TL use. Careful reflection on teacher practices through exercises such as stimulated recall might allow WL teachers to explore alternative strategies that empower them to use the TL more often. Moreover, WL teacher histories and experiences with the TL and their own training are highlighted in their reflexive positioning as knowledgeable or inexperienced, which also plays a role in their classroom TL use. Finally, researchers may be positioned by participants as more or less knowledgeable, which in turn may lead participants to express more or less agency, regardless of how their agency is carried out in the classroom. For this reason, triangulation through other sources of data is important to gain a clearer picture of how agency is produced. As a comparative case study of three WL teachers in one region of the United States, this research cannot be generalized to all WL teachers.

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However, it is hoped that these findings will pave the way for additional studies on teacher agency in TL use and other practices in WL education. Though I did use classroom observations to triangulate the inferences gained from the interviews, additional triangulation through interviews with students and/or administrators could shed additional light on these findings. Additionally, more research on student agency in language learning, particularly among students positioned by their teachers as reluctant learners, would add important voices to this conversation. Note (1) I use ‘world language’ rather than the traditional term ‘foreign language’ both to recognize the multilingual, multicultural reality of today’s schools and to index an approach to learning new languages as an important component of global citizenship, rather than something ‘other’ and ‘foreign’.

References Ahearn, L.M. (2001) Language and agency. Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (1), 109–137. American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) (2010) Use of the target language in the classroom. See https​://ww​w.act​fl.or​g/new​s/pos​ition​-stat​ement​s/use​ -the-​targe​t-lan​guage​-the-​class​room (accessed 21 May 2017). Back, M. (2015) Transcultural Performance: Negotiating Globalized Indigenous Identities. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bale, J. (2016) Language proficiency in an era of accountability: Using the target language to learn how to teach. Journal of Teacher Education 67 (5), 392–407. Bauman, R. (1987) The role of performance in the ethnography of speaking. Working Papers and Proceedings of the Centre for Psychosocial Studies 11, 3–12. Byram, M. (2006) Developing a concept of intercultural citizenship. In G. Alred, M. Byram and M. Fleming (eds) Education for Intercultural Citizenship: Concepts and Comparisons (pp. 109–129). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Chen, T.Y. and Chang, G.B. (2004) The relationship between foreign language anxiety and learning difficulties. Foreign Language Annals 37 (2), 279–289. Davies, B. and Harré, R. (1990) Positioning: The discursive production of selves. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 20 (1), 43–63. Ellis, N. and Wulff, S. (2015) Usage-based approaches in second language acquisition. In B. VanPatten and J. Williams (eds) Theories in Second Language Acquisition: An Introduction (2nd edn; pp. 75–93). New York: Routledge. Gass, S.M. and Mackey, A. (2000) Stimulated Recall Methodology in Second Language Research. New York: Routledge. Gibbs, G.R. (2007) Thematic coding and categorizing. In G.R. Gibbs (ed.) Analyzing Qualitative Data (pp. 38–55). London: Sage. Horwitz, E.K. (2000) It ain’t over ’til it’s over: On foreign language anxiety, first language deficits, and the confounding of variables. The Modern Language Journal 84 (2), 256–259. Kang, D.M. (2008) The classroom language use of a Korean elementary school EFL teacher: Another look at TETE. System 36 (2), 214–226. Kayi-Aydar, H. (2015) Teacher agency, positioning, and English language learners: Voices of pre-service classroom teachers. Teaching and Teacher Education 45, 94–103. Kramsch, C. (2011) The symbolic dimensions of the intercultural. Language Teaching 44 (3), 354–367.

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Ladson-Billings, G. (1995) Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal 32 (3), 465–491. Leeman, J. (2015) Heritage language education and identity in the United States. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 35, 100–119. Mackey, A., Oliver, R. and Leeman, J. (2003) Interactional input and the incorporation of feedback: An exploration of NS-NNS and NNS-NNS adult and child dyads. Language Learning 53 (1), 35–66. Talmy, S. (2011) The interview as collaborative achievement: Interaction, identity and ideology in a speech event. Applied Linguistics 32 (1), 25–42. Yin, R.K. (1994) Case Study Research: Design and Methods (2nd edn). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

8 Bi/Multilingual Teachers’ Professional Holistic Lives: Agency to Enact Inquiry-based and Equityoriented Identities across School Contexts Patricia Venegas-Weber

This chapter draws from a larger life history study that focused on the linguistic and cultural trajectories of bi/multilingual elementary school teachers working in different English–Spanish dual language immersion (DLI) schools in a Midwestern city. In this chapter, I focus on the voices and agency of two bi/multilingual teachers: Jennifer, a self-identified Chicana teacher born and raised in East Los Angeles, and María, who was born and raised in a small town in Spain and identifies herself as a Spanish and Valencian speaker. This chapter pays special attention to their reflections and to the nuances of participating and being the bi/ multilingual English or Spanish ‘only’ teacher in critical dialogue with a strict language separation model. I argue that the teachers’ agency, their newly situated understandings and their pedagogical practices allow them to articulate what I have come to call a ‘bi/multilingual pedagogical noticing’, which has shaped their self-reported classroom practices. That is, through inquiry and equitable practices, these two teachers have ‘noticed’ pedagogical resources in themselves, which they purposefully and meticulously leverage within the social context of their classrooms and their schools. This practice (re)shapes teachers and emergent bilinguals’ contexts tied to pedagogical possibilities that further reflect the students’ and teachers’ linguistic, social and cultural resources, practices, identities and life trajectories.

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Introduction

Jennifer:

I feel that there is a feeling in this country, learn English, you are in the United States and if you don’t speak it that is your own fault; there is no compassion. I would say, like, in a broader sense, I feel that that is what the community at large would say and I have noticed many times when I am out with my kids and speaking to them in Spanish, I feel like people look at us, like speak English. I get that feeling, that people do not always welcome hearing another language. Interviewer: How do you react to that? Jennifer: I just speak louder. It doesn’t bother me in the least, but I notice it though. I definitely noticed it though. (27 January 2015) Jennifer’s (pseudonym) personal story depicts the lived experiences of many Latinx1 students and Chicano/a2 teachers like her and highlights the macro-level forces (Douglas Fir Group, 2016), such as ‘English only’ ideologies and social identities that have shaped their bi/multilingual teaching and emotional lived lives. These values and identities are, in part, due to the prevalence of English in the United States (Palmer, 2011; Valdés, 1997), but also to the expectation that here one ‘should’ only speak English. As Jennifer’s action of ‘speaking louder’ reveals her use of the Spanish language, it also reveals her agency to act for herself and for her students against such ideologies in and out of school (Menken & García, 2010). Thus, they pose the need to better understand teachers’ linguistic and cultural resources, and how their positioning as language teachers and learners, as well as their decision-making process within these contexts, take place. This chapter unveils bi/multilingual teachers’ trajectories, identities and linguistic and cultural resources from a holistic perspective. As Hicks (2001: 15) reminds us, peoples’ identities reside ‘in historical and cultural localities, and amid relations with others’. In recent years, in the United States, there has been an increased interest in implementing dual language immersion (DLI) programs in English and Spanish (Center for Applied Linguistics, 2012), based on their supposedly ‘rich promise’ of high academic achievement for dominant speakers of both Spanish and English (Lindholm-Leary, 2005). Gándara (2017) contends that even when emergent bilinguals correspond to an estimated 25% of the school-age population, all children should have access to DLI programs. However, scholars in the field of bilingual education, such as Varghese and Park (2010) among others, have started to problematize these programs, as they might not be providing ‘equal access to educational opportunity for transnational emergent bilingual students’ (Cervantes-Soon et  al., 2017: 403). For example, the English

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language and English speakers are being privileged in DLI programs through a ‘symbolic’ or ‘surface-like integration’ of Anglo and Latinx parents (Muro, 2016: 517), or through the construction of this specific group of students’ successful academic identities (Palmer, 2009). Bi/multilingual teachers in DLI, as ‘crucial agents with power to influence classrooms’ experiences’ (Cervantes-Soon et  al., 2017: 410), are in key positions to facilitate or hinder the integration of English-speaking and Spanish-speaking students as well as to construct their academic identities, particularly for traditionally marginalized emergent bilinguals (Palmer, 2011; Valenzuela, 1999). In other words, these teachers have the chance to purposefully avoid privileging the English language or Englishspeaking students’ linguistic identities within their classrooms. Building on studies of bi/multilingual teachers’ processes of professional identity development (Varghese, 2006), this study focuses on the reflections and agency of two bi/multilingual professionals; one within a school that implemented the DLI program in the whole school and the other that implemented it within a K-2 DLI strand (one class per grade) in the school. These teachers’ agency to counteract, for example, a strict language separation model, brings light to some of the larger sociopolitical and historical contexts embedded within this model, as well as the power of identity and ideology in language learning (De Costa, 2016). This language separation model is commonly used in DLI programs with the intention to protect the minority language for a determined amount of instructional time accomplished by either school days or weeks or by assigning different teachers to different languages by content areas (Howard & Sugarman, 2006). Moreover, this study contributes to holistic approaches to understanding bi/multilingual teachers’ professional identity development through examining these two teachers’ deployment of agency, linguistic identities and their bi/multilingual and bi/multicultural resources. In particular, I argue that these two teachers’ agency, their newly situated understandings of themselves and their pedagogical practices allow them to articulate what I have come to call a ‘bi/multilingual pedagogical noticing’. This ‘pedagogical noticing’ has shaped bi/multilingual teachers’ professional identity, agency and self-reported classroom practices. Through inquiry and equitable practices, these two teachers ‘noticed’ pedagogical resources in themselves, which they purposefully and meticulously leveraged based on their linguistic and cultural identities. In the next section, I begin with a review of the literature, examining theoretical constructs and empirical work that informed this study. Thereafter, I offer a brief description of each participant’s site and methods used in this life history study, followed by an analysis of Jennifer and María’s instances of agency to ‘notice’ pedagogical possibilities that (re)shaped their and their students’ learning contexts. Finally, I conclude with a critical reflection on the possibilities of agency for bi/multilingual

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teachers and discuss the implications of this study for more holistic views of the bi/multilingual development of teachers and students. Bilingual Becoming: Towards Agency and Pedagogical Noticing in Dual Language Immersion Programs

Drawing from a social theory of learning based on the idea of participation in a community of practice (CofP; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998), I conceptualized Jennifer and María’s professional identities as part of being dual language teachers in a DLI school and engaging with different members within a linguistic CofP (Wenger, 1998). Within this framework, bi/multilingual teachers with different levels of development in English or Spanish engage with one another in legitimate participation in a shared practice, a shared repertoire and a joint enterprise (Wenger, 1998). This participation ‘suggests both action and connection among community members’ (Lin, 2014: 255), with implications for members’ professional development. Bi/multilingual teachers’ processes of development have included not only learning a new language, but equally important, time for reflection about values, beliefs and ideologies that have guided their actions and processes of becoming (Flores, 2001; Galindo, 1996, 2007; Guerrero, 1997; Jackson, 2006; Sánchez & Ek, 2009; Varghese, 2000, 2006). Varghese (2006), for example, noted that novice bilingual teachers who participated in a professional development community developed a conflicted sense of their identities, not only influenced by national and local discourses, but also by structural influences within their district. She suggested that the ‘making’ of bi/multilingual professional identities is in the intersection of agentive and structural influences (Varghese, 2006: 211). Indeed, in the United States, bi/multilingual teachers fashion a bi/ multilingual teaching identity within the controversial field of bilingual education (Crawford, 2004; Nieto, 2002; Téllez & Varghese, 2013). In the field of language teacher education (LTE) and applied linguistics, identity has been viewed through poststructural lenses that consider the conflicting power dynamics embedded in the negotiation of one’s identity/subjectivity in relation to others (Norton, 2000). These lenses consider the changing discourses and ideologies affecting identity and second language learning for individuals situated within their social world (Darvin & Norton, 2015; Norton, 2000; Norton & Morgan, 2013). I explored Jennifer and María’s identities, agentive moves and positioning through what Connelly and Clandinin (1999: 2) defined as ‘the stories to live by’, including the discourses and stories that informed their identities. Positioning and Agency

Davies and Harré (1990: 48) define positioning as ‘the discursive process whereby selves are located in conversations as observably and

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subjectively coherent participants in jointly produced story lines’, which, for dual language teachers, has meant being allowed to speak in English or Spanish ‘only’. The DLI language separation model determines when and who should speak what language to whom (García & Sylvan, 2011), and has been questioned for its artificiality in terms of what bi/multilinguals do (Lee et al., 2008). This language separation model subscribes to the notion of dual monolingualism (Fitts, 2006), which does not reflect the linguistic practices and everyday language learning of bi/multilingual speakers. Thus, I was curious to explore Jennifer and María’s social positioning and agency within these spaces. Agency has been associated with the capacity to act purposefully and reflectively in the world (Ahearn, 2001; Davies & Harré, 1990; Gao, 2010; Holland, 2001; Johnson, 2009). Palmer et al.’s (2014) study within this same language model offers a powerful example of this purposeful acting, where their participants, Ms J and Ms T, enacted their agency to become models of dynamic bilingualism within their classrooms. García and Kleifgen (2010: 42) note that dynamic bilingualism highlights ‘the development of different language practices to varying degrees in order to interact with increasingly multilingual communities’. Through these practices, these teachers positioned their students as capable regardless of their language proficiency and celebrated students’ metalinguistic commentaries; how the two languages were similar and different, disregarding the ‘language’ they were supposed to stay in. This agency was also evident in Palmer’s (2009) study, where she demonstrated how important it was for teachers to become aware of the power enacted by English middle-class students over Spanish-speaking students. She concluded that what was most important for teachers was their investing in students’ bilingual identities, rather than enforcing a language separation. Thus, the capacity of humans to assert agency (Holland et al., 1998) within a language separation model, bolsters the argument that bi/multilingual teachers can mediate their pedagogical contexts, regardless of their conflicted working spaces (Palmer & Lynch, 2008). In other words, their agency to position themselves or their students can mediate the linguistic socialization of others (Duff & Doherty, 2014) toward more dynamic and holistic views of bi/multilingual development and identities for all (García & Sylvan, 2011). Methods

Data for this chapter draw from a larger life history study of seven bi/multilingual teachers that took place in Twin Lakes (pseudonym), a Midwestern city with a large research (R1) university. However, for this analysis, I only included two bi/multilingual teachers, Jennifer and María, who were selected for their reputation as master bi/multilingual educators. The city where the study took place has a growing population

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of K-5 Spanish-speaking students, which has given rise to 90/10 DLI programs. This specific type of DLI program model means that both English- and Spanish-speaking students start kindergarten with 90% of their instructional time in Spanish as the target language and 10% in English. These percentages change as students move up in grades (see Baker, 2011). The implementation of these DLI programs started in 2004, when the district opened the first and only K-5 dual language charter school, ‘Escuela de la Comunidad’. Currently, there are eight kindergarten to fifth-grade elementary schools, one third- to fifth-grade elementary school, three sixth- to eighth-grade middle schools and one ninth- to twelfth-grade high school. I conducted a series of three 60–90  minute life history interviews (Cole & Knowles, 2001) with each participant over four months at a location of their choice. The interviews were recorded and later transcribed to capture linguistic and cultural experiences, beginning with teachers’ memories of growing up mono-, bi- or multilingual to their linguistic, cultural and pedagogical trajectories. An important aspect in data analysis in life history research is ‘to honor the richness and complexity of lives lived’ (Cole & Knowles, 2001: 101). Clandinin and Connelly (1995) also suggest that in this type of work, it is important to obtain what they called a participant’s signature. This signature included sharing interview transcripts, analytic memos and the shortened versions of their life histories with the participants. In summary, I first read each interview transcript to gain a deep understanding of each participant’s life history. Then, I coded them according to patterns and themes, such as personal background, educational experiences and teaching trajectories and conducted a thematic analysis of the interview transcripts (WatsonGegeo, 1988). Finally, I drew on contextual information of the teachers’ linguistic communities of practices and examined dimensions of agency, identity, power negotiations and approaches to bilingualism and biliteracy (Cole & Knowles, 2001). Jennifer and Escuela de la Comunidad

At the time of the study, Jennifer was in her early 50s and selfidentified as a Chicana teacher born and raised in East Los Angeles. A simultaneous bilingual, raised in a mainstream American family, she had been speaking and listening to both English and Spanish since birth. Regarding her language background, she explained, ‘My mom did not promote Spanish in our home, but my grandmother and my great aunt spoke in this flowery language about Spanish and about the Mexican heritage in a way that my mom never did’. Her K-12 schooling was all in English and part of her identity was being biracial and not feeling like she fit in. As a student, she was often asked to translate for newcomer students, an experience that was not necessarily affirming of her Spanish

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and English linguistic identities. She obtained a college degree in English. Hoping to take advantage of her bilingual skills, she decided that teaching was something ‘she could do’. Therefore, she went back to school for her bilingual teaching certification and taught at a transitional bilingual3 school in Los Angeles for 10 years. She then moved to the Midwest, to Escuela de la Comunidad, where she had been teaching for over 10 years. At the time of the study, Jennifer was teaching the ‘English’ part of fifth grade and was also a parent of two children, in third and fifth grades. She was a national board-certified teacher in elementary education in English, an advocate and had done numerous leadership trainings for Latinx family groups. María and Roosevelt School

María was in her early 30s and was born and raised in a small town in the south of the Alicante province in Spain. She was a sequential bilingual, who started learning some English as a foreign language in Spain in third grade. I define sequential bilinguals as those bilingual speakers who have developed their second or third language after having developed literacy in their first or dominant language. María grew up learning both Spanish and Valencian in school, but regardless of this academic experience and her constant interaction with the Valencia language, she explained, ‘realmente no me siento, bilingue’. [I do not really feel bilingual.] Similar to Jennifer, María did not have any affirming linguistic identity experiences growing up in both English and Spanish. As a child, she dreamed of becoming a pianist and never thought of being a teacher. She explained, ‘Mi madre me dijo que tenía que estudiar para maestra de música’. [My mother told me I had to study to become a music teacher.] Once she became a certified music teacher in Spain, she taught religion in English and Valencian in fifth grade for two years, music for three years and then all subjects in a 1/2 multiage classroom for three years. At the time of the study, María had since come to the United States and was in her second year as a second-grade DLI teacher at Roosevelt, a K-2 elementary school with a strand-like DLI program. She taught 70% of the content areas in Spanish, science in English, while alternating in English and Spanish for social studies. Findings

The findings show that the bi/multilingual teachers in this study developed robust bi/multilingual identities outside of classrooms and schools, despite how these identities were recognized or incorporated within a K-5 dual language program. For example, Jennifer’s assertion of her Spanish-speaking linguistic identity was enacted with her children by her ‘speaking to them in Spanish’. Even when Jennifer and María did not have bi/multilingual-affirming schooling experiences in Spanish and

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English, their social and literacy practices, enacted in one or the other language or bilingually, affected their bi/multilingual and bi/multicultural identities, which might reflect those of their emergent bilingual students. These two bi/multilingual teachers’ professional becoming was also centered around important critical incidents, events or circumstances in their trajectories of language and cultural learning and development. These experiences were central, not only for capturing the complexity of individual lives, but also for creating counter-spaces and narratives of resistance and marginalization, for agency and for the telling of those experiences (Yosso, 2006). Noticing, ‘a collection of practices designed to sensitize oneself as to notice opportunities in the future in which to act freshly rather than automatically out of habit’ (Mason, 2002: 35), has the ultimate goal of shifting teachers’ attention to substantive aspects of instruction (Sherin et al., 2011). For these two bi/multilingual teachers, this shifting in practices and attention, or what I call a ‘bi/multilingual pedagogical noticing’, stemmed from their own experiences and was directly connected with agency and with a level of consciousness that resulted in implementing new pedagogical strategies in and out of the classroom. This new way can only be reached through a personal development process or that inner monitor nurtured through reflection, will and the reconstruction of incidents. Mason (2011: 36) writes, ‘awakening the witness/monitor is the central aim of the discipline of noticing’. That is, through inquiry and equitable practices, these two teachers ‘noticed’ pedagogical resources in themselves, which they purposefully and meticulously leveraged within the social context of their classrooms and their schools. Jennifer: Agency to enact a pedagogical noticing of the self

Jennifer, as a Chicana, white-Latinx, bilingual student growing up in Los Angeles in the 1970s explained that while her school was not ‘officially’ bilingual, it had a lot of bilingual Latinx students, but only white teachers. For her, school involved constant negotiation of who she was across two worlds. She explained, ‘it was kind of this strange dance for me to kind of try to find my way, navigating between those two worlds that were not many people like me’. For Jennifer, this awareness was directly related to issues of language, race and power, where her linguistic and cultural identity played a key role. She recalled how some Spanish-speaking students made fun of her for not being able to answer them in fluent Spanish. At the same time, she remembered how teachers’ actions contributed to her being socially recognized as a successful student, as a bilingual child and as a smarter student than her peers. Because of her high proficiency language skills, Jennifer was placed, ideologically, at a higher linguistic level and assigned power by her white teachers. She

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explained how teachers often put her next to recently arrived Spanishspeaking immigrant students who did not speak any English to ‘help’ them because she had a ‘good command of both languages’. Jennifer alluded to how such actions and social positioning were also reinforced by her teachers often calling on her to read out loud. As a teacher, Jennifer drew on her experiences to understand how situating a student as a helper of a less proficient language learner or being called often to read out loud could position certain students at a higher level than others. She mentioned that she made a purposeful effort to level language, cultural and racial power dynamics in her classroom. Jennifer noted how these power dynamics could reach beyond language or race into cultural practices that manifest through gender dynamics within her classroom. She specifically described how boys in her classroom did not get away with not doing classrooms chores, as they might at home, where house chores are typically considered to not be part of a more machista Latinx culture. And so she ensured that boys did their fair share of work and had an equal opportunity to participate and learn. In Jennifer’s words: They have to work, all that stuff they get away with at home. They do it here. So, we work very hard to keep gender equity. I have Popsicle sticks with their names and I make sure I call on every kid every day and so everyone is participating, no one is off the hook, no matter in what language we are in.

This excerpt reflects Jennifer’s agency to enact a ‘pedagogical noticing’ that mediated Latinx students’ ‘stuff they get away with at home’ like not cleaning or doing house chores. Moreover, her purposeful use of Popsicle sticks ‘kept gender and language equity’ and created a more just environment for the learning and development of all children. She made sure she called on ‘every kid every day’, ‘no matter what language we are in’, so that all students were intentionally (re)positioned as equal and had a chance to act as language models and learners (Howard & Christian, 2002). Jennifer also explained that while, for some, her purposeful positioning of students with the same rights and responsibilities might look rough, that care and those expectations came from a place of love that resembles Valenzuela’s (1999: 22) notion of ‘authentic caring’. It is an authentic care based on a cultural connection enacted toward their flourishing as human beings. Jennifer said: Si les regaño [If I scold them], they know, Ok, she is doing it because she cares about me and not because she hates me. I don’t know, it is not misinterpreted because we have that cultural connection, which is stronger

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than anything, and I love it and I cherish it, and sometimes I know other teachers say, I can’t believe you are so strict, you know, harsh with them. I think, no, I know I love them, I love them hard and I push them hard, too, but they know I love them. (Interview)

For Jennifer, her agency to leverage her cultural resources with her emergent bilingual students reflected her ability ‘to notice’ and re(shape) her teaching and learning context. She acknowledged that to some other teachers she might look ‘so strict’, but for her, being strict reflected purposeful and authentic caring. She had high expectations for her students, stating that these expectations were part of making linguistic and cultural connections with all of her students enacted within the common values and beliefs of her school. Jennifer also articulated a pedagogical noticing through enacting ideological clarity. Bartolomé (2000: xiii) explains that ideologies are ‘the framework of thought constructed and held by members of society to justify or rationalize an existing social order’. In DLI, these ideologies mediate language learning for emergent bilinguals and their teachers. For example, De Mejía (2002) found that elite bilinguals might not identify themselves with marginalized students. Martínez et al. (2015) found that some bi/multilingual teachers could even echo ideologies of linguistic purism that might emphasize language separation. On the other hand, and in response to these ideologies, Jennifer mentioned: Jennifer:

I feel that is a feeling in this country, learn English, you are in the United States and if you don’t speak it that is your own fault; there is no compassion. I would say, like, in a broader sense, I feel that that is what the community at large would say and I have noticed many times when I am out with my kids and speaking to them in Spanish, I feel like people look at us, like speak English. I get that feeling, that people do not always welcome hearing another language. Interviewer: How do you react to that? Jennifer: I just speak louder, it doesn’t bother me in the least, but I notice it though. I definitely noticed it though. Jennifer’s ‘feeling’ is manifested through her ‘noticing’ of people’s looks when speaking Spanish in public spaces. This noticing has allowed her to name it (Freire, 1970) and to counteract it by enacting her agency to ‘speak louder’. For Bartolomé (2008: xix), this teacher’s naming is part of enacting a political clarity or an ‘ever-deepening consciousness of the sociopolitical and economic realities shaping their lives, as well as their capacity for changing both material and symbolic conditions’. Jennifer’s consciousness and naming of inequalities, as well as her agency in

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enacting change mechanisms that speak to those material and symbolic inequalities – ‘I just speak louder’ – stem from that political clarity, where, for her, ‘You have to have a voice here and if there is something that it doesn’t feel fair to you, you can say something. Yeah! and to disagree, and to call people out’. For Jennifer, political clarity and articulation of a ‘bi/multilingual pedagogical noticing’ to deconstruct power dynamics affecting her, her students and families, in and out of school, are demonstrations of agency. María: Agency to enact a professional identity through equity, learning and self-positioning

Since coming to the United States, María explained, ‘Me he sentido un bicho raro (riéndose)’. [I have felt like a strange creature (laughing).] Such feelings are due to the fact that with a strict language separation, even when María was mostly the ‘Spanish’ teacher in her team, she still had to teach certain subjects in English. This teaching required her to learn new pedagogical approaches in a language about which she felt less confident. For example, she had to read the teaching materials in English, learn the new pedagogical approach and then translate its teaching into Spanish. All of these laborious steps represented challenges for her, but also the chance to improvise, something Holland (2001) encourages us to consider as spaces of agency that might piece together cultural resources when addressing new problems. Linguistic challenges and pedagogical equity

Another critical moment stemmed from María’s ‘noticing’ of some English literacy skills that she never formally developed yet are important when teaching academic content and language. She explained that, in Spain, like in the United States, foreign languages are often taught by teachers with relatively low competencies (Lambert, 1986, as cited in Valdés et al., 2003), and where ‘lo único que hacíamos era copiar verbos irregulares y aprendérnoslos como se escribían. No sabíamos ni pronunciarlos’. [The only thing we did was to copy irregular verbs and learn how they were written. We didn’t even know how to pronounce them.] María, as a Spanish ‘only’ teacher, felt inadequate teaching subjects in English, a language ‘she had never heard’. María’s ‘noticing’ of the specific forms of language she had learned, and her ‘will’ to recognize the ones she had not learned, spoke about her English literacy development or lack thereof, in the context of her teaching academic content in a language that was not her own. She reflected on her recently formed theater group for DLI students in the United States, and how it was not only for them, but it was also helping her with English pronunciation and academic language in English, as she was constantly interacting with students. She explained how, for her, the fact

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that she learned Valencian in the same way she developed her Spanish, by ‘learning vocabulary, grammar, the writing process, etc.’, teaching any subject in Valencian did not represent the same challenge as teaching in English. On the other hand, teaching social studies or science in English was difficult and required a level of English literacy skill she knew she did not possess. She noted, ‘cuando vine aquí, mi nivel de inglés no era tan bueno. Tampoco lo es ahora, y yo me pasó el día hablando en español’. [When I came here my level of English was not that good. It is not good now either and I spend all day speaking in Spanish.] While the awareness of the theater group was important, her lack of literacy acquisition in English and the lack of formal opportunities to improve her English literacy skills made María feel inadequate in teaching English and teaching it using English. Beyond the inability to articulate a more holistic bi/multilingual professional self, María’s ‘noticing’ also spoke about possible difficulties with effective instructional practices such as scaffolding, enunciation, gestures and modeling that scholars have proven to be necessary for students’ English language development (Echevarria et  al., 2008; Krashen, 1985). María’s difficulties also touched upon issues of quality and equity (e.g. Freire, 1970) for Spanish-speaking emergent bilinguals. These issues of quality and equity are embedded in Valdés’ (2009) assertion that teaching English to emergent bilingual students requires a sophisticated understanding of English phonology and grammar that goes well beyond the understanding of parts of speech and how these parts relate to a broader set of cognitive structures. Thus, these challenges illustrate not only the need to consider María in a more holistic way, but also her pedagogical ‘noticing’ in relation to professional development needs tied to her inability of enacting robust forms of language in English or pedagogical practices for her students, as these fell short due to her not having had access to developing the literacy competencies required in the language she needs to teach. Agency to (re)position self

María did not feel like a bi/multilingual person. Even when she taught in both languages, she avoided speaking English. She explained: Cuando tengo que hablar con compañeros que solamente hablan inglés, no tengo ningún tipo de relación… el idioma es un obstáculo. Para mí lo es, porque no me puedo expresar igual, porque no puedo ser yo misma hablando en inglés que hablando en español. [When I have to speak with colleagues who only speak English, I don’t have any type of relationship… the language is an obstacle. It is [an obstacle] for me because I can’t express myself in the same way, because I can’t be myself speaking in English as when speaking in Spanish.]

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Here, María points out how isolating it had been for her as ‘the English language is an obstacle’ and she could not communicate with anyone. This statement brings to light some of the unintended consequences of a strict language separation model and of the prevalent ideology in the United States and the district that privileged María’s perceived ‘good Spanish from Spain’ but ignored the degree to which English was ‘an obstacle’ that materialized across María’s professional duties. She emphasized, ‘aquí no participo en nada, es que no he encontrado aquí mi lugar. Entonces, yo mi vida aquí se limita a trabajar’. [Here I don’t participate in anything, I have not found here my place. So, my life here is limited to working.] She further explained that this feeling was deepened by how those who spoke Spanish were viewed as less. As a bi/multilingual teacher, she understood ideologies that communicated that her linguistic and cultural identity, or in Bourdieu’s (1991) terms, her ‘linguistic capital’, was not valued within American society and in the school culture. She felt that what she had to offer, culturally and pedagogically, was ignored. In her words, ‘se piensan (maestras bilingües americanas) que se lo saben todo […] muchas veces quieren hacer con el español lo mismo que con el inglés y no puede ser, que no es lo mismo. Estamos hablando de dos lenguas completamente distintas’. [They think (English-speaking bi/multilingual teachers) they know it all […] many times they want to do with Spanish the same you do in English and it cannot be. It is not the same. We are talking about two very different languages.] María’s frustration about not even being considered in her linguistic knowledge and opinion about how to teach Spanish was emphasized by her colleagues’ sense of superiority, since ‘They think (English-speaking bi/multilingual teachers) know it all’. Her agency to assert her knowledge later became recognized. She explained: ‘Este año está mucho mejor… siento como que ya he hecho mi espacio aquí, mi hueco aquí, como una persona que tiene una opinión valida muchas veces una opinión buscada por otras compañeras, y eso pues para mi que soy una persona insegura y tímida, me hace como sentirme bien’. [This year it is much better… I feel like I have created my space here, my niche as a person who has a valid opinion, many times sought after by other teachers, and that for me, as an insecure, shy person, it makes me feel better.]

Here, María reflected on how she had enacted her agency and created her space within the school, where she felt like ‘a person who has a valid opinion’ that was ‘sought after by other teachers’. She explained, ‘Mis niños cuando hacen la prueba AIMs web están todos en T1 or T2’. [My students when they do the AIMs web test, they are all in T1 and T2]4 (Interview). For María, this meant that, as a shy person, her agency to

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articulate her pedagogical linguistic resources and holistic professional being came through her students’ high academic performance. Conclusion

Valdés (1997) discusses some of the possible tensions that might surface in DLI programs and affect not only emergent bilingual students, but also their teachers, as the dual language model fits within larger issues associated with language and power. Many social, linguistic, political and ideological factors affected Jennifer and María’s professional identity and agency as bi/multilingual teachers and that revealed some of the broader macro-conditions affecting them and their emergent bilingual students, particularly within linguistic communities in tension such as the DLI program context. For these bi/multilingual teachers, these opportunities and their shifting of attention reflected key bi/multilingual knowledge and metalinguistic language awareness. More critically, their pedagogical approaches were rooted in their awareness of how bi/multilingual speakers learn, in ‘the will’ (Gao, 2010) and in counteracting bi/ multilinguals’ different social and linguistic positioning across linguistic communities. These teachers’ voices, as more robust and holistic bi/multilinguals, allowed them to enact their agency and insert important experiences and the learning they had accumulated into their bi/multilingual teaching. Through political clarity (Bartolomé, 2000), they both ‘noticed’ pedagogical linguistic and cultural resources in themselves and articulated a ‘bi/multilingual pedagogical noticing’ as part of developing and enacting their more holistic bi/multilingual professional identities. While scholars have asserted the need for teachers to develop awareness of the dynamics of positioning (Fitts, 2006; Lee et al., 2011; Palmer, 2008; Wortham, 2006), the question has remained regarding how to help teachers develop this awareness. Within Jennifer and María’s social contexts of bilingual becoming, their positioning (Davies & Harré, 1990), their reflections on their own development, their agency and ‘authentic care’ for their students, as well as their political clarity helped them ‘notice’ opportunities to develop more equity-oriented practices. This bi/multilingual pedagogical noticing mediated linguistic and cultural resources and thus possibilities for themselves and for the flourishing of all their students, but it primarily developed their awareness of the need to attend to issues of equity and holistic bilingual development for their students and for themselves. These teachers’ stories reflected a kind of introspection related to their key interactions with students and colleagues, their intellectual development and their social responsibilities. More importantly, as these teachers told their stories of being, they reflected on who they had become as just and equitably oriented bi/multilingual teachers and learners. Jennifer and

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María’s life stories demonstrate that the work on social justice happens in the detail of practice, in the will of interrogating one’s positioning, in ‘pedagogical noticings’ and in ideological clarity. Taken together, these factors and practices contribute to the development of a more robust, holistic professional identity that embodies and espouses an equityoriented view of teaching for agentive actors. Practices ‘con cariño’ that embrace the voices of all bi/multilingual beings are explicit ways through which Jennifer and María showed their commitment to developing and reflecting about their own bi/multilingualism, bi/multiculturalism and biliteracy to help their students reach the full measure of their humanity and use all their linguistic and cultural resources. The implications of these findings are twofold: bi/multilingual teachers’ limited positioning can be detrimental for leveraging their linguistic and cultural resources and practices and for modeling more robust, holistic, professional identities for their students. At the same time, teachers’ agency to ‘notice’ and capitalize on the resources they have, while acknowledging the areas where they require professional development, can further move the collective ‘bi/multilingual professional noticing’ knowledge and unify professional development efforts toward metalinguistic awareness, and linguistic and cultural knowledge. Notes (1) I have chosen to use the term ‘Latinx’ in an effort to be gender inclusive when referring to teachers of Latin American descent. (2) The term ‘Chicano/a’ is typically associated with the civil rights movement and Chicano activism and it is used in the Southwest. It indicates social identification with indigenous populations from Mexico and those of mixed European and indigenous ancestry, mestizos. Chicano generally refers to US-born Mexican-Americans or those born in the United States of Mexican heritage. (3) A transitional bilingual model has an ‘assimilationist’ approach to bilingual education, whereas language minority students are allowed to use their home language only temporarily, until they transition to English (Baker, 2011: 215). (4) T1, T2, T3 correspond to a multi-tiered system of instruction that provides students with support matched to their needs. Tier 1 represents core instruction, Tier 2 represents targeted or supplemental intervention and Tier 3 represents strategic or intensive intervention.

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García, O. and Sylvan, C.E. (2011) Pedagogies and practices in classrooms: Singularities in pluralities. Modern Language Journal 95, 385–400. Guerrero, M.D. (1997) Spanish academic language proficiency: The case of bilingual education teachers in the US. Bilingual Research Journal 21, 65–84. Hicks, D. (2001) Reading Lives: Working-Class Children and Literacy Learning. New York: Teachers College Press. Holland, D.C. (2001) Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Holland, D., Lachicotte, W., Skinner, D. and Cain, C. (1998) Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Howard, E.R. and Christian, D. (2002) Two-Way Immersion 101: Designing and Implementing a Two-Way Immersion Education Program at the Elementary Level. (Educational Practice Report 9). Santa Cruz, CA: Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence. Howard, E.R. and Sugarman, J. (2006) Realizing the Vision of Two-Way Immersion: Fostering Effective Programs and Classrooms. Crystal Lake, IL: Delta Publishing. Jackson, L.G. (2006) Shaping a borderland professional identity: Funds of knowledge of a bilingual education teacher. Teacher Education and Practice 19 (2), 131–148. Johnson, D.C. (2009) Ethnography of language policy. Language Policy 8 (2), 139–159. Krashen, S.D. (1985) The Input Hypothesis: Issues and Implications. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley Longman Ltd. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, J.S., Hill-Bonnet, L. and Gillispie, J. (2008) Learning in two languages: Interactional spaces for becoming bilingual speakers. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 11 (1), 75–94. Lee, J.S., Hill-Bonnet, L. and Raley, J. (2011) Examining the effects of language brokering on student identities and learning opportunities in dual immersion classrooms. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 10, 306–326. Lin, M.C.A. (2014) Toward a relationship-oriented framework: Revisiting agency by listening to the voices of children. In P. Deters, X. Gao, E. Miller and G. Vitanova (eds) Theorizing and Analyzing Agency in Second Language Learning: Interdisciplinary Approaches (pp. 252–270). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Lindholm-Leary, K.J. (2005) The rich promise of two-way immersion. Educational Leadership 62 (4), 56–59. Martínez, R.A., Hikida, M. and Durán, L. (2015) Unpacking ideologies of linguistic purism: How dual language teachers make sense of everyday translanguaging. International Multilingual Research Journal 9 (1), 26–42. Mason, J. (2002) Researching Your Own Practice: The Discipline of Noticing. New York: Routledge. Mason, J. (2011) Noticing: Roots and branches. In M. Sherin, V. Jacobs and R. Phillip (eds) Mathematics Teacher Noticing: Seeing Through Teachers’ Eyes. Studies in Mathematical Thinking and Learning (pp. 35–50). New York: Routledge. Menken, K. and García, O. (eds) (2010) Negotiating Language Education Policies: Educators as Policymakers. New York: Routledge. Muro, J.A. (2016) ‘Oil and water’? Latino-white relations and symbolic integration in a changing California. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 2 (4), 516–530. Nieto, S. (2002) Language, Culture, and Teaching: Critical Perspectives for a New Century. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. See http:​//sea​rch.e​bscoh​ost.c​om/lo​gin.a​spx?d​ irect​=true​&Auth​Type=​ip,ui​d&db=​nlebk​&AN=6​3479&​site=​ehost​-live​&scop​e=sit​ e (accessed March 2018). Norton, B. (2000) Identity and Language Learning: Social Processes and Educational Practice. London: Longman.

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Norton, B. and Morgan, B. (2013) Poststructuralism. In C. Chapelle (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (pp. 1–6). Malden, MA: Wiley–Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0924. Palmer, D.K. (2008) Building and destroying students’ ‘academic identities’: The power of discourse in a two-way immersion classroom. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 21 (6), 647–667. Palmer, D.K. (2009) Middle-class English speakers in a two-way immersion bilingual classroom: ‘Everybody should be listening to Jonathan right now…’. TESOL Quarterly 43 (2), 177–202. Palmer, D. (2011) The discourse of transition: Teachers’ language ideologies within transitional bilingual education programs. International Multilingual Research Journal 5, 103–122. Palmer, D. and Lynch, A.W. (2008) A bilingual education for a monolingual test? The pressure to prepare for TAKS and its influence on choices for language of instruction in Texas elementary bilingual classrooms. Language Policy 7 (3), 217–235. Palmer, D., Martínez, R.A., Mateus, S.G. and Henderson, K. (2014) Reframing the debate on language separation: Toward a vision for translanguaging pedagogies in the dual language classroom. Modern Language Journal 98, 757–772. Sánchez, P. and Ek, L.D. (2009) Escuchando a las maestras/os: Immigration politics and Latina/o preservice bilingual educators. Bilingual Research Journal 31 (1–2), 271–294. http:​//doi​.org/​10.10​80/15​23588​08026​40722​. Sherin, M., Jacobs, V. and Philipp, R. (eds) (2011) Mathematics Teacher Noticing: Seeing through Teachers’ Eyes. New York: Routledge. Téllez, K. and Varghese, M. (2013) Teachers as intellectuals and advocates: Professional development for bilingual education teachers. Theory into Practice 52, 128–135. http:​ //doi​.org/​10.10​80/00​40584​1.201​3.770​330. Valdés, G. (1997) Dual-language immersion programs: A cautionary note concerning the education of language-minority students. Harvard Educational Review 67 (3), 391–429. Valdés, G. (2009) Commentary: Language, immigration, and the quality of education: Moving toward a broader conversation. In T.G. Wiley, J.S. Lee and R.W. Rumberger (eds) The Education of Language Minority Immigrants in the United States (pp. 295–301). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Valdés, G., González, S.V., García, D.L. and Márquez, P. (2003) Language ideology: The case of Spanish in departments of foreign languages. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 3–26. Valenzuela, A. (1999) Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Varghese, M.M. (2000) Bi/multilingual teachers-in-the-making: Advocates, classroom teachers, and transients. PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania. See http:​ //sea​ rch.p​roque​st.co​m.ezp​roxy.​libra​ry.wi​sc.ed​u/pqd​tglob​al/do​cview​/3046​33576​/abst​ract/​ 157BD​65CE4​BC4E0​5PQ/1​ (accessed March 2018). Varghese, M.M. (2006) Bilingual teachers-in-the-making in Urbantown. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 27 (3), 211–224. Varghese, M.M. and Park, C. (2010) Going global: Can dual-language programs save bilingual education? Journal of Latinos and Education 9 (1), 72–80. Watson-Gegeo, K.A. (1988) Ethnography in ESL: Defining the essentials. TESOL Quarterly 22 (4), 575–592. http://doi.org/10.2307/3587257. Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge/ New York: Cambridge University Press. Wortham, S. (2006) Learning Identity: The Joint Emergence of Social Identification and Academic Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yosso, T.J. (2006) Critical Race Counterstories along the Chicana/Chicano Educational Pipeline. New York: Routledge.

9 English Language Teachers’ Agency and Identity Mediation through Action Research: A Vygotskian Sociocultural Analysis Emily Edwards

The relationship between language teacher agency and identity is emerging as an important area of inquiry and has significant implications for the field of language teacher education. As one example of an inquirybased approach to teacher education, action research (AR) can be an empowering force for teachers to effect democratic pedagogical improvements, but little research has examined the relationship between AR and language teacher agency. Taking a Vygotskian sociocultural perspective and an agency-centered approach to understanding teacher identity, this chapter explores English as a second language (ESL) teachers’ agency and professional identity mediation during and after their participation in an AR program. The qualitative, longitudinal study investigated how participating in a national nine-month AR program mediated the professional identities of experienced in-service ESL teachers in Australia. A series of five in-depth interviews was conducted over 12 months with five teachers during and after their AR participation, and the data were analyzed through a two-level coding process. The next stage of analysis drew on the Vygotskian concepts of ‘tools’ and ‘mediation’ in particular. The AR program provided the teachers with various conceptual and practical tools. Through transformation of these tools for their own purposes, the teachers were able to enact their agency, mediated by their future-oriented visions of self as well as their social, institutional and political environments. Implications of this study include the value of AR as an approach for equipping language teachers with a selection of tools to transform their practices. The findings also suggest that ESL colleges 141

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need to become more conducive to sharing and supporting the benefits of teacher AR in order to better facilitate the emergence of new professional identities and mediate agency. Introduction

The relationship between language teacher agency and identity is emerging as an important area of inquiry (Kayi-Aydar, 2015; Vähäsantanen, 2015; Varghese et  al., 2016) and has significant implications for the field of language teacher education. Teacher education activities such as degree programs and ongoing professional development courses need to assist both pre-service and in-service language teachers in continually negotiating their dynamic professional identities, which are intrinsically connected to the changing pedagogical contexts in which teachers work. Agency is an important aspect of teachers’ professional identities because it allows them to take action in line with their goals for continuous professional development. However, when teachers’ agency is not sufficiently mediated, the impact can be detrimental, for instance leading to burnout and teacher attrition (Trent, 2017). Within the literature on language teacher identity, agency can be understood broadly as the capacity for an individual to act, as connected to and influenced by the individual’s social contexts (Feryok, 2012; Kayi-Aydar, 2015; Tsui, 2007). Indeed, Vähäsantanen (2015: 1) highlights the need for agency to be viewed as ‘both socially and individually resourced’. This chapter takes a sociocultural theoretical approach to agency, and more specific definitions of the central concept of ‘mediated agency’ are provided in the next section. Taking a Vygotskian sociocultural perspective and an agency-centered approach to understanding teacher identity emergence (Vähäsantanen, 2015), in this chapter I explore English as a second language (ESL) teachers’ agency and professional identity mediation during and after their participation in an action research (AR) program. AR is an example of an inquiry-based approach to teacher education and can be an empowering force for teachers to effect democratic pedagogical improvements. As Dikilitaş and Griffiths (2017: 2) propose in their recent practical handbook, AR can liberate teachers ‘with a sense of agency and ownership to deal with their own problems, critical questions, points to improve or puzzles, thereby promoting teacher autonomy’. However, there is limited empirical evidence in the literature detailing how AR mediates teacher agency emergence. The structure of this chapter is as follows. First, I outline the Vygotskian theoretical perspective adopted, specifically the concepts of identity, mediated agency and tools. I then describe the specific teacher education activity at the center of the study, AR, and review the limited literature exploring language teacher agency in the context of AR engagement. Next, I explain the context and research design of the study, before presenting the findings in terms of the tools teachers appropriated from AR, and how these tools were transformed.

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A Vygotskian Sociocultural Framework: Identity and Agency Mediation

From a Vygotskian sociocultural perspective, identity is conceptualized as a sense of ‘self’, which refers to how people perceive themselves, their roles and status and how they think others perceive them: ‘the self is […] an on-going project of establishing one’s place in the world’ (van Lier, 2004: 115). Van Lier (2008: 59) adds that identity can be viewed as a continuous process of aligning and realigning perceptions of self from different sources (yourself, and how others see you), and he also highlights the importance of ‘future-oriented aspects of self’. My conceptualization of identity in this chapter corresponds to Vygotsky’s (1994) work on future-oriented ‘motives’ (motivations for human actions) that drive the interaction between a person’s real (present) form and their ideal (future-oriented) form of self. Agency is central to a teacher’s identity, in that their actions will be aligned to their professional sense of self and visions of their future self, which will guide a teacher in their ongoing development. A Vygotskian conceptualization of agency includes the key notions of tools and mediation. Mediation explains the connection between human development and the sociocultural environment, which is considered the stimulus or the ‘starting point’ (Veresov, 2015: 5) for human development. The sociocultural environments humans live and work in encompass certain ‘artificial [i.e. social or cultural] formations’ (Vygotsky, 1997: 85), which Vygotsky commonly referred to as ‘psychological tools’ or ‘instruments’, and which have also been termed ‘mediating agents’ (Kozulin, 2003: 17). These ‘mediating agents’ facilitate a person’s relationship with the environment, and ultimately contribute to development through the process of internalization. They can be divided into three broad categories: ‘activities’ (such as an organized teacher development activity), ‘artifacts’ (physical and symbolic tools such as texts) and ‘concepts’ (understandings constructed by communities) (Lantolf, 2006). In this chapter, I primarily use the term ‘tools’, referring to the physical and symbolic artifacts that teachers gain from participation in an AR program. Once mediating agents (such as tools) have been internalized or appropriated, they have the power to alter the structure of mental processing and ‘help individuals master their own natural psychological functions of perception, memory, attention and so on’ (Kozulin, 2003: 15–16). Smagorinsky (2011) explains the process of the appropriation of tools as follows: Appropriation refers to the process through which a person […] adopts and modifies the tools available for use in particular social environments and through this process develops ways of thinking endemic to specific cultural practices. (Smagorinsky, 2011: 32–33)

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Smagorinsky also outlines the different levels of appropriation that may be achieved, ranging from a complete lack of appropriation, through to appropriating only the surface features (not the conceptual whole) and at the highest level achieving mastery of the tools. The level of appropriation achieved is influenced by the social context of learning, as well as the individual characteristics of the learner (Smagorinsky, 2011). In addition, Grimmett (2014: 17) describes mediated agency as both the ‘socioculturally mediated awareness’ of the opportunities a person may have to transform their current situation, and the ‘mediated capacity to act, by using cultural resources, in order to actually transcend’ their present position and abilities (emphasis in original). A final but important aspect of mediated agency is the role of power, and the rules that define and constrain the roles of individuals within a system (Lantolf & Genung, 2003). Such rules may govern, for example, the extent that a teacher can appropriate and then transform the tools they appropriate and may result in a redirection of agency if certain restrictions exist within their context. Drawing on the above definitions, in the current study mediated agency is conceptualized as a teacher’s ability to regulate their own activities by reusing, or transforming, the tools (or artifacts) they appropriate from the AR program. Such tools could include the cyclical AR framework (described in the next section), new concepts the teachers gain, data they generate and written texts or projects they develop. The transformation of tools is thus considered central to language teacher agency: their agency is both mediated by the tools and evidenced by their capacity to act in transforming the tools for their own continued development. For example, after completing the AR program, a teacher may appropriate only the surface features of the cyclical AR framework tool or gain full mastery. If the latter, then the teacher may be able to transform the AR framework tool for their own purposes, such as to guide them in systematic reflection on their teaching, or to structure and write a research proposal. Action Research and its Mediation of Teacher Identity and Agency

AR is a form of systematic, inquiry-based professional development that involves a dynamic combination of action and self-reflection focusing on a particular topic, puzzle or issue of interest and importance to a teacher in their given classroom context. The broad aims of AR are to create ‘meaning and understanding in problematic social situations and [improve] the quality of human interactions and practices within those situations’ (Burns, 2005: 57). The processes of conducting AR are generally conceptualized by a cyclical framework that may involve the steps of planning, action (implementing an intervention in the classroom), observation (collecting evidence regarding the intervention’s impact) and reflection (Kemmis & McTaggart, 1988), although these processes are

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frequently quite messy in reality (Burns, 2010). A teacher might explore one topic through several iterative cycles of AR that evolve through reflection and planning based on the findings from a previous cycle. While AR can be conducted by individual teachers working alone, it is often a collaborative process involving pairs or teams of teachers working together, perhaps facilitated by a mentor or an educational organization. In the practice of second language teacher education, AR has become more widespread in the last decade, with programs for English as a foreign language (EFL)/ESL teachers now well established in contexts such as Australia (Burns & Edwards, 2014), Chile (Smith et al., 2014), China (Yuan & Burns, 2017) and the UK (Borg, 2015). There has also been a surge in empirical research exploring the impact of such AR programs on language teachers’ professional development, and the themes of increased teacher autonomy and empowerment have emerged from some of those studies (e.g. Banegas et al., 2013; Wang & Zhang, 2013; Wyatt, 2011). For instance, the teachers in both Banegas et  al.’s (2013) and Wyatt’s (2011) studies were empowered to create more relevant teaching materials, and to use them more creatively in the classroom. In Wang and Zhang’s (2014) study, some of the teachers also developed more autonomy in relation to both teaching and research. However, very few studies have focused specifically on teachers’ agency in connection with their identity emergence from conducting AR. One example is Trent’s (2010) study of six pre-service English language teachers on a bachelor’s course in Hong Kong. Trent found that conducting AR encouraged the teachers to question current educational discourses, to contrast what they perceived of as ‘modern’ with ‘traditional’ teaching and to make commitments to trying ‘modern’ methods (e.g. student centered, using technology) in order to fully engage their students in learning. These emerging identities were also in response to the current educational landscape in Hong Kong and the teachers’ perceived need for change. In a more recent study of in-service teachers, Yuan and Burns (2017) investigated the identity shifts of two Chinese high school EFL teachers as a result of participating in a university–school collaborative AR program. In addition to developing pronounced ‘teacher researcher’ and ‘collaborator’ identities, the teachers also became ‘change agents’ who were able to adjust their own teaching practices and encourage their colleagues to try their ideas. A greater sense of agency thus emerged in their professional practice and also the power to effect change more widely. In the specific context of the current study, an AR program in Australia, my previous work has also identified the empowerment of teachers’ identities as confident professionals, leaders, mentors and awakened teacher-researchers after participating in AR (Edwards & Burns, 2016a, 2016b). The current study adds to this literature base by taking a longitudinal approach to examining how teachers’ professional identities and sense of agency (more specifically) emerged over the course

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of their AR participation and beyond. It is also the only study, to my knowledge, to use a sociocultural ‘mediated agency’ perspective to analyze language teacher agency and identity as mediated by AR. Research Design

In this section, I present the study’s research design, including the research context and participants, and then the data collection and analysis procedures. The research question to be explored was: How does participating in a national nine-month AR program mediate the professional identities and agency of experienced in-service ESL teachers? Research context and participants

The specific teacher education context for this qualitative, longitudinal study was a national, annual nine-month AR program established in Australia in 2010 by peak body English Australia in collaboration with Professor Anne Burns and Cambridge English Language Assessment. ESL teachers working in the English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students (ELICOS) sector in Australia are eligible to submit a voluntary expression of interest in the program, and each year six AR projects are selected and conducted by teachers working either individually or in pairs. Since 2012, a broad theme has been chosen for each annual program (such as ‘reading’ or ‘assessment’) and teachers’ proposals can address any sub-theme that is relevant to their teaching context and current situation. The program incorporates a series of three workshops held in Sydney in March, July/August and September, which set up, facilitate and provide the space for discussion and peer feedback on the teachers’ AR projects. Following the third workshop in September, teachers present their projects at the annual English Australia conference, and they then prepare 3000-word AR reports for submission in November, which are published in the freely accessible journal Cambridge Research Notes the following May. For a more detailed overview of this AR program, see Burns and Edwards (2014). The Australian ELICOS sector is strongly affected by economic and political factors such as changes to government policies regarding student visa requirements, the value of the Australian dollar and global economic trends. These factors all influence student enrolment numbers and require many English language teaching (ELT) institutions to be profit oriented, creating a tension between business and pedagogy, and a reliance on a workforce of casual, short-term teachers (Stanley, 2016). The sociocultural contexts of teachers’ workplaces in terms of the tensions and in particular their employment status may, therefore, play an important role in mediating, restricting or even redirecting the teachers’ agency (Lantolf & Genung, 2003). Against this backdrop, professional development opportunities for teachers can vary considerably between

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institutions, but centralized support is provided by peak body English Australia. The AR program, as one of English Australia’s key professional development provisions, is still a relatively new innovation, and exploring its sustained impact on the sector is the focus of my current research (see Burns & Edwards, 2014; Edwards & Burns, 2016a, 2016b). Five teachers who participated in a recent iteration of the AR program volunteered to participate in the current longitudinal study. Their pseudonyms and years of experience as EFL/ESL teachers are as follows: Alex (1 year), Quinn (5 years), Sarah (10 years), Katie (16 years) and Phoebe (25 years). Quinn is male, and the other teachers are female. Three of the teachers are Australians who had taught EFL overseas as well as ESL in Australia for a number of years, whereas two of the teachers had recently moved to Australia from other countries. While Alex had only been teaching ESL for a year, she had previously taught a different language in high schools, so she had considerable overall teaching experience. Most of the teachers worked in ELICOS colleges affiliated with universities, teaching Academic English programs that led to university admission for international students. The teachers’ specific AR project topics are not mentioned here in order to protect their anonymity since their AR reports are published online, but also because the focus is on their identities and agency in relation to their professional careers more broadly, rather than the specific pedagogical knowledge gained from their projects. Data collection and analysis

This study collected data during and after the AR program in which the five teachers participated. A series of five in-depth interviews were conducted with each of the five teachers over 12 months to align with different stages of the AR process: in March (after the first workshop), in June (during data collection), in September (after their conference presentations), in December (soon after the official end of the program) and in March (four months after the program). The interviews were conducted face to face as far as possible, but sometimes Skype was more convenient due to the long distances between cities in Australia. I designed some general questions for each interview, asking teachers to describe their AR experience to date, how they felt as teachers and/or researchers and whether they experienced any changes in their perceptions of themselves and/or in terms of how others perceived them. I also asked what they believed they had gained from the program, and whether they continued to use these new tools. After each round of interviews, I transcribed the data and conducted one level of inductive in vivo or descriptive coding (following Saldaña, 2013) in order to determine important categories emerging from the teachers’ experiences; I used these categories to form questions for each subsequent interview that were specific to each teacher. This process allowed me to develop detailed profiles of each

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teacher’s identity and agency mediation over the 12 months of data collection. At the end of the 12-month period, I conducted a second round of coding, followed by an analysis drawing on the Vygotskian concept of mediated agency, in particular the reuse (transformation) of tools teachers appeared to have appropriated from the AR program. In the following section, the findings are presented together with data extracts from the interviews, which are labelled with the teachers’ pseudonyms and interview number (1 = March, 2 = June, 3 = September, 4 = December and 5 = March the following year). Findings

For each of the five teachers, new professional identities emerged over the course of the 12-month study, as mediated by their experiences of the AR program as well as the sociocultural environments of their workplaces. Table 9.1 shows the teachers’ ‘future self goals’, which were explicitly stated in the first interviews when I asked about their motivations for joining the AR program and their future visions of themselves. The teachers’ emerging professional identities were identified from coded data from the third, fourth and fifth interviews. Table 9.1 is a point of reference for the subsequent analysis of mediated agency, which teases out complexities in the relationships between teacher agency and identity. Participating in the AR program seemed to provide the teachers with various tools, which served to mediate their agency and professional identities in myriad ways. These tools included ‘conceptual tools’ such as new theories about teaching arising from their AR projects, or the validation of a research gap in the literature. Another type of tool identified was ‘practical tools’, including the teachers’ AR project findings, materials created through their AR interventions, the AR framework (planning, acting, observing, reflecting) and data collection skills. Some of the tools Table 9.1  Teachers’ future self goals and emerging professional identities (sense of self) from the AR program Teacher

Future self goals

Emerging professional identities mediated by the AR program

Alex

To continually develop as a teacher and expert in her area

Becoming a go-to person and developing ‘maturity as a teacher’

Quinn

To become a more theoretically informed teacher

‘Teacher AND researcher’, able to ‘contribute to colleagues within the industry’ ‘Burnt-out’ but ‘more explicit teacher’

Sarah

To continually develop in her career

Katie

To become a recognized and valued ‘An extra-terrestrial researcher’ teacher-researcher

Phoebe

To be a confident leader and contributor

Note: Use of ‘quotes’ indicates in vivo labels.

‘Kick-started’ into conference engagement, and a community-focused teacher

English Language Teachers’ Agency and Identity Mediation through Action Research  149

teachers appropriated from the AR program were then transformed. I have categorized these transformations according to three domains of reuse of the teachers’ AR tools: (1) materials and curriculum development, (2) systematic teaching and research and (3) further presentations or publications. The following descriptions are structured around the domains of tool reuse to describe each teacher’s agency mediation as a result of their AR participation. Each section includes a table summarizing each teacher’s appropriation and transformation of the tool, and how that transformation was mediated by the teacher’s future self goal and by the sociocultural environment of the ELICOS college where they were employed. Materials and curriculum development

As the analysis in Table  9.2 shows, there was evidence of Alex, Quinn, Katie and Phoebe all appropriating the practical tool of their AR materials, and being aware of how they could be transformed for materials and curriculum development within their colleges. However, only Alex was specifically asked by the leaders at her college to continue developing the materials she initially created for her AR project in order to integrate them more widely into her college’s curricula. This outcome greatly enhanced her status at the college, which shifted from ‘newbie’ (Alex, Interview 1) before commencing the AR program to a ‘go-to person’ afterward. She found her new go-to person identity quite surprising Table 9.2  Analysis of agency mediation for the practical tool of AR materials developed Teacher

Tool appropriated?

Tool transformed?

Mediation through Mediation or restriction future self goal through sociocultural environment

Alex

Yes

Yes: New collegewide materials created

Yes: To continually develop as a teacher and expert in her area

Mediation: Asked by college leaders to continue developing AR materials for collegewide use

Quinn

Yes

In progress: Encouraging voluntary adoption of materials

Yes: To become a more theoretically informed teacher

Restriction: Limited time and resources at this college

Sarah

No evidence

No evidence

No

Restriction: Lack of support from AR partner and lack of interest from colleagues

Katie

Yes

No evidence

No (but potential existed)

Restriction: Lack of interest from managers and colleagues

Phoebe

Yes

In progress: Optional Yes: To be a materials created confident leader and contributor

Mediation: Position as program coordinator and permanent teacher

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but gratifying, as she received more and more frequent questions from colleagues relating to her AR materials. Alex’s supportive sociocultural context, including managers who quickly identified the value of her AR materials, mediated the emergence of her agency through the transformation of her materials for college-wide use, in line with Alex’s future self goal to continually develop, and assisted the development of her ‘maturity as a teacher’ identity (Alex, Interview 5). However, Quinn, Sarah, Katie and Phoebe all experienced more restrictions than mediation from their sociocultural (college) environments in terms of the transformation of their AR materials. For instance, Quinn had been told by his managers that limited time and teacher training resources available restricted the extent that his materials could be used by the whole college, but he believed that he should take the initiative to continually ‘try and push it a bit more’ (Quinn, Interview 5). He also planned to create a video for his college, explaining his AR project, his newly developed activities and how teachers could implement them, in order to encourage voluntary adoption of the materials. These actions were in line with his future self goal of becoming a more theoretically informed teacher: ‘Action research is part of delving more into the theories behind what I’m doing’ (Quinn, Interview  1). Like Quinn, Phoebe was also unable to make formal changes to her college curriculum, but she resisted the restrictions creatively, perhaps because of her position of relative power (discussed below). Phoebe found a way of gradually incorporating her new AR materials as supplementary lesson tasks for teachers who wished to diverge slightly from the set curriculum or to be used when students were repeating a level. Whereas at the start of the AR program, Phoebe had been reluctant to share materials she had created, one year later her reluctance had been replaced with confidence and enthusiasm in line with her future self goal of confident leader: ‘now you can’t stop me [developing new materials], it’s a flood’ (Phoebe, Interview 5). A key reason why Phoebe was able to enact her agency in this way was her position as a program coordinator and permanent teacher; thus, the importance of power emerges (Lantolf & Genung, 2003). Phoebe’s coordinator role involved some materials development, and having worked at her college for over a decade, she had a certain degree of authority to successfully and creatively resist the (perceived) inflexible curriculum. On the other hand, Quinn had relatively less power in his college, as a sessional teacher employed on separate 10-week contracts, so his relative lack of status perhaps contributed to some of the difficulty he experienced in pushing for curricular integration of his AR materials. Katie held a similar employment status to Quinn in her workplace, and although she attempted to engage colleagues and managers in the online platform and resources she had created for her AR project, it was to no avail. Due to a lack of interest in her materials from anyone within her college, she became frustrated, and eventually dispirited about the potential

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transformation of her AR materials: ‘Because it’s not worth it. Because it’s a lot of hard work and nobody cares, nobody was paying attention, it was as if nothing has happened, frustrating’ (Katie, Interview 3). Katie’s agency was necessarily redirected toward the reuse of other tools (see domains [2] and [3]). Quinn and Katie’s experiences reflect the key tension of workforce casualization within ELICOS (Stanley, 2016) and perhaps more broadly within ELT, which can ultimately lead to a loss of teachers’ power and thus less potential for agency mediation. Sarah was the only teacher of the five who appeared not to have appropriated the tool of her AR materials. A lack of mediation from her college environment, including little assistance from her AR partner (due to health and other commitments) and no apparent interest from her colleagues perpetuated to lead to her losing confidence in her project: Ours wasn’t as innovative as the others [other AR program projects], and yes we had the technology, but ours was just a re-hash of what’s been done before […] I suppose if I’d had a different partner […] we could have come up with some alternatives. (Sarah, Interview 3)

Like Phoebe, Sarah held a relatively powerful position within her college as a coordinator, and she certainly seemed to have a good relationship with her managers. However, while they valued Sarah’s project, the managers did little to promote her AR materials or ideas within the college, which highlights the importance of principals and managers in mediating the transformation of tools appropriated from an AR program, and their position of power regarding language teacher agency. Another reason why Sarah seemed unable to transform this tool relates to her future self goal of continually developing in her career, especially in quite a competitive way. She felt that she had not received sufficient recognition after completing the AR program: ‘some sort of […] a certificate, an announcement [at a staff meeting] would’ve been nice, a $50 voucher or anything, just a symbol really’ (Sarah, Interview  4). Consequently, her perception of her AR project not being innovative or recognized meant that her AR materials lost their usefulness, from her perspective, in advancing her learning and career. Systematic teaching and research

The analysis in Table 9.3 shows that both Alex and Quinn were able to transform the practical tool of the AR framework for their own systematic teaching or informal classroom research. Four months after the AR program had ended, they had both commenced subsequent informal AR projects. Alex was working together with a colleague, and Quinn independently to assist his own teaching: ‘I’m using action research techniques in my day-to-day classroom and in planning and analyzing the lessons that I’m teaching. […] It seemed natural to use those [AR] tools’ (Quinn,

Yes: AR framework

No evidence

Yes: Theoretical ideas and gap Yes: Informing future research in the literature proposal, gained master’s scholarship

Yes: AR framework

Quinn

Sarah

Katie

Phoebe

Not yet

No evidence

Yes: Conducting AR in own teaching

Yes: Conducting another AR project with colleague

Yes: AR framework

Alex

Tool transformed?

Tool appropriated?

Teacher

Mediation or restriction through sociocultural environment

No

Yes: To become a recognized and valued teacher-researcher

No

Yes: To become a more theoretically informed teacher

Mediation: Developing AR culture in her college, some interest from colleagues

Restriction: Lack of interest from managers and colleagues in her research

Restriction: Lack of support from AR partner and lack of interest from colleagues

Mediation: Free to use AR framework to inform his own classroom teaching

Yes: To continually develop as a teacher Mediation: AR culture developing in and expert in her area her college, colleagues interested in conducting AR projects

Mediation through future self goal

Table 9.3  Analysis of agency mediation for the practical tool of the AR framework and the conceptual tool of theoretical ideas from AR

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Interview 5). For Quinn, the AR framework seemed to be especially well aligned with his future self goal of theoretically informed but practical teacher, hence his immediate reuse of the framework for his own teaching. Alex’s commencement of another AR project quite soon after completing the formal AR program was mediated firstly by her future self goal driving her to be a continually developing teacher. In a similar way to Sarah, Alex wanted to ensure she was always learning, but in a less competitive way than Sarah. In particular, Alex was keen to avoid a strong negative identity she imagined might emerge if she stopped learning: ‘If you don’t continue challenging yourself, you become one of those old, bitter, stuck in their ways teachers, and that’s always something that I’ve been very scared of becoming’ (Alex, Interview  1). A second form of mediation came from an AR culture that had started to develop at Alex’s college, where most of the teachers had conducted small-scale AR projects in the same year as her program participation. This culture provided a supportive, AR-focused, sociocultural environment that mediated Alex’s agency and identity emergence. In our final interview, Alex described herself as progressing steadily in her career, despite being relatively new to ELICOS, and that the AR framework had become part of her professional identity: I think that [AR] is now part of my personality as a teacher. I don’t think, hopefully I’ll never lose it, I don’t think I could because it’s a way of thinking about your own teaching now that’s part of who I am as a teacher. (Alex, Interview 5)

In addition, as Table  9.3 shows, Katie was able to transform the conceptual tool of theoretical ideas she learned while conducting AR for her own purpose, aligned with her future self goal of becoming a recognized teacher-researcher, and a career goal of becoming an academic one day. She believed that her AR project had ‘opened doors’ (Katie, Interview 2) for her career, as she had written a future research proposal and gained a scholarship for a master’s degree before finishing the AR program. She explained that her AR project had allowed her to verify a gap in the research that she wanted to pursue further. Sarah’s experience again revealed no evidence of tool transformation, with restrictions present in her context and a lack of alignment with her future self goal. Similarly, Phoebe did not appear to have transformed either the AR framework or theoretical ideas from the program, but she did seem to have abundant energy and a desire to develop herself further: ‘[I’ve] got all this energy and now it’s like well where to next?’ (Phoebe, Interview 4). This quote indicates that perhaps given more time, there would be potential for Phoebe to transform these tools, especially because she worked in a mediating sociocultural environment where an AR culture was developing, like in Alex’s college.

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Further presentations or publications

In addition to presenting their AR projects at the English Australia conference and publishing their Research Notes reports, which are part of the program, four of the five teachers were able to reuse the practical tool of project findings for further dissemination. This analysis is demonstrated in Table 9.4. Alex, Quinn, Katie and Phoebe all reported having presented their findings again at local workshops as well as national and international conferences, demonstrating the relative ease of transforming AR project findings for further presentation and publication. The format of further dissemination generally aligned with each teacher’s future self goal. For example, Quinn created and presented a poster using his AR findings for a forum at the university with which his ELICOS college was affiliated. This action helped him feel a greater sense of connection between theory and practice (his future self goal), through the university valuing his research, which also supported his emerging identity of a ‘teacher AND researcher’ (Quinn, Interview 4) as well as feeling ‘like I’ve got something to say or contribute to colleagues within the industry’ (Quinn, Interview  5). In addition, Katie presented her AR findings at an international conference a few months after the AR program had ended, driven by her future self goal of being recognized as a teacher-researcher, and her career goal of becoming a university academic in the future: ‘my ultimate goal is to become a lecturer in the future, that’s what I want to do’ (Katie, Interview 5). Although Katie felt alienated from her managers and colleagues by the time the AR program Table 9.4  Analysis of agency mediation for the practical tool of the AR project findings Teacher Tool appropriated?

Tool transformed?

Mediation through future self goal

Mediation or restriction through sociocultural environment

Alex

Yes

Yes: Presented at local conference

Yes: To continually develop as a teacher and expert in her area

Mediation: AR culture at college which encouraged sharing of AR ideas

Quinn

Yes

Yes: Presented Yes: To become a poster at local more theoretically university forum informed teacher

Mediation: Opportunity to present at a nearby university forum, which was encouraged by his college

Sarah

No

No

No

Restriction: Lack of support from AR partner and lack of interest from colleagues

Katie

Yes

Yes: Presented at international conference

Yes: To become a university academic

Restriction: Alienated from colleagues and managers in her college due to lack of interest

Phoebe Yes

Yes: Conference Yes: To be a engagement and confident leader presentations and contributor

Mediation: Encouragement and funding from her college

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had ended, due to their dismissal of her research, she was spurred on by the prospect of shifting to a new career path. Therefore, the restrictions in Katie’s sociocultural environment seemed to lead to a redirection of her agency toward a different career path, rather than remaining as an ELICOS teacher. Phoebe’s transformation of tools related to conference going was also quite profound. Despite having taught EFL/ESL for 25 years and previously attending conferences, the English Australia conference was the first event at which Phoebe presented her own research. The experience ignited an intense interest and sense of purpose for Phoebe: she described it as ‘kick-starting’ her into thinking about the possibilities of attending more conferences and the benefits she could gain both from watching other teachers present and from feeling part of a supportive conference community. Phoebe explained her excitement at the English Australia conference as follows: We did not leave the building […] we were just going to everything (laughing), getting everything. I came back on the plane loaded with sample bags, it was so exciting, like a child in a lolly shop. And then, because of that I decided ‘I’ve got to get to [name of next conference], how do I get to [next conference]?’ (Phoebe, Interview 4)

Therefore, Phoebe was able to transform the practical tool of her AR findings to attend and present at future conferences, assimilating into a new conference-goers community. Unlike Quinn and Katie, her actual AR findings seemed to be of secondary importance but provided the springboard for mediating her agency toward her new communityfocused professional identity. Given her considerable teaching experience, part of Phoebe’s motivation was to give back through mentoring and supporting other teachers who were presenting, which added an extra dimension of purpose to her teaching career. As was the case for domains (1) and (2), Sarah had not been able to transform the tool of her AR findings either. Reasons for this lack of transformation included restrictions within her sociocultural environment, her doubts about the validity of her project and therefore her belief that her AR project would not assist her toward her goal of continually developing. Overall, Sarah seemed to feel stuck even in her final interview six months after the end of the AR program, when she described herself as being in a ‘tunnel’: I’m just wondering what else I would use my action research for. It just seems to be sitting there and […] it’s not doing anything. […] I probably haven’t quite come out the other end yet of the tunnel to sort of go ‘okay, well how can I implement it [her AR findings]?’ (Sarah, Interview 5)

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Sarah’s experiences serve as a reminder of how a tool-rich activity such as an AR program will not be able to mediate every teacher’s agency and identity emergence. Under certain conditions, which will be discussed below, excessive restrictions may exist within the sociocultural environment. However, there are also implications for optimizing the environment, which I outline in the final section. Theoretical Discussion

This chapter makes a contribution to the literature by, first of all, suggesting that an AR program may provide an especially rich teacher education environment for practical tool provision. The tools appropriated by the teachers from this Australian AR program were multifaceted and included conceptual tools (such as new theories) and practical tools (such as the AR findings and materials, and the AR framework itself). This provision of tools in turn offers significant opportunities for teachers’ mediated agency development through tool transformation. Overall, four of the five teachers (Alex, Quinn, Katie and Phoebe) experienced considerable success in transforming their AR tools for their own purposes. In addition, this study offers theoretical insights in terms of three key aspects that can mediate or restrict language teacher agency and the transformation of tools. Teachers’ success in experiencing mediated agency through the transformation of tools appropriated from teacher education activities may depend on (1) their future self goals at the time of the activity, (2) their domain of tool reuse and (3) any major mediational means or restrictions in their environments. Firstly, if the potential reuse of appropriated tools aligns with a teacher’s future self goals in terms of their ideal (final) forms of self (Vygotsky, 1994), then these goals play a crucial role in mediating agency. For three of the teachers in the current study, their agency was successfully directed toward their future self goals, mediating the transformation of tools and facilitating the emergence of professional identities such as a mature, expert teacher (Alex), an established teacher-researcher (Quinn) and contributors to the community (Quinn and Phoebe). These findings draw parallels with other studies exploring identity emergence through AR, notably the reflective teacher-researchers in Yuan and Burns (2017) and the creative materials developers in Banegas et al. (2013). A new understanding from the current study is the need for alignment between identity goals and the ways AR tools can be transformed. This insight adds to the work of Kubanyiova (2012) on ‘possible language teacher selves’, which suggests that for conceptual development to occur through teacher education, teachers need to have strong visions of their ideal selves, but also to understand how to pursue their ideal selves through the teacher education activity. The current study shows how the future or ideal self

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concept can be applied to an AR context, in which AR tools provide a particularly powerful means for teachers to pursue their ideal selves. Secondly, the domain of tool transformation plays an important role in the mediation of teachers’ agency. While most of the teachers effectively reapplied their AR tools to their teaching, informal classroom research and further presentations and publications, it was more difficult to enact their agency in relation to the transformation of teaching materials and curricula, which were viewed as quite inflexible in this ELICOS context. Phoebe succeeded by using creative means in her position of relative power, and Quinn demonstrated considerable effort in this domain, but had yet to succeed by the time of his final interview. Katie’s attempts within the domain of materials development failed, showing that a teacher’s status and power within their institution also mediate or restrict their agency. Finding ways to navigate issues of power and status within ELICOS and ELT (Stanley, 2016) in relation to the domain of tool reuse is therefore an important way forward. This study also shows that if agency cannot be socially resourced from a teacher’s institutional environment due to restrictions such as a lack of support, collegial interest, time or resources, then it is possible for agency to be redirected in line with a new identity goal. In Katie’s case, her agency was gradually redirected from her goal of being a recognized teacher-researcher within ELICOS, to a desire to eventually leave the sector and move into academia. However, if agency cannot be either individually or socially resourced, then it is likely to be partially or fully restricted. Such restriction can lead to the teacher feeling frustrated and limited, with no options available to reuse their AR tools. Conclusions and Implications

The analysis in this chapter has demonstrated the value of AR as an approach for equipping language teachers with a selection of tools to mediate their agency. The study contributes to the theorizing of language teacher agency by explaining, from a Vygotskian sociocultural perspective, how AR tools can mediate teacher agency and identity emergence. Teachers’ future self goals may be particularly important in this process of mediation. Therefore, it might be useful for teachers to reflect on their future self goals before conducting AR to assess whether these goals align with the practical and conceptual tools they are likely to gain, and the potential reuse of these tools. The findings also highlight the importance of sociocultural environments in mediating teachers’ agency and identities. When these environments are too restrictive and no support or interest from colleagues is present, teachers may feel frustrated, isolated and undervalued, which can severely affect their professional identities. Indeed, as Eun (2008: 150) argues, in order to ensure the sustainability of professional development

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after an activity or program, ‘the school context has to be transformed to be compatible with the teachers’ efforts at implementing what they have acquired from their professional experiences’. Within the Australian ELICOS context, it appears that there is potential for greater compatibility in some colleges. Teachers need to feel that their newly negotiated researcher identities are accepted and recognized, and that workplaces are conducive to sharing and supporting the benefits of teacher AR. Managers and principals seem to play an important role in creating such conditions and mediating teachers’ agency and identity after their participation in AR; therefore, the mediating contributions of educational leaders would be a fruitful area for further agency research. References Banegas, D., Pavese, A., Velázquez, A. and Vélez, S.M. (2013) Teacher professional development through collaborative action research: Impact on foreign English-language teaching and learning. Educational Action Research 21 (2), 185–201. Borg, S. (2015) Professional development through the Cambridge English/English UK Action Research Scheme. Cambridge English: Research Notes 61, 3–5. Burns, A. (2005) Action research: An evolving paradigm? Language Teaching 38 (2), 57–74. Burns, A. (2010) Doing Action Research in English Language Teaching: A Guide for Practitioners. New York: Routledge. Burns, A. and Edwards, E. (2014) Introducing innovation through action research in a national programme: Experiences and insights. In D. Hayes (ed.) Innovations in the Continuing Professional Development of English Language Teachers (pp. 65–88). London: British Council. Dikilitaş, K. and Griffiths, C. (2017) Developing Language Teacher Autonomy through Action Research. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Edwards, E. and Burns, A. (2016a) Language teacher action research: Achieving sustainability. ELT Journal 70 (1), 6–15. Edwards, E. and Burns, A. (2016b) Language teacher researcher identity negotiation: An ecological perspective. TESOL Quarterly 50 (3), 735–745. Eun, N. (2008) Making connections: Grounding professional development in the developmental theories of Vygotsky. The Teacher Educator 43 (2), 134–155. Feryok, A. (2012) Activity theory and language teacher agency. The Modern Language Journal 96 (1), 95–107. Grimmett, H. (2014) The Practice of Teachers’ Professional Development: A CulturalHistorical Approach. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Kayi-Aydar, H. (2015) Multiple identities, negotiations and agency across time and space: A narrative inquiry of a foreign language teacher candidate. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 12 (2), 137–160. Kemmis, S. and McTaggart, R. (eds) (1988) The Action Research Planner (3rd edn). Geelong, Victoria: Deakin University Press. Kozulin, A. (2003) Psychological tools and mediated learning. In A. Kozulin, B. Gindis, V.S. Ageyev and S.M. Miller (eds) Vygotsky’s Educational Theory in Cultural Context (pp. 15–38). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kubanyiova, M. (2012) Teacher Development in Action: Understanding Language Teachers’ Conceptual Change. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lantolf, J.P. (2006) Sociocultural theory and L2: State of the art. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 28 (1), 67–109.

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Lantolf, J.P. and Genung, P. (2003) ‘I’d rather switch than fight’: An activity theoretic study of power, success and failure in a foreign language classroom. In C. Kramsch (ed.) Language Acquisition and Language Socialization: Ecological Perspectives (pp. 175–196). London/New York: Continuum. Saldaña, J. (2013) The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Smagorinsky, P. (2011) Vygotsky and Literacy Research: A Methodological Framework. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Smith, R., Connelly, T. and Rebolledo, P. (2014) Teacher-research as continuing professional development: A project with Chilean secondary school teachers. In D. Hayes (ed.) Innovations in the Continuing Professional Development of English Language Teachers (pp. 115–117). London: British Council. Stanley, P. (2016) Economy class? Lived experiences and career trajectories of privatesector English-language school teachers in Australia. In P. Haworth and C. Craig (eds) The Career Trajectories of English Language Teachers (pp. 185–200). Oxford: Symposium Books. Trent, J. (2010) Teacher education as identity construction: Insights from action research. Journal of Education for Teaching: International Research and Pedagogy 36 (2), 153–168. Trent, J. (2017) Discourse, agency and teacher attrition: Exploring stories to leave by amongst former early career English language teachers in Hong Kong. Research Papers in Education 32 (1), 84–105. Tsui, A.B.M. (2007) Complexities of identity formation: A narrative enquiry of an EFL teacher. TESOL Quarterly 41 (4), 657–680. Vähäsantanen, K. (2015) Professional agency in the stream of change: Understanding educational change and teachers’ professional identities. Teaching and Teacher Education 47, 1–12. van Lier, L. (2004) The Ecology and Semiotics of Language Learning: A Sociocultural Perspective. Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers. van Lier, L. (2008) The ecology of language learning and sociocultural theory. In A. Creese, P. Martin and N.H. Hornberger (eds) Encyclopedia of Language and Education: Ecology of Language (Vol. 9, 2nd edn; pp. 53–65). New York: Springer. Varghese, M.M., Motha, S., Park, G., Reeves, J. and Trent, J. (2016) In this issue. TESOL Quarterly 50 (3), 545–571. Veresov, N. (2015) Human emotions, perezhivanie, and cultural development: Unfinished project of Lev Vygotsky. In C. Moro and N. Muller-Mirza (eds) Semiotique, Culture et Developpement Psychologique (pp. 209–235). Paris: Peptentrion. Vygotsky, L.S. (1994) The problem of the environment. In R. van der Veer and J. Valsiner (eds) The Vygotsky Reader (pp. 338–354). Oxford: Blackwell. (Original work published 1935.) Vygotsky, L.S. (1997) The instrumental method in psychology. In R.W. Rieber (ed.) The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky: Problems of the Theory and History of Psychology (Vol. 3; pp. 85–89). New York: Springer. Wang, Q. and Zhang, H. (2014) Promoting teacher autonomy through university-school collaborative action research. Language Teaching Research 1 (2), 222–241. Wyatt, M. (2011) Teachers researching their own practice. ELT Journal 65 (4), 417–425. Yuan, R. and Burns, A. (2017) Teacher identity development through action research: A Chinese experience. Teachers and Teaching 23 (6), 729–749.

10 Problematizing English Language Teaching in China through a Local Chinese English Teacher Agency Lens Wenjing Li and Peter De Costa

In line with Kumaravadivelu’s (2003, 2012, 2016) call to initiate a postmethod and bottom-up approach to English language teaching (ELT), we argue for a need to restore teacher agency and recognize the value of teacher expertise developed through locally situated practice (Canagarajah, 2012). Specifically, our case study traces the practices of our Chinese teacher participant, Mr Ding, (1) from an ecological approach to teacher agency (Douglas Fir Group, 2016; Priestley et al., 2015) and (2) through the lens of Kumaravadivelu’s (2012) postmethod pedagogy. Mr Ding provided private English teaching lessons to high school students at his home in the capital city of a midland province in China. Data sources include classroom observations of his teaching, interviews with him and his writings in blogs. Our findings revealed that Mr Ding’s enactment of teacher agency was a result of negotiation with contextual constraints and resources. This exercise of agency was manifested in two ways. First, he identified himself as a ‘rule-breaker’ who survived and successfully navigated the institutional structure in China by creating his own approach to teaching English, which was well received by his students and their parents. Second, he actively advocated ‘Deaf-and-dumb English’ (Tsui, 2007), and placed strong emphasis on English reading skills for the purpose of developing learner autonomy so that his students could become strategic readers in a globalized society. The chapter closes with implications for teaching. Introduction

Ever since the implementation of the open door policy in the late 1970s, China has witnessed an exponential increase in English language learners (Gu, 2010; Hu & McKay, 2012). As a global lingua franca, 160

Problematizing ELT in China through the Lens of Teacher Agency  161

English provides access to worldwide communication and is closely related to economic affluence, cosmopolitanism and power (Molina, 2016). In order to develop effective communication skills that are essential in an increasingly globalized world (Kumaravadivelu, 2016), communicative language teaching (CLT) has been widely adopted in Chinese schools and colleges since the 1980s (Yu, 2001). The implementation of CLT, however, has not yielded the desired results (Tsui, 2007). Luo (2007), for example, pointed out that teachers in several big Chinese cities usually mixed CLT with other traditional teaching methods. By contrast, in rural areas, traditional teaching approaches (e.g. the grammar-­ translation approach) have dominated mainstream English classrooms. Commonly reported difficulties in implementing the CLT include teachers’ English deficiencies in speaking skills, learners’ limited language proficiency and local teaching contextual constraints, such as large class size and grammar-focused assessment (Zhang & Liu, 2014). Furthermore, there have been mounting concerns about the notion of a universal method that is applicable to all language classrooms (Hall, 2016; Thornbury, 2016). There have been emphatic calls to grant teachers the authority to make pedagogical decisions informed by their local culture and their own classroom realities (Canagarajah, 2012; Kumaravadivelu, 2012). This increasing focus on teacher agency entails (re)constructing the teacher’s role as a decision-maker and even policymaker in the classroom (Crandall & Bailey, 2018; Menken & García, 2010). Similarly, Kumaravadivelu (2003, 2006, 2012) has called for teachers to theorize their own practices and draw on their localized knowledge instead of adopting a ‘one-size-fits-all’ teaching approach. In light of this need to recognize the expertise of language teaching professionals, this chapter traces a local Chinese English teacher’s pedagogical practice and examines how he realized agency while making learning English relevant for his students. Literature Review Teacher agency

Interest in teacher agency research has gained momentum in teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL; see Eteläpelto et al. [2013] for a comprehensive review). Studies have explored teacher agency from various perspectives that include the exercise of teachers’ professional agency in relation to teachers’ professional identity (Kayi-Aydar, 2015; Li & De Costa, 2017), beliefs (Biesta et  al., 2015), professional development (Tao & Gao, 2017) and education reforms (Vähäsantanen, 2015). However, the conceptualization of teacher agency varies across studies. Priestley et  al. (2015) identified three main conceptualizations of agency in the current literature: (1) positioning agency as personal attributes that individuals possess to varying degrees, while ignoring the impact of social contexts and structure; (2) seeing agency as capacity

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that is mediated by the interaction between personal efforts and social forces; and (3) understanding agency as actions that are influenced by their environment. This third conceptualization of agency, according to Priestley et al. (2015), provides a comprehensive understanding of agency that underscores the interplay between individual actions and societal and contextual factors that influence it. In this chapter, we adopt the third conceptualization of agency, an ecological approach, to guide our study, as we focus on our focal participant’s classroom decision-making processes within a situated context. According to Priestley et al. (2015), an ecological approach draws heavily on Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) work, which conceives of agency as [a] temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its habitual aspect), oriented toward the future (as a capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and ‘acted out’ in the present (as a capacity to contextualize past habits and future projects with the contingencies of the moment). (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998: 963)

Thus, as observed by Priestley et al., teacher agency is shaped by the individual’s past teaching experience, evaluation of the present teaching context and future pedagogical objectives. Another key constituent factor of an ecological understanding of agency is that agency is achieved socially and relationally through a negotiation of contextual opportunities and constraints (Priestley et al., 2015). In line with an action-oriented conceptualization of agency, Tao and Gao (2017) investigated how eight English for specific purposes (ESP) teachers in Chinese universities made informed agentic choices and took action to support their professional development in response to the educational reforms. Informed by Eteläpelto et al.’s (2013) sociocultural developmental approach to teacher agency, Tao and Gao revealed that teachers’ decisions to develop their professional expertise were mediated by their different identity commitments to the profession in light of similar contextual affordances and constraints. Situated in a different teaching context in China, Lai et al. (2016) revealed that teachers’ realization of agency was shaped and mediated by institutional systems, the associated power relations in which they were embedded and their professional identity. The impact of globalization on English teaching education in China has also been explored in Gao’s (2017) chapter on teacher autonomy that demonstrated how the marketization of English education in China has led to an increase in language teachers’ professional vulnerability and limited space for teachers to exercise their teacher autonomy. Given that English has been ascribed so much power and value in China, Gao (2017) called for language teacher educators to help empower language teachers to claim their teacher autonomy. In these earlier studies, attention has mainly been given to language teachers in mainstream English

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educational institutions. Absent from the picture are English teachers in the private sector or those working independently. Our focal participant, Mr Ding, was one of those teachers who was not affiliated with an institution. To understand Mr Ding’s agentic and context-sensitive pedagogies within the broader educational context of China, we next turn to a brief introduction of English language teaching (ELT) in China. Globalization and English language teaching in China

Since the implementation of the open door policy in the 1970s, China’s increasing participation in globalization has led to a fervor to learn English, as English has been regarded as the language of international communication and one of power that privileges those with socio-economic capital and resources (Huang, 2017; Pan, 2015). Concerns regarding this growing dominance of English have been raised, as such dominance contributes to neocolonialism and racism by empowering an already powerful Western white native speaker community while disempowering the ‘subaltern community’ (Guo & Beckett, 2007; Kumaravadivelu, 2016). This phenomenon is realized through (1) the promotion of such ‘standard English’ spoken by white native speakers from major English-speaking countries, such as the United States and the United Kingdom; (2) positioning such teachers as the ideal English teachers (Guo & Beckett, 2007) in China; and (3) the implementation of Western-based CLT. CLT in China

CLT in China was imported in the late 1980s by the Chinese government’s response to the growing need to facilitate global economic and commercial exchanges (Hu, 2002). In addition, CLT would help solve the problems related to the grammar-translation teaching methods. As Tsui (2007) pointed out, the overemphasis on grammar and writing resulted in a lack of attention to learners’ speaking and listening skills. English learned through this approach was thus described as ‘Deaf-and-dumb English’ (Tsui, 2007: 662). CLT, with its emphasis on meaning comprehension and communication, was intended to target learners’ underdeveloped communicative competence (Yu, 2001). Despite the Chinese government’s endorsement, CLT experienced resistance by teachers who reported frustration and challenges in implementing CLT methods in their English classrooms (Tsui, 2007). As reported by Tsui (2007: 666), teachers in China referred to CLT as ‘cruel language teaching’. Even decades after the introduction of CLT, Zhang and Liu (2014) reported that secondary school teachers continue to follow teacher-centered and grammar-based instruction that focuses on recitation, memorization and drill practice. In her analysis of the main challenges of implementing CLT in Asian countries, Butler (2011: 39–43)

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identified three broad categories of constraints encountered by English teachers: • Conceptual constraints, which characterize Anglocentric ideologies embedded in CLT that could potentially conflict with Confucian values that embody the cultural practices of many Asian countries. • Classroom-level constraints, which refer to limited local resources, the physical environment (e.g. large class size, limited access to authentic English textbooks), the lack of sufficient support and training for English teachers, as well as the prevalence of performance-based assessment systems. • Constraints at the societal-institutional level, which include grammar-focused college exams and limited opportunities to use English outside the classroom. Relatedly, Thornbury (2016: 233–234) pointed out that in the current neoliberal landscape of education, the focus on ‘communication’ has shifted to ‘commodification’. As a result, language learning is generally associated with learning outcomes in high-stakes testing rather than communicative competence. CLT seems only to work well with language learners of higher socio-economic status who can afford the luxury of studying in small classes that provide communication-focused learning. In light of these aforementioned challenges, Pan (2015) suggested that teachers think beyond dominant teaching methodologies and develop contextual-sensitive pedagogies that take into consideration local linguistic needs. Postmethod pedagogy

The notion of method, as argued by Thornbury (2016), is limited in its applicability to diverse teaching contexts that are characterized by various students’ needs and classroom realities. The ideologies and values underlying a normative method have also been challenged by Kumaravadivelu (2016) and Pennycook (1989). Pennycook, for example, contended that method creates a dichotomy between applied linguists who develop ‘scientific’ language teaching methods and language teachers who deal with the ‘real world’ in their classrooms. By favoring Western-based pedagogical theories over local pedagogical knowledge, teachers become de-professionalized and are reduced to technicians who are ‘trained to transmit a fixed canon of knowledge’ (Pennycook, 1989: 612). Extending this line of criticism and using CLT as an example, Kumaravadivelu (2012, 2016) describes how CLT originated from Western culture and was subsequently exported to other countries, especially those on the periphery. By adopting and implementing CLT, Western-based values and ideologies are thus reproduced and reinforced worldwide. To offset this epistemological imbalance, Kumaravadivelu

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proposed a postmethod pedagogy, which prioritizes teacher agency by encouraging teachers to draw on linguistic resources from their contextual knowledge and localized teaching practices. Three parameters characterize Kumaravadivelu’s (2003) postmethod pedagogy: particularity, practicality and possibility. Particularity requires teachers to be sensitive to the local realities and be aware of students’ various cultural and social backgrounds and needs. The instructional goals might vary in different teaching contexts with different groups of learners. As suggested by McKay and Brown (2015), teaching goals could be localized to meet particular groups of learners’ needs. Relatedly, the parameter of practicality seeks to encourage teachers to ‘theorize from their practice and then practice what they theorize’ (Kumaravadivelu, 2006: 59). In other words, theories should emerge from classroom practice and subsequently inform teachers’ pedagogy. Next, the principle of possibility aims to empower teachers to make transformative decisions that might change social inequalities by relating language teaching to broader social and political issues. Despite its strong emphasis on localized classroom practices, few empirical studies have explored the implementation of postmethod pedagogy into local teaching contexts (for notable exceptions, see Zakeri, 2014; Zheng, 2013). In light of this conspicuous gap in English language education research, this study draws on the rich insights from postmethod pedagogy principles and responds to Molina’s (2016: 7) astute observation that ‘research on how local teachers make sense of English language teaching within their unique contexts remains limited’. To this end, we investigate how our focal participant, Mr Ding, exercised his teacher agency by going beyond contextual norms and developing a critical consciousness of what should be taught in the classroom. In particular, we illustrate how he was able to negotiate contextual demands instead of implementing prescribed practices. Building on Kumaravadivelu’s (2003, 2012, 2016) postmethod and bottom-up approach to ELT and the ecological turn in teacher agency (Priestley et  al., 2015) and by tracing the practices of our focal participant, Mr Ding, our study was informed by two research concerns: (1) How did Mr Ding achieve teacher agency within the social and contextual constraints? (2) How did he exercise agency to localize his pedagogy and facilitate his students’ English learning? Methods Situating Mr Ding within China’s teaching landscape

In China, English teachers working in urban public schools are regarded as holders of a golden rice bowl because of their stable and high incomes, which, according to Hu (1974), led to some level of arrogance

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and entitlement among English teachers in secondary education. Thus, public school English teaching entails not only reverence from members of Chinese society, but it also confers institutional privileges that legitimize their professional identity in their respective communities of practice (Wenger, 1998). To secure this sought-after position as an urban public school English teacher, one needs to have earned a degree in an English-related major and other English-accredited credentials (e.g. advanced academic performance in College English tests). Despite such strict selection criteria, several studies have questioned the quality of secondary and university English language education in China (e.g. Dai, 2001; Huang, 2017). For example, Dai (2001) pointed out that the prevalence of exam-oriented English teaching practices in secondary English classrooms, which emphasize grammar instruction and drill practice, may be related to the instruction English teachers received at university. In addition, Huang (2017) noted that tertiary students generally believed that English is learned through memorization and recitation, often at the expense of critical and creative thinking activities, which subsequently affected their classroom practices as English teachers. In short, a drillbased approach to learning English had a deleterious knock-on effect on the pedagogy of future English teachers. It is against this wider educational context that our focal participant, Mr Ding, was situated. At the time of this study, Mr Ding was a self-employed English teacher, who provided private English tutoring to high school students at his home in a mid-sized city in inland China. He grew up in a peasant family in a small village in south China and graduated with a degree in public administration management. Not having any previous formal study of English or English education, Mr Ding’s attempt to apply for English teaching positions at public high schools failed. As a result, he initiated his own English teaching business in a rented apartment and changed his living room into a small classroom with three rows of desks and a portable whiteboard. What separated his classroom from his ‘home’ was a bookshelf stocked with a variety of books that he read, ranging from Western philosophy to child psychology. Mr Ding’s English teaching mainly focused on English vocabulary and grammar (i.e. the grammar-translation approach). Importantly, his classes were conducted in Chinese. He developed his own teaching materials for students who wanted to improve their English exam scores. His targeted clientele were high school students who barely passed their English exams at school and who ‘were not interested in learning English’ (Interview data). At the time of the study, Mr Ding had four students. Data sources

The study was conducted over six months (June–November 2016). In the summer of 2016, the first author (Wendy) visited Mr Ding’s classroom to conduct a semi-structured interview. In the following days, Wendy was

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invited by Mr Ding to observe this teaching at a private arts school where he was occasionally invited to teach English. Later in November, Wendy conducted another interview with Mr Ding over Skype. Our entire data set includes two in-depth interviews, one classroom observation, Mr Ding’s teaching materials, advertisement flyers, his journal entries and posts on two popular social media platforms in China: QQ blogs and WeChat. The latter data source (i.e. the online posts) dates back to 2012 when Mr Ding started his teaching career. The inclusion of his personal social media data allowed us to see the development of his professional trajectory of becoming an English teacher over time. All data were collected in Chinese and subsequently translated into English by Wendy, who was a third-year doctoral student at a US university at the time of study. Data analysis

We adopted Strauss and Corbin’s (1998) coding system to analyze our data. First, we transcribed the audio-recorded interviews verbatim. Guided by the two aforementioned research questions, we identified and created codes for data concerning Mr Ding’s agentic actions in classrooms. Later, we coded texts in which we identified factors that shaped or mediated Mr Ding’s pedagogical choices and classroom actions. These codes were placed into four groupings: his previous English learning experience, his reasons for becoming an English teacher, his beliefs about English teaching in China and his evaluation of student needs. Later, we went through Mr Ding’s online journals and posts to identify information related to the topics discussed in the interview. Next, we turned to the classroom observation data. Different teaching events and episodes were identified in relation to either grammar or vocabulary instruction. Those events were then subject to further examination of whether the factors identified in the interviews mediated such teaching practices. Two types of pedagogical choices were consistent in the data: (1) using examples that were relevant to students’ life experiences; and (2) using strategies to facilitate students’ memorization and usage of the new vocabulary. Findings and Discussion

Upon constantly comparing observation data with interview data, three themes emerged from the data: • achieving teacher agency by being a rule-breaker; • developing context-sensitive teaching methods; • advocating ‘Deaf-and-dumb English’ in China. These three themes supported our understanding of how Mr Ding was able to achieve agency within the social and contextual constraints he

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encountered, and how he exercised this agency to optimize student learning opportunities. Achieving teacher agency by being a rule-breaker

In the teaching blog, Mr Ding wrote about how he often introduced himself to his students at their first English class meeting: Don’t I as an English teacher break your stereotypes of English teachers? You probably would imagine them to be gentle and nice-looking girls who have a soft voice or tall and handsome boys who enjoy an artistic lifestyle. Yes, you might wonder, how someone, who resembles nothing like an English teacher, could teach English well. In fact, one’s appearance has nothing to do with his/her wisdom. I will charm you with my unique, humorous and blow-your-mind teaching method. (Excerpt 1/Teaching blog, August 2013)

Mr Ding is of below-average height and has a medium-built frame and tanned complexion. According to him, his physical appearance often leaves people with the impression that he looks like a typical peasant from the south China countryside. During the interview, he joked about how people often mistakenly thought he was a peasant who sought low-paying jobs in the city and were subsequently surprised that he was an English teacher. ‘There are some stereotypical perceptions associated with teachers, especially English teachers’, Mr Ding stated in the interview. Those stereotypes of English teachers (‘nice-looking’ female and ‘handsome’ ‘artistic’ male), as he described in Excerpt  1, reveal that English is constructed as a global language for communication and is ‘deeply embedded in power and ideologies’ (Bhatt, 2017: 302). Put differently, English bears ideologies that are associated with wealth, cosmopolitanism and power, characteristics that are often also embodied in one’s disposition. English teachers are therefore typically members of the middle class and individuals who enjoy a cosmopolitan lifestyle. Coming from a peasant family, Mr Ding was deprived of these privileges. However, he was not afraid of sharing his social ‘disadvantages’ with his students; instead, he challenged those circulating expectations and turned these ‘disadvantages’ into a way to construct a unique image, that is a rule-breaking English teacher who generally won his students’ respect and trust with his ‘wisdom’ and good teaching practices rather than ‘looking like an English teacher’. Thus, Mr Ding contested expectations and societal constraints imposed on him and other English teachers in China; he achieved some level of teacher agency by challenging the problematized ideologies embedded in English by positioning himself as a rule-breaker.

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Besides not adhering to the social norms of having a disposition and physical appearance associated with a ‘typical English teacher’, Mr Ding’s formal education background also seemingly failed to meet the institutional requirements of becoming an English teacher. As he had not received any formal teacher training, Mr Ding was initially turned down for many English teaching positions for which he applied. Even after obtaining a high school teaching certificate, he was rejected by public schools due to his lack of a formal English teaching background, despite having much experience tutoring English in college. When asked why he was so determined to become an English teacher despite these setbacks, he replied: Because those English teachers in the public schools have been failing their students, there is a market for someone like me who is interested in English and teaching, and willing to invest time and effort in studying how English could be taught interestingly and efficiently to meet students’ needs. (Excerpt 2/Interview, June 2016)

Mr Ding stated in the interview that the majority of English teachers in the public school faced little prospect of losing their jobs and were thus not motivated to cultivate student interest in learning English or make their teaching more appealing to students. When students lose their interest in learning English, those [public school] teachers blame their students for not studying hard. Students’ parents also believe that their children should shoulder the blame. (Excerpt 3/Interview, June 2016)

As mentioned earlier, having the ‘right’ teaching credentials (e.g. earning a degree in an English-related major) was crucial to gaining legitimate membership into the relatively exclusive community of practice of public school English teachers. In Excerpt 3, Mr Ding pointed out that teachers’ professional legitimacy might not be compromised even when their teaching practices fail to engage students in English learning. As a result, insulated by institutional privileges, many English teachers, according to him, were not willing to critically reflect on their teaching practices or make changes to their routinized practices. Mr Ding summarized their teaching methods as ‘just following the textbooks and asking students to memorize words and do drill practice with grammatical rules’. This description corroborates with what Dai (2001) and Zhang and Liu (2014) observed in secondary English classrooms. By identifying those problems in public schools, Mr Ding also recognized the emerging demands in the local Chinese market for English instruction. Therefore, Mr Ding was able to exploit his professional space through a negotiation of institutional constraints and contextual opportunities for private English

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education. As Oolbekkink-Marchand et  al. (2017) suggested, teachers achieve agency through actively exploiting their perceived professional space. By exploiting the resources and opportunities (e.g. responding to the increasing demand for private English tutors) in his perceived professional space, Mr Ding was able to actively engage in initiating and designing his own teaching practice. According to him, his bottom-up teaching practices contrasted sharply with English teachers who received formal English teaching training at university. In the following excerpt, Mr Ding metaphorically positioned himself as a piece of art, compared to English teachers in public schools, ‘the streamline products’: Most English teachers in public schools … were taught by their previous English teachers and then use the same method to teach their students. They are trapped in the system and don’t have out-of-box thinking. Compared to them, I am more like a piece of art, unique. (Excerpt 4/Interview, June 2016)

Interestingly, Mr Ding saw English teachers as products of English teacher education programs across China. The teaching methods to which these English teachers were introduced during their teacher training seemed to fail to meet students’ needs, however. Mr Ding attributed their failure in teaching English to a lack of pedagogical creativity, an observation that corresponds with Kumaravadivelu’s (2012) call for an alternative to a methods approach in language teacher education programs. Kumaravadivelu argued that current approaches in teacher training programs often focus on preparing language teachers with knowledge from discrete subjects, such as methods, second language acquisition and curriculum design. However, such theorized knowledge and methods generally do not take into consideration the impact of social and contextual factors on language education. By contrast, Mr Ding developed his understanding of English and English teaching by drawing on multiple resources and was thus able to actualize his beliefs of English and English teaching in and through his daily teaching practices. By constructing himself as a piece of art, he underscored his uniqueness as an English teacher, that is, an individual language teaching professional who sought to develop and adjust his teaching methods to meet his students’ needs. Thus, to survive as an English teacher independent of an educational institution, Mr Ding earned his professional legitimacy by making his instruction and practice appealing to his students and demonstrating the ability meet the individual needs of his students. Mr Ding indicated that he was not motivated to work in public schools anymore, because ‘[He has] more space here to follow [his] own way of teaching’. In addition to carving out a professional space for himself to actualize his bottomup teaching methods, Mr Ding also demonstrated how he was able to exploit contextual affordances to inform his teaching practices and thus

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make pedagogical decisions that also made English learning relevant to his students. These findings demonstrate that despite Mr Ding’s perceived limitations in his own teaching context (e.g. not looking like a typical English teachers and not having a formal English education background), he was able to enact his agency to maneuver within these constraints and exploit the resources within his personal spaces (e.g. his familiarity with English learners’ needs and his localized view of English teaching and learning) to empower himself. Developing context-sensitive teaching pedagogy

Knowing that Mr Ding had no prior formal teacher education, Wendy was curious about how he acquired teaching strategies at the beginning of his teaching career. Mr Ding disclosed: The readings I did in college shaped my teaching philosophy, teaching beliefs and teaching methods … They not only expanded my knowledge, but also trained me to think independently and critically, so that I could provide insights and advice for my students on other problems they encounter in life. (Excerpt 5/Interview, June 2016)

Upon visiting his classroom, Wendy was impressed by the wide collection of books on Mr Ding’s bookshelf, which according to Mr Ding only accounted for one third of the books he had read in college. With such a rich reading repertoire, Mr Ding was relatively confident about his English teaching practices in the classroom and his relationship with his students and their parents. As noted in Excerpt 5, the extensive reading he did in college helped improve his teaching practice. At the interview, Mr Ding revealed that he was able to ‘bring in new perspectives, make connections to different subject knowledge and guide them to think critically’. Therefore, Mr Ding’s experience enabled him to make informed decisions in the classroom that would facilitate students’ learning and engage them in critically reflexive activities. Lasky (2005: 900) suggested that teachers take agentic action in a situational context through drawing on resources ‘that are culturally, socially and historically developed’. Relatedly, Pyhältö et  al. (2014: 307) underscored that teachers’ professional agency ‘is highly relational and thus embedded in professional interactions between teachers, pupils and their parents’. These observations can be seen in the ways Mr Ding exercised agency as well as in his invested relationship with students and parents. In Excerpt  5, for example, Mr Ding highlighted that his reading experience also helped him interact with his students more effectively. The fact that his students sought advice from him regarding their personal lives indicated his willingness and potential to help them make transformative decisions in their lives. Mr Ding’s responsibilities also extended to interacting with

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students’ parents and providing counseling to them, which seems to indicate Mr Ding went beyond what was typically expected of a teacher. This agentic action, according to Haneda and Sherman (2016), could be seen as a form of job crafting, that is, teachers sometimes actively modify their job boundaries to make sense of their work. Because Mr Ding recognized that the parent–child relationship could have an impact on students’ performance in class, he saw counseling as part of his core responsibilities to maximize students’ learning (Kumaravadivelu, 2003). In sum, Mr Ding’s actions and decisions as exemplified in the excerpts above thus characterize his agency that shaped and was shaped by his context-sensitive pedagogy. Kumaravadivelu (2003, 2006, 2012) proposed that the implementation of such pedagogy is only possible when teachers are sensitive to the particularity of local linguistic, societal, political and educational environments in which teaching and learning are embedded. Given Mr Ding’s local context, his initiative to relate his teaching (including actions not limited to teaching English) to students’ local realities helped them optimize their learning outcomes. Mr Ding’s English teaching practices in the classroom also demonstrated that he was able to develop a context-sensitive pedagogy that facilitated his students’ English learning. When asked what teaching methods he adopted in his teaching, Mr Ding explained: I have never learned any teaching method and I don’t think one’s teaching methods could be learned or taught by others. Teaching methods should come from your own experience, that is, first, you construct your own way of teaching through daily teaching practices and then you summarize what kind of methods that best suit your teaching contexts from those accumulated teaching experiences. (Excerpt  6/Interview, November 2016)

Mr Ding’s bottom-up approach to teaching is thus in accordance with Kumaravadivelu’s (2001, 2003) proposed postmethod pedagogy. Instead of adopting and implementing a one-size-fits-all top-down pedagogy, Kumaravadivelu advocates empowering local teachers to develop their own teaching methods in their local teaching contexts so that they can theorize from their accumulated experiences. The goal is to make English learning relevant to students’ lives and meet their respective needs. The following classroom exchange from Mr Ding’s vocabulary class demonstrates how he localized English teaching and related English learning to his students’ own experiences. Mr Ding (D): What does ‘essential’ mean? Student A (S): It means ‘very important’. Teacher, we learned this ‘sent’ before. It means ‘song’ (send in Chinese).

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D: Yeah. But there is another meaning to this word. Do you know? S: Oh yeah, it means ‘feel’ ‘sense’. D: Yeah, very good. Look, sent here is similar to ‘sense’, means ‘feel something’, ‘-es’ here means ‘toward outward’, so together, when you can feel something, it’s important. For example, every year on June 6 and 7 (dates that students take Gaokao – China’s university entrance exam), you would automatically wake up without setting your alarm [clocks]. Why? because those two days are just so important and your body can sense the importance. S: Oh! Right! (Excerpt 7/Class observation) As illustrated in Excerpt 7, when teaching the word ‘essential’ instead of asking students to memorize the meaning of this word, Mr Ding employed different strategies to help students relate to words or knowledge they had previously acquired. First, he broke down the words into two parts: -es and -sent. Then, following one of his methods developed specifically for learning English vocabulary in the Gaokao exam, he related -es to the prefix -ex, which refers to a state of ‘toward outward’, and connected -sent with the stem -sense, meaning ‘feeling something’. Combining those two parts together, he then provided an example of taking the Gaokao, which could help students relate this word to their own experiences. Although Mr Ding admitted that there was no theoretical base in linguistics to analyze the word ‘essential’ in the above-mentioned way, by breaking down the word, he claimed that students could memorize the word more efficiently. He noted: The ultimate goal is to help them learn the key vocabulary in a meaningful way instead of reciting them by rote. Those students came to me frustrated with learning English and had an urgent need to improve their English scores within a short period of time. So I created a list of 3000 must-have words that are most frequently tested in Gaokao and developed teaching methods to help them master those 3000 words. My focus here is efficiency in learning. (Excerpt 8/Interview, November 2016)

Mr Ding’s teaching practices in Excerpts 7 and 8 were characterized by the particularity principle put forward by Kumaravadivelu (2003, 2006, 2012). First, Mr Ding was able to draw on localized knowledge to make English vocabulary meaningful in a way that related to his students’ life experience. Second, Mr Ding demonstrated that he was sensitive to the particularity associated with the realities of his students. By recognizing their practical needs and their low English competence, Mr Ding made strategic moves to selectively manage the size of his students’ vocabulary bank required for the Gaokao and developed different strategies to help them master the meaning and usage of new words. Pedagogically, he elected to remove the phrasal verbs (e.g. to take up, to take on,

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to take off) from his 3000 must-have word list, justifying his decision as follows: ‘Because it takes lots of time to distinguish and memorize the meaning and use of those phrases and there aren’t many of them tested in Gaokao’. Mr Ding’s decision-making, therefore, was shaped by what he determined to be pedagogical moves that needed to be taken in order to maximize learning outcomes within contextual constraints (Priestley et al., 2015). Advocating ‘Deaf-and-dumb English’ in China

As noted, Tsui (2007) coined the term ‘Deaf-and-dumb English’ to describe the phenomenon of students who had received traditional English instruction in China and developed competence in reading and grammar but encountered great difficulty with speaking and listening. The next section demonstrates that Mr Ding advocated ‘Deaf-and-dumb English’ in his teaching context, which reveals how Mr Ding’s enactment of teacher agency interacted with factors at the societal and political level. Mr Ding stressed in the interview that his customized teaching methods to fulfill students’ needs to improve their English testing scores should not be misunderstood as simply exam-oriented English teaching methods. Besides his focus on vocabulary and grammar, which is often regarded in China as the most efficient way to improve exam scores, Mr Ding also sought to improve his students’ English reading skills. In Excerpt 9, he expressed his concern about the examination reforms to the Gaokao that lowered the difficulty level of the English exam, especially for reading comprehension. Nevertheless, a focus on English reading skills still accounted for a significant part of his syllabus as the following excerpt shows: In addition to grammar and vocabulary, I focused heavily on training students’ analytical reading skills. There have been some changes to Gaokao English in the past few years. The reading comprehension section is easier than before … Now, more emphasis has been put on inferring word meanings in contexts or searching for information. (Excerpt 9/Interview, June 2016)

This resistance to accommodate the changes in the Gaokao in his teaching can be traced to Mr Ding’s beliefs about English and English teaching in China. Despite the challenges and problems associated with the implementation of CLT in China, which were discussed in the introduction to this chapter, CLT remains the dominant teaching model in English education in China (Littlewood, 2013). Given the national policy about the use of CLT, Wendy asked Mr Ding about the absence of CLT in his teaching practices. In response, Mr Ding first challenged the applicability of CLT in his local teaching context. Taking into consideration

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his students’ urgency to improve their test scores and their relatively low English proficiency, Mr Ding argued that the use of CLT fails to fulfill students’ needs in China’s performance-based culture. Furthermore, as Thornbury (2016) points out, CLT benefits students in small-size classes with well-trained instructors who have appropriate teaching materials. Situated in a mid-sized inland city of China, Mr Ding recognized that the use of CLT privileged students from the metropolitan cities rather than his students who had unequal access to educational resources. In addition, with respect to ideologies of globalization and cosmopolitanism that CLT was often wrapped up with, he observed: We talk about fancy words like globalization, internationalization everyday, but I don’t think many people know what globalization means to them, to their own lives. Most of my students would study and work in China and probably won’t have opportunities to study or work abroad. They rarely have any opportunities to communicate in English, with foreigners here as well. To be a globalized citizen, for them, does not have to be through ‘speaking’. ‘Reading’ would benefit them more. (Excerpt 10/Interview, June 2016)

Notably, Mr Ding was an active advocate of ‘Deaf-and-dumb English’ in his local teaching context, as he saw being able to read in English as providing his students access to a wider world. Thus, to him, reading promoted learner autonomy and ‘equipped them [learners] with the means necessary to self-direct and self-monitor their own learning’ (Kumaravadivelu, 2003: 545). Therefore, Mr Ding put great emphasis on developing his students’ analytic reading skills. According to him, when students mastered those skills and developed sound knowledge of English grammar, ‘they would be able to read any English articles, reports, academic publications on the internet with a dictionary’. This aligns with Kumaravadivelu’s (2003: 545) desire to ‘help students learn to learn, and learn to liberate’. Thus, in Mr Ding’s view, students with a mastery of reading skills would be able to be liberated from contextual and socio-economic constraints by being able to access information of their interest. In addition, he revealed other merits of helping students with their English reading skills: I think English teachers in China should put more emphasis on training students’ analytic reading skills. Because it could improve students’ thinking skills. English articles are written in a more logical and organized way compared to Chinese writing, so students could learn the western way of thinking from reading English articles. (Excerpt  11/ Interview, June 2016)

Relating English language learning to learning about Anglo-Saxon culture is another way that Mr Ding helped his students ‘go global’. As

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demonstrated in Excerpt 11, Mr Ding acknowledged that English writing appeared to favor logic and organization more than Chinese writing; thus, he encouraged students to acquire a ‘western way of thinking’ and develop a global cultural consciousness. In short, Mr Ding’s ‘Deaf-and-dumb English’ teaching method was not intended to compromise the development of his students’ Englishspeaking and listening skills; rather, it should be viewed as an ‘appropriate’ method in his local teaching context that could maximize students’ learning opportunities and give them autonomy in their learning. The implementation of a ‘Deaf-and-dumb English’ teaching method further exemplified how Mr Ding’s enactment of teacher agency was the result of a complex interplay between his evaluation of his students’ future plans and a negotiation with contextual constraints. Conclusion

This study focused on the teaching practices of an English teacher, Mr Ding, in his local teaching context in China. We explored (1) how Mr Ding was able to achieve teacher agency despite social and contextual constraints and (2) how his enactment of teacher agency facilitated his students’ learning of English. Invoking Kumaravadivelu’s (2003, 2012, 2016) postmethod pedagogy, and guided by Priestley et al.’s (2015) ecological perspective to teacher agency, we demonstrated how Mr Ding constructed his teacher identity as a rule-breaker, unraveled stereotypes regarding English teachers while successfully carving out his professional space outside the educational institutions. Honing in on Mr Ding’s teaching practices in class, we revealed that Mr Ding’s bottom-up pedagogical practices developed from his accumulated teaching practices and his localized knowledge of his students’ needs and plans for the future. Kumaravadivelu’s (2001, 2003) postmethod pedagogy was instantiated in Mr Ding’s teaching practices in three ways. First, Mr Ding developed teaching methods that were sensitive to the local lived realities of his students and their particular needs. The grammar-translation teaching method that prevailed in the public school classrooms failed to motivate his students to continue learning English. This phenomenon, coupled with limited educational resources and opportunities available in a mid-sized Chinese city where the students were located, made Mr Ding realize that CLT was not applicable to his own classroom. Although he emphasized vocabulary and grammar teaching, he was also able to develop various strategies to help his students reduce their cognitive learning load and make learning English relevant to their lives. Next, drawing on knowledge he gleaned from extensive reading, Mr Ding was able to develop positive relations with his students and their parents by providing life advice to students and serving as a mediator between students and parents. Third, Mr Ding’s beliefs about English and English

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teaching also had an impact on his decision-making in the classroom. Biesta et  al. (2015) argued that teacher beliefs play a role in orienting their actions. In the context of this study, Mr Ding’s beliefs about ‘Deaf-and-dumb English’ demonstrated that he enacted teacher agency to design transformative pedagogical practices that would empower his students to achieve autonomous learning. Therefore, on the one hand, he interrupted the wider language-in-education policy that emphasized English for communicative purposes; and on the other, Mr Ding was able to (re)frame his pedagogy in ways that positioned his students for a globalized environment by preparing them to become strategic readers of English. Crucially, our examination of his teacher agency allows us to observe how a teacher can make his own pedagogical decisions within a local context while negotiating societal constraints in ways that grant students access to learning opportunities and enhance their learning outcomes. In closing, an ecological approach to investigating teacher agency combined with a postmethod pedagogy can help teachers like Mr Ding create a culturally sustaining classroom where both learner and teacher goals can be achieved. Even though Mr Ding’s individual case alone might not speak exclusively to the dynamics of teaching practices in other local teaching contexts in China, the findings from our study contribute to ELT research by providing specific examples of how English teachers can (re)claim their agency in their contexts through localized and context-sensitive pedagogies to fulfill students’ needs. We believe that English teachers’ local pedagogical practices should be mobilized to counter center-based English discourses and ideologies that have become entrenched in China. References Bhatt, R.M. (2017) World Englishes and language ideologies. In M. Filppula, J. Klemoia and D. Sharma (eds) The Oxford Handbook of World Englishes (pp. 291–311). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Biesta, G., Priestley, M. and Robinson, S. (2015) The role of beliefs in teacher agency. Teachers and Teaching 21 (6), 624–640. Butler, Y.G. (2011) The implementation of communicative and task-based language teaching in the Asia-Pacific region. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 31, 36–57. Canagarajah, A.S. (2012) Teacher development in a global profession: An autoethnography. TESOL Quarterly 46 (2), 258–279. Crandall, J. and Bailey, K.M. (eds) (2018) Global Perspectives on Language Education Policies. New York: Routledge. Dai, W. (2001) The construction of the streamline ELT system in China. Foreign Language Teaching and Research 5, 1–7. Douglas Fir Group (2016) A transdisciplinary framework for SLA in a multilingual world. Modern Language Journal 100, 19–47. Emirbayer, M. and Mische, A. (1998) What is agency? American Journal of Sociology 103, 962–1023. Eteläpelto, A., Vähäsantanen, K., Hökkä, P. and Paloniemi, S. (2013) What is agency? Conceptualizing professional agency at work. Educational Research Review 10, 45–65.

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Gao, X. (2017) Language teacher autonomy and social censure. In A. Chik, N. Aoki and R. Smith (eds) Autonomy in Language Learning and Teaching: New Research Agendas (pp. 29–50). London: Palgrave. Gu, M.M. (2010) Identities constructed in difference: English language learners in China. Journal of Pragmatics 42 (1), 139–152. Guo, Y. and Beckett, G.H. (2007) The hegemony of English as a global language: Reclaiming local knowledge and culture in China. Convergence 40 (1/2), 117–131. Hall, G. (2016) Method, methods and methodology: Historical trends and current debates. In G. Hall (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of English Language Teaching (pp. 209– 223). New York: Routledge. Haneda, M. and Sherman, B. (2016) A job-crafting perspective on teacher agentive action. TESOL Quarterly 50 (3), 745–754. Hu, C.T. (1974) On ‘T’U’ and ‘Yang’ westernization and de-westernization in China. Chinese Studies in History 7 (4), 3–35. Hu, G.W. (2002) Recent important developments in secondary English-language teaching in the People’s Republic of China. Language, Culture and Curriculum 15, 30–49. Hu, G. and McKay, S.L. (2012) English language education in East Asia: Some recent developments. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 33 (4), 345–362. Huang, Z. (2017) Native and Non-Native English Speaking Teachers in China: Perceptions and Practices. Singapore: Springer. Kayi-Aydar, H. (2015) Teacher agency, positioning, and English language learners: Voices of pre-service classroom teachers. Teaching and Teacher Education 45, 94–103. Kumaravadivelu, B. (2001) Toward a postmethod pedagogy. TESOL Quarterly 35 (4), 537–560. Kumaravadivelu, B. (2003) A postmethod perspective on English language teaching. World Englishes 22 (4), 539–550. Kumaravadivelu, B. (2006) TESOL methods: Changing tracks, challenging trends. TESOL Quarterly 40 (1), 59–81. Kumaravadivelu, B. (2012) Language Teacher Education for a Global Society: A Modular Model for Knowing, Analyzing, Recognizing, Doing, and Seeing. New York: Routledge. Kumaravadivelu, B. (2016) The decolonial option in English teaching: Can the subaltern act? TESOL Quarterly 50 (1), 66–85. Lai, C., Li, Z. and Gong, Y. (2016) Teacher agency and professional learning in crosscultural teaching contexts: Accounts of Chinese teachers from international schools in Hong Kong. Teaching and Teacher Education 54, 12–21. Lasky, S. (2005) A sociocultural approach to understanding teacher identity, agency and professional vulnerability in a context of secondary school reform. Teaching and Teacher Education 21 (8), 899–916. Li, W. and De Costa, P.I. (2017) Professional survival in a neoliberal age: A case study of an EFL teacher in China. The Journal of AsiaTEFL 14 (2), 277–291. Littlewood, W. (2013) Developing a context-sensitive pedagogy for communicationoriented language teaching. English Teaching 68 (3), 3–25. Luo, W. (2007) English language teaching in Chinese universities in the era of the World Trade Organization: A learner perspective. PhD thesis, RMIT University. McKay, S.L. and Brown, J.D. (2015) Teaching and Assessing EIL in Local Contexts around the World. New York: Routledge. Menken, K. and García, O. (2010) Negotiating Language Policies in Schools: Educators as Policymakers. New York: Routledge. Molina, S.C. (2016) English language teaching in China: Teacher agency in response to curricular innovations. In P.C. Ng and E.F. Boucher-Yip (eds) Teacher Agency and Policy Response in English Language Teaching (pp. 7–25). New York: Routledge.

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Oolbekkink-Marchand, H.W., Hadar, L.L., Smith, K., Helleve, I. and Ulvik, M. (2017) Teachers’ perceived professional space and their agency. Teaching and Teacher Education 62, 37–46. Pan, L. (2015) English as a Global Language in China: Deconstructing the Ideological Discourses of English in Language Education. Cham: Springer. Pennycook, A. (1989) The concept of method, interested knowledge, and the politics of language teaching. TESOL Quarterly 23 (4), 589–618. Priestley, M., Biesta, G. and Robinson, S. (2015) Teacher Agency: An Ecological Approach. London: Bloomsbury. Pyhältö, K., Pietarinen, J. and Soini, T. (2014) Comprehensive school teachers’ professional agency in large-scale educational change. Journal of Educational Change 15 (3), 303–325. Strauss, A. and Corbin, J. (1998) Basics of Qualitative Research Techniques. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Tao, J. and Gao, X. (2017) Teacher agency and identity commitment in curricular reform. Teaching and Teacher Education 63, 346–355. Thornbury, S. (2016) Communicative language teaching in theory and practice. In G. Hall (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of English Language Teaching (pp. 224–236). New York: Routledge. Tsui, A.B. (2007) Complexities of identity formation: A narrative inquiry of an EFL teacher. TESOL Quarterly 41, 657–680. Vähäsantanen, K. (2015) Professional agency in the stream of change: Understanding educational change and teachers’ professional identities. Teaching and Teacher Education 47, 1–12. Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yu, L. (2001) Communicative language teaching in China: Progress and resistance. TESOL Quarterly 35 (1), 194–198. Zakeri, E. (2014) Postmethod era: Amalgamation of methods, a real example. International Journal of Language Learning and Applied Linguistics World (IJLLALW) 5 (2), 523–529. Zhang, F. and Liu, Y. (2014) A study of secondary school English teachers’ beliefs in the context of curriculum reform in China. Language Teaching Research 18 (2), 187–204. Zheng, C. (2013) Implications on a designed questionnaire about English teachers’ in-class example designs. Theory and Practice in Language Studies 3 (11), 20–25.

11 Teacher Authority and the Collaborative Construction of Agency in Second Language Writing Instruction Patricia Mayes

This chapter argues that second language (L2) writing teachers’ agency is revealed through their careful interactional management of two types of authority during writing conferences with their students. The teachers used the turn-taking system and turn design to vary their authority displays in ways that encouraged students to claim their own epistemic authority through knowledge displays. In this way, teacher and student agency are collaboratively achieved through jointly constructed action. It is further argued that the types of knowledge displayed and discussed focused more on content-related issues than on language per se, and this is attributed to the fact that the curriculum followed a ‘learning-to-write’ (Manchón, 2011) approach, based in process pedagogy. In this context, language teaching can be understood as embedded in the teaching of writing. More generally, teacher agency is tied to specific institutional contexts in complex ways, best revealed through micro-level, turn-byturn analysis. Introduction

As evidenced by this volume, in recent years, there has been a growing interest in understanding the role of agency in language teaching contexts, and in particular, as it pertains to language teachers (see also Feryok, 2012; Kayi-Aydar, 2015; Lai et al., 2016; Ruohotie-Lyhty, 2011). Yet, in research on the teaching of writing in a second or additional language, this topic has not received the same amount of attention. A primary reason for this in the setting investigated here (US higher education) is that writing instruction is often subsumed within English composition, which has had its own research tradition, largely separate 180

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from second language (L2) studies (Matsuda, 1999). Thus, teachers of L2 writing are considered writing teachers rather than language teachers per se. In addition, until recently, research on L2 writing has more or less mirrored research in composition studies, which has tended to focus on agency with respect to students, rather than teachers. This research often positions student agency in opposition to teachers’ agentive displays of authority. In this chapter, I argue that authority and agency work together and that agency is best understood as distributed – a relational concept defined as the ‘socioculturally mediated capacity to act’ (Ahearn, 2001: 112). This understanding of agency enables us to see that teachers’ actions lead students to display both knowledge of writing practices and the language needed to carry out those practices. The studies of language teacher agency mentioned above have drawn primarily on interviews, journal entries and reflective essays or reports, and in some cases, classroom observation, but for the most part, they have not explored how teachers’ agency may be displayed through actions and interactions with their students as they are teaching. On the other hand, there are a number of studies of recorded interaction between teachers and students, but they tend to focus on two broader questions: What interactional practices occur in classrooms? What is the relationship between classroom interaction and learning? (Gardner, 2013). To my knowledge, there has been little explicit focus on how such actions and interaction between teachers and students may be understood as agentive on the part of either the student or the teacher. In addition, as mentioned, there has been little focus on the agency of writing teachers who teach L2 writers. Here, I analyze teacher–student writing conferences from a university-level L2 writing course (‘Advanced College Writing in English as a Second Language’), in order to make the connection between incremental verbal actions (in particular, knowledge displays) and agency more explicit. I argue that teachers’ agency is observable in the careful management of the authority displayed in their turns at talk, actions that lead students to display their own knowledge. It can also be argued that these actions teach language through writing and that such jointly constructed actions constitute both student and teacher agency. Background Research

This literature review is divided into four sections: First, in order to situate the writing program in this study, I give a brief overview of the relationship between composition studies and research on writing in a second or additional language; second, I briefly define agency; next, I review research on agency and authority in writing instruction; and in the fourth section, I discuss two types of authority and their interactional management.

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English composition and second language writing instruction

In US higher education, writing is often taught in programs that do not provide any special accommodations for L2 writers. As mentioned, this may be due to the fact that composition studies and L2 studies began as different disciplines (Matsuda, 1999). With respect to research, this separation has changed somewhat in recent years, with researchers in both fields studying L2 writing (Matsuda et al., 2013). Still, in a survey of university-level English composition teachers, Matsuda et  al. (2013) found that although many of the teachers were aware of the presence and needs of L2 writers in their courses, they were not always able to meet those needs. The reasons included various programmatic or curricular issues such as inadequate allocation of time, as well as the perception that the needs of L2 writers were ‘outside the scope of the first-year composition curriculum’ (Matsuda et al., 2013: 82). Thus, although research may advocate addressing the needs of L2 writers, this may be difficult to achieve in practice when implementing curricula and programs designed for a general audience, often assumed to be native speakers. Within studies of writing in an additional language, Manchón (2011: 3) identifies three perspectives on research and teaching: ‘learningto-write’, ‘writing-to-learn content’ and ‘writing-to-learn language’. ‘Writing-to-learn’ approaches are designed for non-native or multilingual writers, but ‘learning-to-write’ approaches occur in many settings, including composition programs with native speaking and multilingual writers. Hyland (2011) describes three types of learning-to-write approaches: The first focuses on the writer and includes process approaches; the second focuses on text or discourse, such as genre-based approaches; the third focuses on the reader or discourse community. Hyland (2011: 31) goes on to suggest that learning-to-write approaches have identified five types of knowledge that are involved in learning to write: • Content knowledge – the ideas and concepts in the topic area the text will address. • System knowledge – syntax, lexis and appropriate formal conventions needed. • Process knowledge – how to prepare and carry out a writing task. • Genre knowledge – communicative purposes of the genre and its value in particular contexts. • Context knowledge – readers’ expectations, cultural preferences and related texts. As a process-based approach with a critical pedagogy overlay,1 the curriculum used in the courses studied here emphasized learning-to-write over writing-to-learn (either content or language). In addition, although these courses were considered L2 writing courses because they were so

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designated in the schedule of classes and the students were all L2 writers, the curriculum they used did not differ from the one used in the English composition courses designed for native speakers. Both teachers in this study had some training in L2 pedagogy and applied linguistics, but the busy schedule of the curriculum did not allow for much extra work on language itself. Indeed, despite the fact that all five of the types of knowledge discussed above were included to some extent in the writing conferences, system and genre knowledge were only dealt with when they came up in relation to content and context knowledge, which were evidently the most valued types of knowledge. Agency as jointly constructed action

Research on agency and language use has often used traditional definitions in which an agent is considered to be an individual actor. This understanding is perhaps rooted in linguistics, which traditionally defined an agent in semantic terms, as an individual who acts intentionally and consciously to affect another human or object, known as the patient (Hopper & Thompson, 1980; Lakoff, 1977). More recently, scholarship on language and social interaction has pointed to the fact that this definition eschews ‘the social nature of agency and the pervasive influence of culture on human intentions, beliefs, and actions’ (Ahearn, 2010: 29). In particular, Ahearn (2001: 112) has called for reconceptualizing agency in a broad, non-deterministic way, as the ‘socioculturally mediated capacity to act’. This newer definition suggests that agency is fluid, context dependent, discursively enacted (Ahearn, 2010; Duranti, 2004) and even ‘distributed’ across participants, time and space (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005; Kockelman, 2007). Reconceptualizing agency as a distributed and interconnected phenomenon removes it from the realm of the individual and is particularly important for understanding L2 writing instruction in that student and teacher agency can be understood as emerging incrementally through jointly constructed actions. In addition, recent research by CouperKuhlen and Etelämäki (2015) and Enfield (2014) has examined how agency is distributed across the actions of participants in sequences of directive action. Writing conferences include directive sequences and are thus an appropriate setting for further examining how agency is distributed across participants’ actions. As will be shown, teachers are charged with the task of inculcating the norms for using language in ways that are valued by the composition program. In this way, language instruction is embedded in writing instruction, and as noted above, the two types of language-focused knowledge identified by Hyland (2011), system and genre knowledge, were dealt with as they came up in the conferences, which were more focused on content and context, with some attention to process knowledge.

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Agency and authority in the teaching of writing

As noted, much of the research on agency in composition studies has focused on student agency and the various ways it might be constrained, institutionally or materially. In this view, teacher authority has been understood as one of the primary institutional constraints on student agency, an idea that gained traction in the 1980s, when critics argued that teachers often take over and control student writing (e.g. Brannon & Knoblauch, 1982; Calkins, 1986; Murray, 1985; Walker, 1992). More recently, researchers have sought to complicate the authority-agency debate, focusing on how context and situation affect agency. Although this has led to more ethnographic research, involving interviews (e.g. Sommers & Saltz, 2004) or case studies (e.g. Kill, 2006), the focus on student (or writer) agency has continued. On the other hand, questions concerning how teacher authority and student autonomy work together have been addressed to a certain extent by linguists. For example, in a study of writing conference interaction, Park (2012: 2008) examined how teachers and students manage the tension between two norms: ‘the teachers’ epistemic superiority and the students’ autonomy’. Although different terms are used here, these two norms can be understood as invoking what, respectively, are referred to as teacher authority and student agency in other studies. Park explains that learner autonomy has been an educational norm for several decades. Park focused on how participants managed the tension between authority and autonomy moment-by-moment, and several other studies of writing conferences have also focused on this tension. Mayes (2010) found that teachers faced a dilemma in terms of enacting what they viewed as a ‘directive’ (teacher-centered) approach versus a ‘nondirective’ (learner-centered) approach. A subsequent study analyzed how teachers managed the tension between authority and autonomy as they led students toward displays of epistemic authority associated with writer autonomy, ultimately helping students to develop a writer’s identity (Mayes, 2015). Although these studies do not discuss it in these terms, managing this tension is surely an integral component of teacher agency. The following comment from Park (2012: 2007) certainly implies that it requires teachers’ intentional action: ‘Teachers, on the one hand, have to assume the role of epistemic authority, and on the other hand, encourage learner autonomy’. The discussion above shows that there are several strands of research on writing instruction, including composition studies, writing in a second or additional language and (applied) linguistics. Yet, for the most part, these studies have not considered how teachers’ careful management of authority not only enacts the teachers’ own agency, but also positions their students to act as agents of writing-related actions. In addition, not only has there been a lack of attention to writing teachers’ agency, but

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also the question of how agency is enacted when the students are learners of an additional language has not been addressed. My analysis shows that teacher agency in the context of L2 writing is constituted by the careful management of two types of authority that teachers use to lead students to authoritative displays that do not just demonstrate competence with respect to writing but also with respect to language use. In essence, their linguistic competence is embedded in and displayed through their ability to participate in writing-related actions. In this way, authority and agency go hand in hand and work together to enhance students’ understanding of the linguistic and institutional practices associated with academic writing. Managing authority displays

Writing conferences are advising sessions centered on evaluating and revising a student’s writing. Vehviläinen (2009: 163) defines advice as, ‘a suggestion, recommendation, or a directive for the recipient to follow’. At the level of the utterance, directive actions have been connected to two types of authority, also referred to as rights: deontic rights concern rules and are basically conferred by the status or institutional identity of the speaker (Stevanovic, 2013; Stevanovic & Peräkylä, 2012); and epistemic rights concern knowledge (Heritage & Raymond, 2005; Stevanovic, 2013; Stevanovic & Peräkylä, 2012). These two types of rights work together and may be difficult to tease apart in a particular institutional setting (Stevanovic & Peräkylä, 2012). Stevanovic and Peräkylä (2012) argue that deontic rights come into play when participants are involved in decision-making and making a commitment to future action. For example, when a participant promotes a course of future action (decision), a response is due from the recipient (commitment or withholding commitment). Here, ‘commitment’ refers to action (verbal or gestural) that commits to a plan for future action, which differs from the actual performance of that action. In making an assertion that contains a decision, the speaker is claiming the right to do so, a claim that can either be accepted or contested by the recipient’s next action. In this way, deontic rights are negotiated through sequencing and linguistic form. In the writing conference setting, teachers and students are involved in making decisions about writing choices, and teachers often initiate these decision-making sequences, thus displaying their deontic right to do so. In response, students verbalize their decisions, albeit often tentatively or with the teacher’s help, and these responses can be considered a commitment to a future plan of action that the student is responsible for executing. On the other hand, in this setting, teachers and students may be said to have different epistemic rights. Teachers display knowledge of writing practices and institutional procedures, whereas students have the right to

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display their knowledge and ideas (Mayes, 2015). I will show that one way teachers manage these intersecting rights is by initiating sequences that direct students to form a plan for future action, but they typically downgrade such displays of deontic authority by using wh-interrogatives designed to elicit displays of knowledgeable epistemic stances from students. Much attention has been paid to the use of questions in managing epistemic rights, particularly in institutional settings. Heritage’s (2012: 32) work on knowledge asymmetries is relevant here: the shorthand K+ refers to ‘more knowledgeable’, and K–, ‘less knowledgeable’ epistemic stances. The term epistemic stance ‘concern[s] how speakers position themselves in terms of epistemic status in and through the design of turns at talk’ (Heritage, 2012: 33), and epistemic status is defined as ‘relative epistemic access to a domain [which is] stratified between actors such that they occupy different positions on an epistemic gradient’ from K+ to K– (Heritage, 2012: 32). Essentially, speakers enact epistemic authority, not only by displaying knowledge, but also through their use of linguistic resources to index their position along the epistemic gradient. Asking a question places the speaker in a K– position relative to the recipient. In teaching contexts, it is important to distinguish between ‘knowninformation’ (or display) questions and ‘information-seeking’ (or genuine) questions (Koshik, 2010) because only information-seeking questions index an unknowing stance on the part of the speaker. Previous studies have found that information-seeking questions are used by teachers in advising sessions to elicit various planning actions from students (Koshik, 2010; Vehviläinen, 2012). In the data examined here too, teachers used information-seeking questions and students responded with their proposals. These sequences are of interest because they show how teachers acted to manage both their own deontic and epistemic rights as well as to encourage their students to display knowledgeable epistemic stances. The very act of initiation of the planning sequence shows that teachers have the deontic right to do so. In addition, information-seeking questions, especially whquestions, enact deontic authority in that it becomes conditionally relevant for the student to respond by stating their proposal. At the same time, teachers can be understood to mitigate their epistemic authority, taking a K– stance with respect to the point being questioned. Teachers’ careful management of deontic and epistemic rights helps students to find the appropriate language to display their own epistemic authority and thus is at the core of L2 writing teachers’ agency. In addition, the fact that both participants display their authority as it becomes relevant in the moment is an example of jointly constructed agentive action. Data and Approach

The data examined here were collected as part of a semester-long, ethnographic study of the teaching of writing in two college composition

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courses, in which two teachers and five students who were L2 writers participated. More information about the curriculum, participants and data collection have been published in a prior study (Mayes, 2010). The material collected included 5 hours and 40 minutes of audio or video recorded writing conferences, transcribed according to the system developed by Jefferson (2004). Here, I focus in-depth on excerpts in which the teachers directed students to articulate their decisions about writing choices and/ or formulate a plan of action with respect to those choices. In analyzing the data, I use methods associated with conversation analysis (CA) and interactional linguistics (IL), which focus on the details of moment-by-moment interaction. As explained by Ford (2010: 213), for the most part, the analytic practices of these two approaches are the same in that they follow the same foundational principles of ‘treating naturally occurring talk as the primary data and [of] looking for evidence that the participants themselves orient to the interactional patterns that the analyst observes’. Both approaches examine turns (or turn construction units) as the basic unit of analysis, and focus on sequential structure as a means of examining social interaction. This kind of approach is particularly well-suited for examining not only how agency is jointly constructed, but also the relationship between authority and agency in the context of the writing conference. Teachers’ Management of Authority Displays

In this section, I examine how teachers used interactional (turntaking) and linguistic (turn design) strategies to initiate and manage directive sequences in which they asked students to make decisions about the paper being discussed in the conference. Teacher actions that promote students’ knowledge displays

In the following extracts, the teacher’s deontic authority is displayed by the action of initiating the sequence and by choosing to formulate their request as a wh-question, which effectively requires the student to respond by articulating a proposal or plan. At the same time, the choice of this form places the teacher in a K– position and the student in a K+ position with respect to the epistemic gradient relative to the proposal, thereby encouraging the student to display their knowledge. The initiation and management of the interaction requires teachers’ agentive actions, and students must also act agentively as they produce relevant responses that demonstrate their growing knowledge of the actions and language needed to produce an essay that meets academic requirements.

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In Extract 1, Becky initiates the sequence with a wh-question (Lines 1–3 and 4) that asks Ann to propose a plan for revision.2 1. Becky: so: (.) if you were gonna revise this paper what- (.) what do you think- (.) what 2.       are some steps you think you might take when you’re working on: (1.3) 3. Ann:  I think I 4. Becky: revising. 5. Ann:  would put more of like, what I’ve said about (.7) how people move in from (.) 6.       other areas (.) and (.) the problems that are caused by such. 7. Becky: okay, 8. Ann:  I think I’ll add (.) like also my personal feelings about the issue. Of course, it can be argued that teachers always have the (deontic) right to initiate sequences, and simply doing so displays this right. However, choosing this particular form demonstrates Becky’s careful management of how deontic rights are displayed at any given moment as well as the interaction between deontic and epistemic rights. In other words, the wh-question form mitigates the directive nature of the request, but it also places the right and the obligation to decide in Ann’s purview. The question what are some steps you think you might take… indexes Becky’s K– position with respect to this matter and urges Ann to take a K+ position, displaying her knowledge. Using a wh-question form might be said to reinforce the teacher’s deontic authority, while downgrading her epistemic authority, because of the principle of conditional relevance. In other words, the appropriate second pair part is a detailed plan of action, which places the obligation to articulate these decisions on the student. It is also notable that a conditional precedes the wh-question (Line 1), showing another way this teacher uses turn design to direct the student to make a decision, this time concerning whether or not to revise the paper in the first place. Ann orients to Becky’s request, responding with a plan and listing the points she would add to her essay in Lines 3, 5 and 8. Her response can be understood as explicitly focused on content (the topic of the paper), process (revision) and context (reader expectations) knowledge, but also implicitly on system (language) and genre (communicative purpose) knowledge. The prefacing of these utterances with I think (Lines 3 and 8) may be understood not only as orienting to Becky’s authority (Mayes, 2015), but also mitigating her own epistemic authority in that the actions she describes had already been discussed by both participants and thus are jointly constructed.

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Extract 2 contains a similar sequence-initiating action.

1. Becky: .h (.) but if you were going to revise this one, (.) how do you think you 2.       would (.) go about revising it what r- (.6) what might be a plan. 3.       (.7) 4. John:  well I would (1.0) change what you just said, like (.) 5.       what you wrote, 6. Becky: okay, 7. John:   like, (1.8) move away from- (.) from the: (.) common sense of- (.) to find a like 8.          better (.) argument. or not uh find a better arg- but just be more specific about 9.          it? 10. Becky: okay, 11. John:  (then) maybe stay with the same argument but be more specific about it, 12.       or n-give better examples: (1.2) where- where- where (.) using consensus would 13.        be: t- like better t- because (1.0) as you said it- it’s not really 14.         (1.2) u:m, 15.         (3.2) 16. John:  what I did is uh, I guess is again just uh kinda like uh (2.5) writing out: definition 17.        or something you w- you w- like I say what it di- what it means but it’s like- not 18.        like, I didn’t really write what I could s- use it for specifically. 19. Becky: okay, Becky uses a wh-question to initiate the sequence and request a plan for revision from John (Lines  1–2). As in Extract  1, the wh-question indexes Becky’s K– position, and guides John toward taking a K+ position and displaying his knowledge. Additionally, as in Extract  1, the wh-question is preceded by a conditional that places responsibility for a second decision – deciding whether or not to revise – on John. The form of this sequence-initiating utterance reinforces the teacher’s deontic authority, while downplaying her epistemic authority, and elicits the appropriate second pair part, a detailed plan. Indeed, in Lines 4–5, John begins his response, orienting to Becky’s authority by suggesting that his decision for revision mirrors hers (like what you wrote), but then, he goes on to list some specific writing-related actions, move away from the common sense (Line 7) and be more specific (Line 8) and then, give

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better examples (Line 12). The pausing, repair and questioning intonation in John’s response (Lines 7–9) suggest a tentative plan and display a mitigated K+ stance. Indeed, the idea of finding a better argument is repaired in Line 8 and then again in Lines 11–12 to finally arrive at, the more specific, give better examples (Line 12). The steps that John outlines can perhaps be interpreted as highlighting process and genre knowledge. Starting in Line  16, John gives a critical assessment of his previous draft, also accompanied by repairs, hedges and a longer pause. His hesitancy in both proposing a course of action and critiquing his previous draft may be oriented to the jointly constructed nature of both of these projects in that they had already discussed some of these points earlier in the conference. Self-repair, hedging and pausing may also index his moment-by-moment attempts to formulate the appropriate response, particularly with respect to displaying system, genre and context knowledge, an important part of learning-to-write approaches, but actions that arguably also promote writing to learn. Indeed, Swain (2006: 96) argues that languaging (collaboratively produced oral or written language) ‘is one of the ways we learn a language to an advanced level’. Extracts 1 and 2 show another way the teacher uses turn-taking and sequence management to index her deontic rights and create space for student response. Once the student’s response begins, Becky produces minimal responses, using okay as a continuer. Beach (1993) found that this form was ‘shift-implicative’, indexing a change in speaker or activity. However, in doctor–patient interaction, Heritage and Clayman (2010) found that this was true when doctors produced okay with a falling intonation, but when produced with continuing intonation (represented by comma), this function was downgraded and patients continued speaking. Similarly, the teachers used okay with a continuing intonation to signal that the student should continue speaking. In Extract 2, Becky uses this form in Lines 6, 10 and 19 (and in Extract  1, in Line  7), indexing her expectation that John should continue and produce an elaborated response. Classroom research has noted that teachers sometimes withhold the third-turn evaluation in initiation-response-evaluation (IRE) sequences, which indexes that another response may be required (Gardner, 2013). In a similar way, producing a continuer rather than an evaluative comment may signal that the student should continue, which is what happens in these extracts. At the same time, by actively withholding evaluative comments, teachers allow students the time to work through problems and display the various types of knowledge for which they are responsible. This is another way that teachers’ agentive actions are designed to promote student action in the form of epistemic stance displays, and yet again, show that teacher and student agency are intertwined. Extracts 1 and 2 show that use of conditional and wh-question forms together places responsibility for two decisions on the student: The conditional places the responsibility for deciding whether or not to revise on

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the student, and the wh-question directs the student to come up with a revision proposal. In addition, Becky uses okay, with a continuing intonation, to index her expectation that the student will produce an extended turn, elaborating their decisions. These excerpts show three ways deontic rights can be managed: by initiating sequences, by managing how the sequence unfolds and by choosing turns specifically designed to elicit particular student actions. Extracts 1 and 2 also show that in initiating a sequence with a wh-question, the teacher takes a K– stance, effectively encouraging students to display K+ stances. This form reinforces the teacher’s deontic authority, while mitigating her epistemic authority, eliciting the appropriate second pair part, a detailed plan of action. These verbal actions demonstrate agency on the part of the teacher, and they show that an important aspect of teachers’ agency is guiding their students toward producing their own agentive actions: displays of the five types of knowledge that Hyland (2011) found to be associated with learning-to-write approaches. In this way, agency is jointly constructed or distributed through the verbal actions of both participants. In the next section, I describe a second, more collaborative strategy used by the teachers to guide their students toward appropriate knowledge displays. Collaboratively constructed plans of action

The strategies discussed above were not the only way teachers encouraged students to demonstrate the various types of knowledge associated with learning-to-write. When students’ responses to a request for a plan of action were either too general or too specific, teachers sometimes responded by adding on to the student’s turn to give information at the appropriate level. An example of how the teacher (Alicia) responds after the student has given a general response to her request for a revision proposal is shown in Extract 3. 1. Alicia:   so: then what do you think, how you c- how can you uh:, revise the intro (.) now. 2.        (1.2) 3. Wendy: I think it’s just basically adding the- (.) more- (1.2) more information and 4.        I should go more in depth with that cuz it’s kind of short and it’s 5.        (.) real precise and exact and doesn’t really basically catch what that whole 6.        essay’s about. 7.        (.8) 8. Alicia:   which is: (.) now it’s- (.) you talk about history [um-] 9. Wendy: [the v]oc[abulary].

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10.  Alicia:   [vocabu]lary: 11.        you talk abou:t um: (.6) the fo:rm: (.) of the essay:, 12. Wendy: right. 13. Alicia:  and: (.) the way that it looks, the form, 14. Wendy: right. the present- the way it’s presented. Alicia uses a wh-question to initiate a sequence that directs Wendy to propose a revision plan (Lines 1–2), although the scope here is narrower than the requests seen in Extracts 1 and 2. Wendy’s response is general, saying essentially that she will add more information (Lines  3–4), and continuing with a critique of her draft (Lines  4–6). Alicia could have responded as Becky did in Extract  2 with okay and continuing intonation to signal that Wendy should continue, but she chooses another strategy. After a pause, Alicia reclaims the floor (Line 8), linking her turn to the last part of Wendy’s turn (Line 6) and providing a more specific example of what the revised introduction might include (you talk about history). This teacher-initiated post-sequence expansion elaborates on the student’s previous turn and functions as an alternative to acknowledging or withholding, by instead displaying an appropriate epistemic stance. In this sense, this action models the way Wendy might display her own epistemic authority and content knowledge of her essay. Wendy displays understanding of this point by adding a further elaboration the vocabulary (Line 9). Alicia continues to elaborate, mentioning the form (Line 11), rephrased as the way it looks in Line 13. Wendy accepts this point (Line 12) and rephrases it to the way it’s presented (Line 14), thus continuing to display her acceptance and alignment with the idea of providing more specific points. Alicia’s turns (Lines 8, 11 and 13) might be considered displays of epistemic authority because they display her knowledge of writing practices and content knowledge of Wendy’s essay. However, this sort of example points to the intersection between deontic and epistemic rights in that it shows that Alicia has both the right to initiate a sequence expansion (Line 8) as well as the right to display knowledge about how writing practices may be applied to the essay in question. It is also true that the points mentioned here (from Wendy’s essay) had been discussed in the conference prior to this excerpt and were in this sense known to both participants. Thus, Alicia is not just displaying epistemic authority, but clearly orienting to the collaborative nature of what had just occurred in the conference. Wendy’s responses further this collaboration (Lines 9, 12 and 14), and the two continued to collaborate after the extract shown here. Both participants seem to focus explicitly on displaying the content knowledge that they had co-constructed prior to this extract, but the other types of knowledge are also implicit in this process. For example, the reformulations may be considered displays of system knowledge, as the two participants work through several different ways of expressing the form of the essay (Lines 11–14).

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In the conferences, teachers tended to focus more explicitly on content and context knowledge than on knowledge centered on language or form and, as in many process approaches, language issues were dealt with in later drafts (Murray, 2003). Despite their training as language teachers, Becky and Alicia followed this approach, although if students brought up issues of form in early drafts, they typically dealt with them as they occurred, primarily in relation to content. Extract 4 is an example of a student suggesting a more specific, language-focused revision than Alicia was asking for in an early draft of her paper. 1.  Alicia:   okay so: what would you (.) say: might need revision here in the first paragraph 2.         in terms of [let’s say]3. Ilene:   [I think I have] one very long hh sentence that kind of- (1.6) um, this 4.          one I think, the first one is too long. 5.          (1.0) 6. Alicia:   okay, ‘I never thought I will think about the way I read, or what I read until I read 7.         until I read two different essays by two different authors, that made me think that 8.        (really stays behind reading.)’ ((Reading Ilene’s paper.)) 9.        okay. 10. Ilene:  I think it’s too many of the same words, like, read. read. read. 11. Alicia: okay (.) yeah, I think so too↑, u:m (1.0) bu:t (1.9) also: maybe: you 12.        could just go ahead and introduce the authors? to start off with. In Lines 1–2, Alicia uses a wh-question to elicit a proposal for revising the first paragraph. In Lines 3–4, Ilene responds with a specific critique of one of her sentences (implying the need for revision). After a pause, Alicia expands the sequence, reading the problem sentence (Lines 6–8), and produces an acknowledgement token okay (Line  9). Ilene then elaborates, making her critique more language focused (Line  10). In Lines 11–12, Alicia’s weak agreement is accompanied by hesitations and pausing, indexing the dispreferred response to come (Pomerantz, 1984). This response turns out to be a directive that focuses on content knowledge and is dispreferred because it disagrees with Ilene’s proposal. The subsequent directive is mitigated through form (maybe you could just …) and rising intonation. This extract, then, demonstrates another way teachers acted agentively to manage both epistemic authority, through the careful design of turns that disagreed with students’ proposals, and deontic authority, by mitigating directive constructions. Following this extract, Ilene acknowledges the advice, and Alicia goes on to elaborate

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her suggestion, finally returning to the critique Ilene had made of her first sentence. At that point, Alicia reframes this critique in terms of content knowledge rather than language, saying ‘so you’re sort of trying to show what you’ve learned? through both of the essays?’ Ilene confirms this and goes on to explain what she was trying to say about the two essays she had read, ultimately reformulating the original problem through a display of content knowledge. Extracts  3 and 4 show another interactional strategy that could be used in cases where the students’ knowledge displays in some way did not address the question posed. Rather than producing continuers like okay, which index that the student should continue, the teacher could expand the sequence beyond the student’s turn, by adding to or redirecting the initial response. Both types of teacher response use the student’s turn as a starting point, showing the collaborative nature of agentive action in this context. Discussion

In this investigation of L2 writing teachers’ agency, I have focused on how the teachers used interactional strategies to manage their deontic and epistemic rights in ways that fostered student agency, through displays of knowledge, associated with learning to write. In order to manage these rights, teachers used both the turn-taking system and turn design. With respect to turn-taking, they initiated sequences, using wh-questions to direct students to make a proposal about revising (Extracts 1–4), and they also managed the sequences they initiated, using several strategies, including responding with okay (with continuing intonation) to create more space for student response (Extracts 1 and 2). A second strategy – sequence expansion – was used when students’ knowledge displays in some way did not address the question, leading the teacher to take a turn (Extracts 3 and 4). With respect to turn design, Extract 4 demonstrated how the teacher carefully designed her dispreferred response to delay disagreement and also mitigated the directiveness of the utterance used to lead the student away from a focus on language in an early draft. In all four extracts, the wh-questions indexed the teachers’ deontic authority, while at the same time mitigating their epistemic authority, by displaying a K– stance. The interaction between these two types of authority is particularly noticeable with respect to turn design. For example, although the wh-question form might mitigate the teacher’s epistemic authority, at the same time, it seems to reinforce their deontic authority, by requiring the student to produce a particular type of action in their response. This point supports Stevanovic and Peräkylä’s (2012: 313) contention that epistemic authority may be the only ‘basis on which deontic authority can be justified in contemporary work life’.

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Another way that turn design indexed deontic authority was shown in Extracts  1 and 2 when the teacher used a conditional to point to a second kind of decision that students were responsible for making, deciding whether or not to revise their essay in the first place. Thus, use of the conditional in conjunction with the wh-question placed responsibility on the student for deciding whether to revise as well as how to do so. All of these verbal actions demonstrate the teacher’s agency, and they show that an important aspect of teachers’ agency is guiding their students toward producing their own agentive actions through knowledge displays related to learning to write. Because both participants work together in these decision-making processes, they can be considered co-constructions. This is true with respect to all of the extracts but is perhaps most obvious in the last two. In Extract 3, the student and the teacher worked together to elaborate the turn initiated by the student in response to the teacher’s initial question. In Extract 4, the teacher responded to the student’s initial response, by redirecting her toward a more appropriate type of knowledge display, according to the norms of process pedagogy. This led the student to reformulate her knowledge display in terms of content as well as to further jointly constructed actions related to revising her paragraph, subsequent to the extract. In this way, agency can be understood as jointly constructed action, as teachers’ actions lead to students’ next actions, and conversely, students’ next actions lead to teachers’ next actions, and so on, as they collaborate in decision-making activities. Conclusion

In general, teacher agency has received less attention than student agency in many strands of educational research. Even when it is the focus, such as in the recent studies of language teacher agency, the data examined have tended to be teachers’ introspective reflections on their own agency, with less attention devoted to how action and interaction can display agency, moment-by-moment. The different subdivisions of writing research have not focused attention here either. For example, as mentioned, in composition studies, the focus has been on student agency and how it might be disrupted by teacher authority. Yet, as shown here, teachers’ careful, interactional work to manage deontic and epistemic rights is often what leads students to display their own epistemic authority in the decision-making processes involved in writing. The strategies used to manage these rights, then, help constitute not only teacher but also student agency. Therefore, in the context of the writing conference, and (probably) in the teaching of writing more generally, it should not be assumed that teacher authority is a negative aspect, or that it somehow takes away students’ opportunity to act agentively.

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With respect to language teacher agency, I have explored writing teachers who may also be considered language teachers as their training concerned L2 pedagogy and they taught courses designated as catering to L2 writers. However, despite their training and audience, because the curriculum used in these courses was essentially designed for native English speakers and was a combination of critical and process pedagogy, there was no focus on the writing-to-learn language approach, discussed by Manchón (2011). Indeed, the curriculum used in these courses most resembled what Hyland (2011) described as an example of a learning-towrite approach. The five types of knowledge (content, system, process, genre and context) that he found to be associated with these approaches were all represented to a certain extent, yet content, process and context knowledge were dealt with most explicitly throughout the writing conferences. The more language-focused types of knowledge (system and genre) were dealt with implicitly, primarily by addressing content concerns. However, this does not mean that students were not ‘writing to learn language’ or that teachers did not focus on language issues as they came up, especially in conferences in which a language and editing focus was deemed to be appropriate, according to the norms of process pedagogy. This last point is among the questions that deserve further investigation. Indeed, in her analysis of epistemic asymmetry and learner autonomy in the writing conference, Park (2012: 2008) argued that, ‘[t]he ways in which the participants manage the push and pull between [the teachers’ epistemic superiority and the students’ autonomy] call for a microscopic, turn-by-turn analysis, which will reveal how the general institutional norms are enacted in interaction’. The ways in which the norms of process pedagogies, as well as other approaches to the teaching of writing in multilingual settings, such as those associated with writing-to-learn language, also need further research examining turn-by-turn interaction. As I have argued, continued research at this level will reveal how teachers’ agentive actions guide their students toward their own actions with respect to using written language in ways that best express what they want to say. Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee for a research and creative activities award that partially supported this project. I also thank Mary Clinkenbeard and Trevor Sprague for excellent technical assistance. Notes (1) With respect to Hyland’s categories, I believe that critical pedagogy can be understood as both writer and reader focused. (2) The names of the participants used in the transcripts and text are pseudonyms.

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Manchón, R.M. (2011) Situating the learning-to-write and writing-to-learn dimensions of L2 writing. In R.M. Manchón (ed.) Learning-to-Write and Writing-to-Learn in an Additional Language (pp. 3–14). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Matsuda, P.K. (1999) Composition studies and ESL writing: A disciplinary division of labor. College Composition and Communication 50 (4), 699–721. Matsuda, P.K., Saenkhum, T. and Accardi, S. (2013) Writing teachers’ perceptions of the presence and needs of second language writers: An institutional case study. Journal of Second Language Writing 22, 68–86. Mayes, P. (2010) The discursive construction of identity and power in the critical classroom: Implications for applied critical theories. Discourse & Society 21 (2), 189–210. Mayes, P. (2015) Becoming an ‘autonomous writer’: Epistemic stance displays and membership categorization in the writing conference. Discourse Studies 17 (6), 1–18. Murray, D.M. (1985) A Writer Teaches Writing (2nd edn). Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Murray, D.M. (2003) Teach writing as a process, not product. In V. Villanueva (ed.) Cross-Talk in Comp Theory (2nd edn; pp. 3–6). Urbana, IL: NCTE. Park, I. (2012) Seeking advice: Epistemic asymmetry and learner autonomy in writing conferences. Journal of Pragmatics 44, 2004–2021. Pomerantz, A.M. (1984) Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In J.M. Atkinson and J. Heritage (eds) Structures of Social Action (pp. 57–101). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ruohotie-Lyhty, M. (2011) Constructing practical knowledge of teaching: Eleven newly qualified language teachers’ discursive agency. The Language Learning Journal 39 (3), 365–379. Sommers, N. and Saltz, L. (2004) The novice as expert: Writing the freshman year. College Composition and Communication 56 (1), 124–149. Stevanovic, M. (2013) Constructing a proposal as a thought: A way to manage problems in the initiation of joint decision-making in Finnish workplace interaction. Pragmatics 23 (3), 519–544. Stevanovic, M. and Peräkylä, A. (2012) Deontic authority in interaction: The right to announce, propose, and decide. Research on Language and Social Interaction 45 (3), 297–321. Swain, M. (2006) Languaging, agency and collaboration in advanced second language proficiency. In H. Byrnes (ed.) Advanced Language Learning: The Contribution of Halliday and Vygotsky (pp. 95–108). London: Continuum. Vehviläinen, S. (2009) Student-initiated advice in academic supervising. Research on Language and Social Interaction 42 (2), 163–190. Vehviläinen, S. (2012) Question-prefaced advice in feedback sequences of Finnish academic supervisions. In H. Limberg and M.A. Locher (eds) Advice in Discourse (pp. 31–51). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Walker, C. (1992) Teacher dominance in the writing conference. The Journal of Teaching Writing 11, 65–87.

12 Language Teacher Agency: A Critical Realist Perspective Karin Zotzmann

The concepts of teacher identity and teacher agency both link the level of the individual with the social, but they do so in decidedly different ways. Whereas research on the former revolves largely around the discourses teachers employ and the narratives they construct, the latter draws our attention to the capacity of teachers (agents) to exercise influence in their respective professional contexts (structures). The present chapter argues that we, as researchers and teacher educators, need to engage more deeply with the interplay between teachers and the social reality that surrounds their work in order to understand not only who they present themselves to be, but, more importantly, what they do and why they do what they do. In order to account for the causal relationships between agents’ reasons for action, their practices and the structures in which they operate, I adopt a critical realist perspective (Archer, 1995, 1996; Bhaskar, 1986, 1998; Fleetwood, 2005, 2008) that focuses on ontological issues with the aim of identifying and understanding what has and what has not been causally effective in specific situations. The chapter uses data from two different research projects with language teachers in Mexico. The qualitative data provide insights into the different contexts in which these participants operate and the way they interact with and respond to the respective affordances and constraints of these structures. In addition to this, the data show that apart from just constructing their identity through narratives, teachers themselves operate with causal explanations in order to be, or to become, skillful practitioners. Introduction

Academic discussions about language learning and teaching have moved beyond focusing on ‘things’ such as methods, syllabi and curricula, and acknowledge the essential role of human beings – teachers, as well as students – in these processes. Research on the role of teachers in language classrooms in particular, but also more widely in relation to curriculum change, language policy and professional development 199

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operates with two main concepts: teacher identity and teacher agency. Although both concepts link the level of the individual analytically with the level of the social, they do so in very different ways. Philosophically, research on teacher identity is influenced, albeit to varying degrees, by postmodern and poststructuralist thought with a concomitant emphasis on epistemological issues (knowing) rather than ontology (being). Despite the diversity that exists among these perspectives, identity, and even social reality itself, are understood to be socially constructed and discursively mediated (e.g. Alsup, 2006; Barkhuizen, 2017; Cheung et  al., 2015; De Costa & Norton, 2017; Duff & Uchida, 1997; Kiely, 2014; Varghese et  al., 2005). The focus is on how an individual co-constructs and positions themselves in written or oral conversation with others. Empirically available discourse data generated, for instance, through interviews or focus groups and sometimes combined with ethnography or classroom observation, are regarded as key to theory building and refinement. This kind of research has greatly enriched our understanding on a number of issues, for example, how teachers become, or fail to become, legitimate members of professional communities of practice (CoP) and how they learn through engagement with these groups (e.g. Kiely, 2014; Tsui, 2007); how they view key concepts of their work, e.g. language and culture, pedagogy and assessment (e.g. Duff & Uchida, 1997; Wolff & De Costa, 2017); how their ideas and practices change over time through formal and informal development (e.g. Alsup, 2006; Nguyen, 2008); and how they position themselves in relation to curricula, institutional demands and language policy (e.g. Abednia, 2012; Cheung et al., 2015). Whereas the concept of identity focuses our research efforts on individuals and their understanding and narratives, any account of agency is intrinsically coupled with a conceptualization of structures. These twin concepts, as I argue in this chapter, can help us to capture not only the essential role of teachers but also the constraining and enabling features of structures that preexist them, structures that they enter into and have to respond to and work with. Views on the relation between agency and structures, however, differ greatly, as I explain in more detail below. Some social theorists strongly emphasize agency and downplay structures; others see structures as predominant and overriding agency, and some regard them as mutually constitutive. Assumptions about agency and structure can also be more or less explicit or implicit. Research on teacher identity, for instance, often attempts to account for contextual influences, but the underlying assumption that social reality is discursively constructed inevitably draws attention to individuals’ perceptions and interpretations of and narratives about it rather than the social reality they report on (Martinez et al., 2014: 453). Nevertheless, researchers make claims about extra-discursive powers that have a causal affect on individuals and their narratives, but

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often without explaining where that power is supposed to come from if reality was indeed purely a social construction. In this chapter, I explore the potential of critical realism (CR) with its focus on ontological theory and its interest in causality to illuminate teacher agency in relation to social structures. I am particularly interested in how institutional structures – public versus private education – and class relations enable and constrain teachers and how individual teachers, in turn, attempt to align their own concerns, values and practices to these contexts in order to establish a viable professional modus vivendi (Archer, 2003, 2007). To this end, I use interview data from two different research projects: The first one is based on a professional development project with four Mexican teachers of Spanish as a foreign language who analyzed and reflected upon the discursive patterns of their own classes; in the second project, I interviewed a group of Mexican teachers of English as a foreign language about the textbooks they use in class. The chapter begins with a brief overview of different perspectives on agency and structure, before I explain CR’s main assumptions in general and Archer’s (1995, 1996, 2003) variants in particular. As CR developed as an alternative meta-theory to both positivism and postmodernism/ poststructuralism in the natural and the social sciences, I point out comparative aspects wherever necessary. The main body of this chapter presents an analysis of the interview data from a CR perspective. Perspectives on Structure and Agency in Social Theory

The interrelationship between agency and structure lies at the core of most social theories and can be conceptualized in a variety of ways depending on the adopted philosophical standpoint. In most general terms, structuralists (e.g. Althusser, 1971) would argue that structures largely determine the behavior of agents and thus reproduce themselves. In a similar vein, functionalists and systems theorists (e.g. Parsons, 1971) hold that specific systems evolved in order to serve particular functions and aim to preserve these structures in order to continue doing so. Human agency, and by implication social change, is effectively obliterated in both these rather conservative perspectives. Despite the great variety among both poststructuralism (e.g. Deleuze, 1995; Deleuze & Guattari, 2005; Derrida, 1994) and postmodernism (e.g. Foucault, 1988), both philosophical currents strongly emphasize that all our knowledge about the world is discursively mediated. Foucauldians, in particular, find claims to truth highly problematic and interpret its invocation as an attempt to naturalize specific discourses. As a consequence, attention shifts to the discursive work that agents engage in when they position themselves – or are positioned in – a discursive network imbricated with power relations. Social life is regarded as either mediated (moderate social constructivism) or entirely constituted (radical social

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constructivism) by discourse. Structuration theorists like Giddens (1984) and to some extent Bourdieu (1990) claim that structures do not exist outside of, and come into being only through, the behavior of agents. From a critical realist perspective, structuralist and functionalist perspectives tend toward downward conflation as they assume that structures have intrinsic and unexplained powers – a form of ‘social hydraulics’ (Archer, 2007: 6) – that operate through agents as if they were dupes. By focusing mainly on discourse and identity, postmodernists and poststructuralists seem to have effectively ‘melted [structures] into “constructs”’ (Archer, 2007: 1) (upward conflation). Structurationist accounts make it difficult to analytically separate between agents and structures, and hence between cause and effect. CR, a philosophical meta-theory developed by Bhaskar (1986, 1998) and Archer (2003, 2007) among others, provides yet another perspective on the structure–agency relation. It seems particularly well suited to illuminate the interaction between the embodied self and the reflexive agency of individuals on one side and structures as ‘the enduring, affording and constraining influences of the social order’ (Sealey & Carter, 2004: xiii) on the other because it attributes causal power to both. I now turn to the specific ontological theory underlying CR. Agency and Structure from a Critical Realist Perspective

Critical realists acknowledge the insights of postmodernism and poststructuralism regarding how our knowledge of the world is mediated through concepts and discourse. Nevertheless, they believe it is important to make explicit ontological claims since there is a world ‘out there’ ‘regardless of what we happen to think about it’ (Sayer, 1999: 2). Hence, we might ‘construe’, but we do not necessarily ‘construct’ elements of the natural and social world (Bhaskar, 2008). Elements of the social world that are causally effective but distinct from discourse include, for instance, material or natural conditions and social structures including not only institutions and agency, but also emotions, values and reasons (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999). These distinct elements of the social and natural world are imbued with their own particular causal powers that exist in or as potential (real). When activated (actual), they interact with other forces and bring about change that might or might not leave observable traces (empirical). This perspective is different from both positivism and postmodernism/poststructuralism that commonly focus exclusively on the empirical level (e.g. behavior, discourse) and thus risk either misattributing or overlooking causation that exists but does not leave empirical traces (transphenomenality) or that contradicts what appears on the surface level (counter-phenomenality) (Collier, 1994). Critical realists emphasize that any knowledge we construe is fallible, but they also hold that some theories or explanations are better than others because they relate to a referent outside of themselves.

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Although different elements of the social and natural world are regarded as distinct, they occur in dialectical relationships. A school building is, for instance, foremost a material structure, but its design is based on specific architectural knowledge available at the time and attuned to the functions it is meant to serve in a particular sociocultural context. It is hence a material structure that is socially construed, but not socially constructed (the material of the construction is not discourse). At the same time, a school building is more material in nature than, for example, language textbooks, which tend toward the semiotic end of the spectrum. As Fairclough et al. (2002:) describe it: … the relative weight of these different elements within the overall configuration of a social action is bound to vary from case to case. In this regard it is worth noting that there is a range of ‘semioticity’ insofar as different social actions, events, or orders may be more or less semioticized. Indeed, one might be able to construct a continuum ranging from technological systems through to religion in terms of the relative weight of semiosis and materiality in their overall logic. (Fairclough et al., 2002: 7)

In both cases, the material (and conceptual) structures of the school buildings and the ideational (and material) make-up of the textbook preexist its users: Teachers and students enter into them (in the case of the building literally) and have to respond to them in one way or another. Structures, however, do not determine what agents do. Their powers exist in potential and become activated through human activities. A concrete school or an entire educational system might, for instance, educate genders separately and representations in textbooks might (or might not) reinforce gender segregation. This does not entail that teachers are in agreement with those structures and act in accordance, although they might be heavily constrained by the powers at play. Structures thus preexist social agents; their powers only become activated through reflexive agents who pursue particular projects (Archer, 1995, 1996, 2003). Agents reflect upon the affordances and constraints of structures in relation to their concerns, values and projects in order to achieve a viable modus vivendi. It is therefore important to look at not only the constraining and enabling features of structures but also the reflexive deliberation individual agents engage in. After all, ‘constraints and enablements’ only indicate the difficulty or ease with which certain projects could be accomplished, ceteris paribus, by groups of people standing in given relations to (part of) society. They tell us absolutely nothing about which projects are entertained, even though they can inform us about who has an objective material or ideational interest in adopting a maintenance project rather than a transformatory one. Much more is involved; agents have to diagnose their situations,

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they have to identify their own interests and they must design projects they deem appropriate to attaining their ends. At all three points they are fallible: they can mis-diagnose their situations, mis-identify their interests and mis-judge appropriate courses of action. However, the fundamental question is not whether they do all of this well, but how they do it at all. The answer to this is held to be ‘via the internal conversation’. This is the modality through which reflexivity towards self, society and the relationship between them is exercised. In itself it entails just such things as articulating to ourselves where we are placed, ascertaining where our interests lie and adumbrating schemes of future action. (Archer, 2003: 9)

From a CR perspective, people and preexistent structures interact with each other on the basis of their distinctive powers in an open system. This means that contexts differ and interrelate differently with the particular realization of agential powers. The outcomes of agents’ deliberation contribute either to some form of social change (morphogenesis) or reproduction (morphostasis) which, in turn, form the basis for and hence preexist subsequent interactions (Elder-Vass, 2010). The task for researchers is to come to an adequate theorization about the interplay of causal mechanisms – including actors’ understandings and rationales for action – and the contexts in which they operate (Pawson, 1996). In comparison with social constructivist approaches to social research that focus on what is empirically available at the discourse level, CR also tries to make theoretically grounded claims about ‘the unsaid, the unknown, the absent and what may lie in potential’ (Martinez et al., 2014: 456). The provision of language education in schools, for instance, might differ according to the socio-economic background of its target student group and thus further exacerbate social inequality as, for example, Lanvers (2017) has shown for the UK. Individual language teachers in elite schools might not be aware of and hence might not talk about the privileges their students enjoy. Likewise, teachers in underprivileged areas might not be aware of the resources that are not at their disposal, for example access to technological devices and professional development opportunities. CR’s stratified ontology draws attention to contextual constraints and affordances that potentially could, and those that actually do, influence agents. It can thus sensitize the analyst to the unequal distribution of linguistic, cultural and economic resources, as well as locate semiotic processes ‘within the practical engagement of embodied and socially organized persons with the material world’ (Fairclough et al., 2002: 7). In the analysis of the interviews I report on here, I focus on teacher agency through reflexive deliberation about what these individuals want to do – their concerns, values and projects – and what they feel they can do in the context of specific institutional and socio-economic structures. I am particularly interested in employment relations in public and private educational institutions and social class. As indicated above, I treat the interviews here not as a ‘play of varied narratives’ but as instances of

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reflexivity and as providing potential insights into the ‘social contexts, constraints, and resources within which those informants act’ (Smith & Elger, 2014: 114). Method

The interview data I report on originate from two different research projects (Zotzmann, 2017, 2018) with aims distinct from the objectives I pursue in this chapter. The two projects nevertheless provided rich material on the interrelationship between agency and structure as the participants were encouraged to talk about and reflect upon what happens in their classrooms, why it happens and why they as teachers act the way they do. In the first research project, four experienced teachers of Spanish as a foreign language participants analyzed the discursive patterns of their own classes using a particular discourse analytical tool (Self-Evaluation of Teacher Talk or SETT) developed for language teachers by Walsh (2006, 2011). I taped one 50-minute class of each teacher, transcribed the lesson, explained the SETT framework to the participants and asked them to analyze the transcript of their class. They then reflected upon their experiences with this type of analysis and the insights it helped to generate in a semi-structured interview that I recorded. My aim was to explore the affordances and limitations of SETT, but in the present context I investigate how participants brought in their educational philosophy and values, as well as elements of the surrounding institutional and socio-economic reality in order to explain why they had acted in specific ways. In the second project conducted with a different group of language teachers, I wanted to find out whether the socio-economic and communicative reality depicted in English language teaching (ELT) textbooks reflected the reality of Mexican language learners at public universities. To this end, I conducted and recorded interviews with eight Mexican teachers of English as a foreign language in different parts of the country who used different textbooks. When teachers reported significant mismatches that generated problems in the classroom, I asked them whether and how they responded pedagogically. Whereas in the first project, participants chose to refer to contextual factors, the teachers in the second group were explicitly invited to do so. People differ, of course, in their willingness to reflect upon and even their ability to analyze different strata of structural conditions. For the present context, I have selected interview data where the participants showed awareness of structural factors beyond the immediate context of classroom discourse and interactions that shaped their work, concerns and practices. Participants and context

The four participants (three female and one male) in the first project were experienced teachers of Spanish as a foreign language (between 15

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and 22 years of experience). Three of them came from Mexico and one from Peru. Two of them held a master’s in Spanish as a foreign language (Aurelia and Lourdes), the others had a first degree in either Spanish linguistics or literature with additional certificates in language teaching (Magda and Martin). The class sizes of these teachers ranged from 5 to 20 adult students, either from the United States or Europe, who either did an internship or studied a semester abroad in Mexico. Two of the four classes took place at one large private language institute, the other two at different private universities. The three institutions are located in the urban center of Mexico. The four participants were comparatively well paid but their employment situation was somewhat precarious. Although they were experienced practitioners, they were employed on short-term contracts dependent on student demand and student evaluations. They worked long hours, sometimes in different institutions, and reported that they had little institutional support for professional development. Out of the eight teachers in the second project, I present data from only three participants who had taught English for several years at the tertiary level: Anna (45), Paola (36) and Xochitl (33). Anna and Paola enjoyed a more secure socio-economic situation because they were employed full time by public universities in the two Southern provinces of Mexico. Both had an undergraduate degree in English language and literature. In addition to this, Anna had recently completed a master’s in English language teaching and Paola held a PhD in linguistics. Xochitl, in turn, had worked at a private university in an urban center of Mexico for seven years on hourly-based short-term contracts, teaching both subject and English language courses. She held a first degree in business administration and additional certificates in language teaching. While the distribution (gender, public–private institution and employment) is in no way representative of the situation of language teachers in Mexico in general, the data provide insights into the different structures individual teachers as reflexive agents are confronted with and have to respond to. Project

Name

Age

Language taught

Institution

1

Magda

46

Spanish

Private university

1

Martin

42

Spanish

Private university

1

Aurelia

40

Spanish

Private language institute

1

Lourdes

36

Spanish

Private language institute

2

Xochitl

33

English

Private university

2

Anna

45

English

Public university

2

Paola

36

English

Public university

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Data analysis

As outlined above, the data originate from two different research projects with aims distinct from the objectives I pursue in this chapter. The data were therefore already transcribed and pseudonyms were assigned to the participants to protect their identity. For the present investigation, the coding of the interview data was theory driven. I used a particular conceptual framework developed by Fleetwood (2005, 2008) who differentiates between structures that are ideally real, artifactually real, materially real and socially real. Under ideally real structures, Fleetwood categorizes broadly discursive entities, for instance, discourses, genres, beliefs or theories. These might not have a real referent but they might still be causally effective. Anna, for instance, reported on instances of native-speakerism, a particular form of discrimination that her students had experienced. When they applied for work in the hospitality sector, employers made it clear that Mexican workers with a US American accent were preferred. While native-speakerism is largely a discursive phenomenon, it nevertheless can have causal effects: In this case, Anna’s students were not employed because they did not have the expected accents although they were highly competent in English. Materially real structures are, according to Fleetwood (2005: 199– 200), entities like mountains and water that exist independently of what human beings do, say or think. In contrast, artifactually real structures include material entities that are concept mediated such as buildings, computers or textbooks. They are physical objects but at the same time conceptually mediated. The term ‘socially real’ refers to ‘practices, states of affairs or entities for short, such as caring for children, becoming unemployed, the market mechanism, or social structures in general, especially the social structures that constitute organizations’ (Fleetwood, 2005: 200). As outlined above, I focus in the analysis only on social structures, i.e. socially real entities like employment relations and social class. Findings Employment relations: Private versus public education

When I asked the first group of teachers about the pedagogical principles they generally follow in class, they all seemed to be committed, at least theoretically, to communicative language teaching. Lourdes, for instance, explains how she aims to create an atmosphere where students feel free to express themselves: I always believed that being empathic with students, showing interests for their interests, creates an ideal atmosphere for true communication

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and it encourages them to learn, to be corrected, to speak the language without any fear of making errors. […]. My students enjoy coming to class and they try to learn.

Her class seemed to mirror her educational philosophy both in my view as an observer and in her own view. When she analyzed the transcript though, Lourdes noticed that her way of teaching tended toward student–teacher interaction, step-by-step guidance of students and a relatively high amount of teacher talk. As a dedicated teacher, she is very positive about her discovery and the opportunity to improve her classes in the future. At the same time, she explains that she has to adjust her teaching to her students’ expectations. Pedagogic choices, according to her, have ‘lots to do with the personality of the teacher’ but she also acknowledges that ‘the type of clients we have needs a lot of organization and structure’. Tellingly, Lourdes who works at a private language institute, refers to her students here as ‘clients’ and continues to describe the context in the following way: Yes, I think we are pretty influenced by working with Germans and for this reason our classes are shaped like this. It is because they like to have a structure: You begin one way and ‘Now we are going to talk a bit, but then we are moving on to grammar’! Because I want to know the irregular forms of the indefinido. So, they demand it from you … in an indirect way, right? They will never say: ‘I want this’ but … they do ask for it. They are very happy when they can write something about grammar in their notebook […] this is what they want, what they expect, what the client asks for …

Working in any institution means that agents are positioned in specific social relations and concomitant power relations, for instance as teacher and student, manager and employee or landlord and tenant. In the private education sector, teachers are also service providers for students who are also clients. In the case of the four teacher participants, their reemployment and, in the case of the private language institute even their level of payment, is partly dependent on the satisfaction of their studentclients. As Lourdes reports, ‘at the end of the year there is an evaluation and it depends on the feedback whether you get five pesos more or less, right?’. Practitioners are commonly, at least tacitly, aware of this considerable shift in power and the effects it has on ways of interacting and communicating in and outside of class. Again, in Lourdes’ words: ‘… we have very critical… and… very… honest [laughter] students. They do not hesitate to tell you: “You know what? I do not like this”. Or: “Excuse me, please let me finish!”’. Even Anna, a participant in the second project, made a reference to the differences between the private and public

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sector and the concomitant expectations of clients, expectations that are actually absent in her work environment at a public university: ‘But of course, when some pays for an English course… this person already has an established idea [about language teaching and learning] in her mind … and so does the institution that provides the service’. Three of the four teachers of the first project feel not only the pressure to adjust to their ‘clients’ but also to compromise some of their professional values and beliefs. Aurelia who works at the same private language institute as Lourdes made a similar comment concerning students’ expectations: ‘German students are terrible. […]. They always ask for grammar’. She finds this problematic as it is contrary to her belief about how to teach and learn languages effectively: ‘the problem is to learn the structures as rules. When they speak, it does not help them to search for rule No. 44 for the subjunctive, does it?’. Magda reports on a similar dilemma she experienced at the private university where she works. The syllabus was heavily adapted to the demands and goals set by the Spanish coordinator at the US-American university where her students come from. She commented, ‘Before they [the students] arrived, the coordinator got in contact and told me: “This is what I want them to do”’. The Mexican host university had agreed to provide a service (Spanish lessons) in return for fees, a structure that Magda feels constrains her agency to teach language the way she thinks would be beneficial and effective. She was asked to focus exclusively on conversational skills and to avoid giving any grammatical explanations. This, in turn, generated a conflict between her and her group of US-American students who felt they needed grammar explanations and exercises. Under pressure from both sides – Magda’s re-employment depends on future contracts with the US-American university and her student-clients’ evaluations – she decided to offer, unofficially and unpaid, extra sessions in which she answered questions concerning grammar. However, as this question and answer time about grammar was separated from the conversations where the problems occurred, the explanations appeared somewhat decontextualized and students did not benefit from the extra hours the way Magda had hoped. In addition to this, the conversation activity itself did not flow well either: ‘They do not speak, they do not react. And I give them topics and try to make them talk and … there is simply no answer’. Reticence and unwillingness to participate in class might, of course, have a variety of sources. Magda who has taught these language courses for similar groups of students for a number of years attributes the problem to the instrumental motivation for learning Spanish: ‘… because learning a foreign language is obligatory [for these students]. The foreign language for them is Spanish because the Latin population is increasing in the U.S.’. She feels quite strongly that students want her

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to teach in a specific way and has adjusted her lessons over time to these expectations: The majority is used to a particular style of teaching […]. They do not envision that there could be other ways …. So, at the beginning, I resisted … partly because I do not even know how to teach this way, but then I started to ask them how they teach [over there], what a normal class looks like.

The last participant in the first group, Martin does not elaborate on structural factors that impact his agency as a teacher even though he has been employed on short-term contracts and is evaluated by students at the private university where he works. He seems to enjoy a certain freedom at his institution but I have no information on whether this is due to an absence of – in CR terms – real or actual control mechanisms or whether Martin has decided to ignore external pressures that constrain him from teaching according to his own values and beliefs. His upper beginners’ level class at the second private university was very lively; his, mostly European, students communicated a lot and apparently enjoyed the lesson. Nevertheless, the transcription of his lesson displays his concerns about the ‘absence of a structure’, in his own words: …the absence of a structure that includes appropriate management of time dedicated to modes, intentions, turns, activities, materials, state of mind of the students and classroom atmosphere is quite clear. This structure can be understood as a lack of a pedagogic discourse that is conscious and efficient.

At the same time, he evaluates the conversations that took place positively. According to him, the communication in class was ‘good, fluid and above all in Spanish’. As a matter of fact, the sometimes rather abrupt topic changes were, in his view, in accordance with his intention to prioritize the ‘human element’. The following excerpt exemplifies how he attempts as a reflective agent to align what he does in class with his values: I am trying to do something good. […] They are also human beings … and they are under pressure, pressure, pressure […] you are worth as much as you produce … Well, that is how it is … this is the time we live in. I am not sure if this is good or bad but it is the reality. So that is why I think that … what we need are strategies of how to survive all this, without getting bitter … […] so I try to make people have a good time … if they have to let off steam, then let us do that, if they are angry then they should say it: ‘Have you now let off steam?’ ‘Have we discussed this

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now? Ok, then let’s continue with the class’. And this what they like … they end up talking a lot about their family, about their private life…

He explains that he tries ‘to create a community’, a ‘fictitious atmosphere between us’ with ‘our own topics, for instance … having our own secrets’. His reflexive deliberation includes a critique of wider socio-economic, political and education processes that increasingly exert pressure on human beings to compete and to marketize themselves. His values have become reasons for action. In contrast to the previous three teachers, Martin has decided to work against structural constraints and external mandates and conducts his classes in a fairly unconventional way. While all four cases presented here exemplify the role of reflexive deliberation as a mediator between structures and actual behavior, Martin’s behavior seems less compliant and more transformational, at least in intent. His teaching decisions might entail professional disadvantages in the long run, but he might also be willing to pay the price for adhering to his values. Socio-Economic Structures: Students’ Background

Unsurprisingly, the participants from the second project who worked at public universities in the southern part of Mexico do not refer to their students as ‘clients’. They do, however, struggle with other structural issues as their students come from various levels of working-class and economically rather precarious backgrounds. As Sealey and Carter describe it: The distribution of wealth and of educational opportunities, at both national and international levels, is a social fact over which […] [no social actor] has any direct personal control. […] actors occupy positions which are anterior to either of them, which stand in a necessary relation to each other (university student and university employee), and which exist in a context where material resources are critically involved (availability of student places, fees to access them, and so on). This is not to say that there is no scope for differential or progressive interpretations of these realities. (Sealey & Carter, 2004: 138)

The socio-economic background of the student population at the public universities where Anna and Paolo work was decidedly different from the social reality presented in the international textbooks they used. These textbooks tended toward the representation of mainly white, middle-class or affluent people and their concomitant practices and social-cultural knowledge. Both Anna and Paola are concerned that these class-based structural differences, and their actualization in textbooks,

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impact their students’ motivation, interest and self-esteem. Paola, for instance, describes the situation in the following way: The young people are very vulnerable. They are easily affected by the atmosphere in class and also by the content of the textbook. If they were young people from a different socio-cultural background they probably would be more critical, they could defend themselves more easily. But these young people are, I think, affected by this. Because they see something that they are not, neither physically nor socially. And there is not much chance that they become like that. Because … let alone the geographical mobility, the social mobility in Mexico is zero … If before there was a middle class, this class is now in extinction. This social mobility, especially for young people is almost zero. And I think they know that. It [the social reality they see in the textbooks] is like a fantasy. But again, this is not TV. We are in a [educational] context where we are supposed to grow, cognitively, intellectually, linguistically, and I [as a student] cannot appropriate this because it does not reflect anything of what I am.

Being the only participant in this group with a PhD in a relevant field, probably made Paola particularly resourceful in identifying critical issues and responding to them pedagogically. She is aware of the agential power of the individual teacher: You can have a text that is, for instance, sexist, and the way you treat it in class is sexist, as well. Or you have a sexist text and the way you deal with it can become an object of reflection. […]. Ultimately, it depends on the teacher.

All three participants seem to have developed a variety of strategies to deal with this class-based mismatch because they are concerned about the effects of the textbooks on their students. On the basis of their reflexive deliberation on these structural issues, they decided to adapt, change, personalize, localize, substitute or ignore some of the textbook content. Anna, for instance, finds it surprising that in textbooks ‘everybody travels … unit three: “the holiday” and then they plan it, organize it and off they go to … Phuket [Thailand]’. She explains that in her region, a mainland tourist destination in the south of Mexico, the majority of learners do not have the resources to travel internationally. In response to my question of how she deals with units entitled: ‘You need a holiday: 50 places to go’ or ‘The world’s most amazing hotels’, she says, ‘It is almost offensive, is it not?’. As a reflexive agent, Anna decided to work with these units in order to enhance geographical knowledge: ‘So whenever they are in a situation where somebody talks about these places, they know at least where it is’.

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Xochitl, the teacher who worked at a private university, does not necessarily see the bias toward middle-class practices and representations as problematic for her classes. Her students can easily relate to topics such as international travel, entertainment and consumption of valuable goods because they generally have the means to engage in these activities. Structural differences, however, become an issue when students from different socio-economic backgrounds were mixed. As she explains, she sometimes has a small group of students from poor rural communities in her class who benefit from a particular funding scheme. Xochitl describes a complex balancing act between adapting, localizing and resisting the respective content of the textbook in the context of the diversity of her students. Topics like transportation and traveling were, as she argued, … complicated. The majority of students at the university [X] have experiences with this type of travel. So they can talk about it. But not all of them. Because then you have three students in your class who have a grant from the foundation [X] who come from the mountainous region and who have never before left their town, let alone the federal state and have not yet seen the capital.

In response to my question about what she does in these cases, Xochitl explains that she personalizes and localizes this and other topics, a decision that is clearly guided by her values and concerns about being inclusive and attuning to the different needs of her students. Anna has similar issues with the co-presence of students from different socio-economic backgrounds. As she explains, the majority of her students come from families with low incomes, but since her university has a good reputation in the region and offers some degree programs that are not offered elsewhere, a small percentage of students from middleclass families enroll as well. These students, however, have a much better level of English since they attended private bilingual schools prior to studying at university. In order to avoid the difficulties involved in teaching a class with students from different socio-economic backgrounds, she prefers to teach the beginners level. As outlined above, Anna, Paola and Xochitl are experienced teachers and although they differ in their reflexive analysis, their values and most likely in their pedagogical responses, they seem to have developed causal accounts of structural relations that impact their students, accounts that novice teachers might perhaps have struggled to identify and articulate discursively. Conclusion

I began this chapter by making a case for the concept of teacher agency that has been marginalized in contemporary academic discussions

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that are largely informed by postmodern and poststructuralist thought. While providing valuable insights into the reasoning and positioning of teachers, research into the discursive construction of teachers, tends, in my view, toward ‘interpretivism’ (Sayer, 1999: 34), that is, a ‘tendency to reduce social life wholly to the level of meaning, ignoring material change and what happens to people, regardless of their understandings’. My objective in this chapter was to make a case for a more detailed engagement with the interrelationship between agents and structures, in particular, institutional structures and class relations. The concept of agency, I argued, has the advantage of being intimately coupled with the concept of structure and thus draws our attention to the interaction between the two through the mediating force of reflexive deliberation. I chose to approach these twin concepts from a critical realist perspective as CR acknowledges that both agency and structures have causal powers with their own distinct properties and powers. Structures, I argued, constrain and enable agents but they do not determine them, and CR is careful to attend to the different realizations of agency of concrete individuals. In the projects I reported on, teachers who worked at private institutions were differently positioned vis-à-vis their students compared to their colleagues at public universities. This impacted not only power relations but ways of teaching and communicating. In the private sector, teachers were more dependent on students’ expectations and satisfaction, but they differed, as reflexive agents, in how they dealt with the particular affordances and constraints of the situation. Whereas Aurelia, Lourdes and Magda felt they had to compromise their approach to language teaching to varying degrees, because of their role as a service provider for clients, Martin seemed to take rather unconventional decisions in line with his pedagogic and political beliefs. Notably, these teachers did not mention class issues at all since the socio-economic status of their clients was not interpreted as being problematic. Class issues were a concern for Xochitl, though, who dealt with students from mixed socioeconomic backgrounds as well as for Anna and Paola who work at public universities. While it is not possible in the context of this investigation to establish how these teachers’ deliberations, concerns and values play out practically in their teaching, the analysis has shown, I hope, that researchers and teacher educators might benefit from the concepts of structure and agency from a critical realist perspective in order to understand practitioners’ reasons for acting in the ways they do in class in response to the particular enablements and constraints that their respective context offers. Teachers as reflexive agents not only construct their identity, they also construct their own causal theories by making ontological claims about social reality. They need to do so because they have a vested interest in their professional practice and hence in taking informed and appropriate decisions. They can ‘mis-diagnose their situation, mis-identify their

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interests, and mis-judge appropriate causes’, as Archer (2003: 9, quoted above) describes it, but you can only engage with the appropriacy of particular claims if you accept that there is a reality outside of our discursive construction or interpretation of it. References Abednia, A. (2012) Teachers’ professional identity: Contributions of a critical EFL teacher education course in Iran. Teaching and Teacher Education 28, 706–717. Alsup, J. (2006) Teacher Identity Discourses: Negotiating Personal and Professional Spaces. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Althusser, L. (1971) Ideology and ideological state apparatuses: Notes towards an investigation. In L. Althusser (ed.) Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (pp. 127–188). London: New Left Books. Archer, M.S. (1995) Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Archer, M.S. (1996) Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory (2nd rev. edn). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Archer, M.S. (2003) Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Archer, M.S. (2007) Making Our Way Through the World. Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barkhuizen, B. (ed.) (2017) Reflections on Language Teacher Identity Research. New York/London: Routledge. Bhaskar, R. (1986) Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation. London: Verso. Bhaskar, R. (1998) The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences (3rd edn). London/New York: Routledge. Bhaskar, R. (2008) A Realist Theory of Social Science. Abingdon/New York: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cheung, Y.L., Said, S.B. and Park, K. (eds) (2015) Advances and Current Trends in Language Teacher Identity Research. London/New York: Routledge. Chouliaraki, L. and Fairclough, N. (1999) Discourse in Late Modernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Collier, A. (1994) Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy. London: Verso. Deleuze, G. (1995) Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2005) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, J. (1994) Spectres of Marx, the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (P. Kamuf, trans.). London/New York: Routledge. De Costa, P.I. and Norton, B. (2017) Introduction: Identity, transdisciplinarity, and the good language teacher. Modern Language Journal 101 (S1), 3–14. Duff, P.A. and Uchida, Y. (1997) The negotiation of teachers’ sociocultural identities and practices in postsecondary EFL classrooms. TESOL Quarterly 31 (3), 451–486. Elder-Vass, D. (2010) The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fairclough, N., Jessop, B. and Sayer, A. (2002) Critical realism and semiosis. Journal of Critical Realism 5 (1), 2–10. Fleetwood, S. (2005) Ontology in organization and management studies: A critical realist perspective. Organization 12, 197–222. Fleetwood, S. (2008) Institutions and social structures. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 38 (3), 241–265.

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Foucault, M. (1988 [1982]) Technologies of the self. In L.H. Martin, H. Gutman and P.H. Hutton (eds) Technologies of the Self. A Seminar with Michel Foucault (pp. 16–49). Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press. Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kiely, R. (2014) English language teacher identity: A framework for teacher learning and professional development. In D. Evans (ed.) Language and Identity: Discourse in the World (pp. 207–228). London: Bloomsbury. Lanvers, U. (2017) Elitism in language learning in the UK. In D. Rivers and K. Zotzmann (eds) Isms in Language Education: Oppression, Intersectionality and Emancipation (pp. 174–202). Berlin: de Gruyter. Martinez, A., Martin, L. and Marlow, S. (2014) Developing a critical realist positional approach to intersectionality. Journal of Critical Realism 13 (5), 447–466. Nguyen, H.T. (2008) Conceptions of teaching by five Vietnamese American preservice teachers. Journal of Language, Identity & Education 7 (2), 113–136. Parsons, T. (1971) The System of Modern Societies. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Pawson, R.D. (1996) Theorizing the interview. British Journal of Sociology 47 (2), 296–314. Sayer, A. (1999) Valuing Culture and Economy. Department of Sociology, Lancaster University. See https​://ww​w.cdd​c.vt.​edu/d​igita​lford​ism/f​ordis​m_mat​erial​s/say​er.ht​m (accessed 20 July 2015). Sealey, A. and Carter, B. (2004) Applied Linguistics as Social Science. London: Continuum. Smith, D. and Elger, T. (2014) Critical realism and interviewing subjects. In J. O’Mahony (ed.) Studying Organizations Using Critical Realism: A Practical Guide (pp. 109–131). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tsui, A.M. (2007) Complexities of identity formation: A narrative inquiry of an EFL teacher. TESOL Quarterly 41 (4), 657–680. Varghese, M., Morgan, B., Johnston, B. and Johnson, K.A. (2005) Theorizing language teacher identity: Three perspectives and beyond. Journal of Language, Identity & Education 4 (1), 21–44. Walsh, S. (2006) Investigating Classroom Discourse. London: Routledge. Walsh, S. (2011) Exploring Classroom Discourse: Language in Action. London: Routledge. Wolff, D. and De Costa, P. (2017) Expanding the language teacher identity landscape: An investigation of the emotions and strategies of a NNEST. Modern Language Journal 101 (s1), 76–90. Zotzmann, K. (2017) Intersectionality from a critical realist perspective: A case study Mexican teachers of English. In D. Rivers and K. Zotzmann (eds) Isms in Language Education: Oppression, Intersectionality and Emancipation (pp. 34–49). Berlin: de Gruyter. Zotzmann, K. (2018) Teacher development through classroom discourse analysis: The self-evaluation of teacher talk instrument developed by Walsh. In D. Evans (ed.) Language, Identity and Symbolic Power. London: Bloomsbury.

13 Volunteer Teacher Agency in a Churchbased ESL Program: An Ethnography Xia Chao

Grounded in a poststructuralist approach to agency and identity, this four-year ethnography examines the interplay of church-based volunteer English as a second language (ESL) teachers’ spiritual identity and agency in pedagogical practice in a Southeastern US city. The findings indicate language teacher agency as identity engagement. This study views Christian teachers’ spirituality as leading them to position learners and themselves in particular ways, and this positioning affects their pedagogy. Although agency is often equated with liberating practices of change, this study reveals that language teacher agency in practice can be used to maintain the status quo – reproducing social wrongs that risk further invisiblizing immigrants’ linguistic resources. Teacher agency is nonlinear, complex and nuanced to the context and learners. This study takes into account the potential of Christianity or other modes of spirituality for a pedagogy of possibility and an act of teacher agency. Introduction

Teacher agency has emerged as one of the most frequently employed concepts within second language (L2) education and has given voice to an intersection among language, identity and pedagogy (Kubota & Lin, 2009; Morgan, 2002). Nevertheless, most research attention has been given to the university-based setting (Feryok, 2012; Kayi-Aydar, 2015; Varghese et al., 2005), and few studies focus on teacher agency in the setting of community-based English as a second language (ESL) programs. The Christian church has played an important role in meeting the linguistic and sociocultural needs at a grassroots level, especially in immigrant settlements including ESL services (Baurain, 2007; Chao, 2013). Although the partnership of Christianity and ESL education is often criticized for ‘covert Christian evangelism’ (Edge, 2003: 706), Christianity in the current

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discussion of spirituality in ESL education is understood not simply as a facet of culture but also as ‘a pedagogy of possibility’ (Canagarajah, 2009: 13). Because of spirituality as a relevant, complex and important element impacting upon ESL education, there appears to be a resurgence of interest in understanding the interface of spirituality and ESL teacher agency. For example, Varghese and Johnson’s (2007) seminal work on evangelical Christian teachers’ integration of faith with their ELT calls for more nuanced understandings of how teacher agency is constructed in and through teacher identity. Given that most discussions on Christianity in ESL education have spotlighted academic Christian institutions, there appears to be space to explore the role of spirituality in teacher agency in the setting of community-based ESL. Hence, drawing from a larger ethnography, this study aims to explore the nature of teacher agency in a church-based ESL program in a Southeastern US city. Specifically, it addresses two interrelated questions: (1) How does spirituality shape church-based ESL teachers’ sense of agency? (2) How does such teacher agency intersect with pedagogical practices? Poststructuralist approach to agency and identity in L2 education

This study is grounded in the poststructuralist approach to agency and identity in L2 education. Ahearn (2001: 112) describes agency as ‘the socioculturally mediated capacity to act’. This view concentrates on an interrelated notion of agency and situates agency within its sociocultural, local and specific context. To demystify the contextual nature of agency, Emirbayer and Mische (1998) add that agency is a fluid, temporal and dialogical process by and through which individuals engage with others and make choices by linking to past experiences, present situations and future trajectories. This perspective of agency indicates that agency is neither given by nature nor imposed by others but rather is emergent in human experience. Following Foucault (1982), Archer (2000) indicates that agency is mediated through personal powers, which emerge through societal structures, knowledge and culture. Agency resides in individuals as a capacity to act and is achieved under particular situations: ‘the interplay of individual efforts, available resources and contextual and structural factors as they come together in particular and, in a sense, always unique situations’ (Biesta & Tedder, 2007: 137). Accordingly, agency is viewed as a relational and sociocultural practice. It is a matter of individual capacity to act or imagine within a societal, cultural and power-embedded context. The poststructuralist approach to agency helps this study to examine the interplay between church-based ESL teachers’ agency and their pedagogy.

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Within poststructuralism, agency is perhaps best understood as a component of micro and macro articulations and constructions of identity. Identity is positioned, practiced and shaped within the operations of the Foucauldian unit – power, knowledge and culture. It is conceptualized with the intersections of micro- and macro-considerations. Identity is viewed not only as constructed and negotiated by individual interactions at the micro-social level but also by symbolic interactions stemming from societal structures, power relations and imagined communities at the macro-social level (Weedon, 1987). Following Weedon, Norton (2000: 5) frames identity as ‘how a person understands his or her relationship to the world, how that relationship is constructed across time and space, and how the person understands possibilities for the future’. By integrating the constructs of identity and agency, Norton Peirce (1995) proposes the perspective of investment – learning a new language is an investment in learners’ identities and in gaining the right to speak. Accordingly, language teachers and learners may have different investments in a variety of identity categories, best understood in the context of power and sociocultural relations. Following poststructuralism, this study locates agency as mediated in macro and micro processes by social, religious and other identities. It is an engagement of individuals with situated contexts that shape their identity/imagined identity. In the Christian context, Cassaniti (2012: 297) recognizes that Christianity ‘serves to mediate the agency of the self with the agency of what is conceived of as an acting, cosmologically eternal Other’, that is, God, and at times Jesus. The Other-based agency in the Christian context regards the agency of the individual as mediated in and through the agency of God. In any given social space – in this case, a church-based ESL program – identity formation is an ongoing negotiation among teachers, learners and the situated context, with particular attention given to operant spiritual and power relations. The constructs of agency and identity guide this study in gaining an understanding of how church-based volunteer ESL teachers enact agency in relation to their identity categories, especially spiritual identity. Literature Review Spirituality in adult ESL education

The research literature has yielded conclusions that may have significant implications for understanding the complex relationship between spirituality and ESL education. Spirituality is about ‘one’s personal beliefs and experience of a higher power or higher purpose’ (Tisdell, 2000: 309). It is a signifier and an embodiment of human nature and identity (Carr, 1995). The understandings of spirituality underscore learners as subjects in enacting agency to author their lives.

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Spirituality affects the nature of teaching practices in the classroom. Christian scholars view adult ESL education as a moral and value-laden process in which teachers’ spirituality inevitably influences learners in moral, social and cultural ways through pedagogical practice and teacher–learner relationships (Baurain, 2007; Johnston, 2003). Yet, little research addresses the role of spirituality in community-based adult ESL education. In this study, I view spirituality as both a marker of identity and a tool for church-based adult ESL education (Chao, 2013). This view positions learners and teachers as whole persons operating in the various domains including the social, sociocultural and symbolic. Church-based ESL programs in the United States

The research literature addresses the important role of the Christian church in meeting a gamut of educational, linguistic and sociocultural needs at a grassroots level in the United States. Historically, the church shaped community members’ language/literacy acquisition and use (Heath, 1983). This influence continues today and is growing in immigrant settlements. My previous ethnographic study on a church-based ESL program indicates that the program not only improves adult immigrants’ communicative function in English but also serves as a social mediator that engages them and their children in language and community practices in the contexts of home, school and community (Chao & Mantero, 2014). Additionally, Campano et al.’s (2015) community-based research indicates that the visions of church-based ESL programs should go beyond simple language practices and discussing the problems encountered by immigrants and should include services that move them toward citizenship. These studies illustrate that personal change, justice and spirituality are relevant and interactive in regard to adult ESL education. Spirituality, in its various forms, appears to be a legitimate mode of inquiry focused on helping immigrants to survive through offering free language classes. However, in some church-based ESL programs, especially those embedded in Christian rituals, spirituality causes a wide array of concerns related to imposing Christian ideologies and power on learners alongside ESL education (Chao, 2013). Following Foucault (1982), the Christian rituals and ideologies would be recast and reproduced by normalizing and converting learners from their own faith to Christianity. Thus, the complex and dynamic relationship between spirituality and agency for teachers and learners merits further discussion. Critical practice in community-based adult ESL literacy

There is a long-standing tradition that sees adult language/literacy education for empowerment and emancipation (Auerbach, 1996; Freire,

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1973). However, there is also a long tradition in community-based ESL programs of assimilating immigrants into the mainstream culture and preparing them to become low-paid workers. Menard-Warwick’s (2007) study of an ESL program for Latina immigrants identifies that the instruction in one such program was not only disconnected from the learners’ needs and prior experiences, but also essentially assigned the learners particular social positions, such as housewives at home. Additionally, based on her fieldwork of women refugees from Sudan in an adult ESL program in the United States, Warriner (2004) found that these refugees are limited in their abilities to use their English language to deal with their everyday lives and problems. Norton Peirce’s (1995) classic case study of Canadian immigrant women’s ESL experiences promoted a critical turn from language knowledge transmission to learner transformation in community-based ESL education. It highlights that learning to speak another language is an investment in learners’ social identity and the imagined community (Anderson, 1991) to which a learner would most like to belong to in the future. Such investment helps learners acquire a wider range of symbolic/ social power and material resources. Morgan’s (2002) perspective of critical community ESL pedagogy reinforces the construct of investment. This perspective implies a way of teaching in which real issues and social concerns are considered equal to language itself. It suggests that teachers’ identities and experiences and those of learners should be considered in pedagogical practices. This perspective provides an avenue into understanding the relationship between church-based ESL teachers’ spiritual identity and the act of agency in practice. As Morgan (2002) proposes, critical community ESL pedagogy should serve as a vehicle for investment in agency, institutional/personal change and justice. Yet, how critical community ESL pedagogy translates into classroom practices is not yet resolved. The poststructuralist approach to agency and identity embraces a situated exploration of church-based ESL education. Accordingly, this study relies on ethnography (Agar, 1996) to understand the interplay of Christian spirituality, agency and pedagogy. Ethnographic Design

As part of a larger ethnography that extended from March 2009 to May 2013, this study is situated in the ‘Bible Belt’ of the Southeastern United States where Christian churches play a significant role in local communities. An adult ESL program in an English-speaking Christian church was chosen for two reasons: (a) it was reputable for the large program size and learner sustainability and diversity; and (b) scriptural materials and church practices, such as praying and hymn

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singing, were excluded from the classrooms. Although the program is not representative of all church-based ESL programs in the ‘Bible Belt’, it is similar to larger Christian communities that also offer free ESL classes. Program and participants

The program was established in 2007. At the time of this study, learner enrollment fluctuated between 45 and 70 individual learners. Their age range was between 25 and 53 years. The majority of them were from Mexico, five were from Guatemala, and three were, respectively, from Colombia, Ecuador and Iran. They worked at low-wage jobs and had children in K-12 schools. Their average length of residence in the United States was seven years. Twenty focal learner participants joined this study. They were nominated by teachers and other learners based on their consistent class attendance. ESL classes took place on Wednesday evenings. Childcare was provided while classes took place. The classes focused on English conversation, reading and writing, and American culture. The instruction was conducted in English. Six volunteer Christian teachers were recruited from the church. They were white, middle-class and native English speakers. Except for the program director, Sally, a certified homeschool teacher, the other volunteer teachers had little formal ESL education training. Before teaching, they received training through a semester-long classroom observation of Sally’s teaching, visiting learners’ homes and participating in monthly teachers’ workshops. They all had experiences travelling abroad and being the ‘Other’ through which they had ‘been in students’ shoes’, as Sally said. Their profiles are illustrated in Table 13.1. All names of people and places are pseudonyms. An integral part of the mission of the program is ‘to reach out to our community in practical ways with the love of Christ’ (the program’s brochure). The program was designed to help learners with ESL learning in order to improve their occupational and personal lives. This core value steered the teachers toward the Christian mission – sharing love for Table 13.1  ESL teachers’ profile Level

Name

Age

Education

Job

Length of teaching in the program

2

Cora

62

High school

Client service specialist

5 years

Roy

64

College

Engineer

1.5 year

3

Maggie

57

College

Office manager

5.5 years

4

Donna

63

College

Administrative assistant

3 years

5

Sally

38

College

Homeschool teacher

6 years

6

Ben

58

College

Accountant

1.5 years

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God and befriending neighbors. The dual mission of the program, in the teachers’ words, was ‘serving God by serving students’. Learners were recruited by word of mouth and through flyers with the program information both in English and Spanish. Classes ran during the regular fall and spring semesters. Learners were not requested to present valid proof of legal status when registering. Thus, their immigrant status was not disclosed. The primary curriculum was Side by Side (3rd edition), an ESL training textbook that integrates conversation practice in a basic format. Also, the teachers integrated teaching materials from newspaper articles, magazines and other multimodal resources into the curriculum based on the issues that learners encountered in their daily lives. Data collection

I applied a naturalistic perspective that yields thick description (Geertz, 1983) based on rigorous weekly participant and nonparticipant observations (for a total of 210  hours) documented in field notes and audio recordings, ethnographic interviews, documentary evidences such as emails and a research diary. I entered the field with a broad research focus on teachers’ teaching experiences and how they were influenced by their beliefs. I shifted my interest as this study proceeded. I refined the initial focus to specifically explore the interplay between Christianity and ESL pedagogy. The field notes contextualized my ethnographic interviews with participants. Along with documentary evidence, I kept a research diary to track my reflections and ‘aha-moments’ arising from the fieldwork. Data analysis

Analysis involved iterative reading of the data through a process of open, axial and selective coding (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). Informed by the research questions and literature review, I initially focused on portions related to teachers’ spirituality and its influence on their sense of agency and pedagogy. Having established a list of generated codes that signified spiritual registers (e.g. God’s people, belief, love), I reread and highlighted the relevant classroom data and established categories for them (e.g. being called to teach). I then synthesized related categories (e.g. God and teaching practices) and examined larger segments of data. In the selective coding, I linked core categories with research literature and pieced together the codes. This led me to new concepts or more nuanced insights in my analysis. I also used critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2012) to unveil the invisible or imposing power and beliefs behind classroom discourse. For example, I found that learners used ‘us/ them’ to signal linguistic identity commitments and the teachers used modals (e.g. should, need) to indicate behaviors prescribed for learners.

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I attempted to identify spiritual and language attitudes that were treated as a matter of ‘common sense’ for life functioning. Throughout the data analysis, I took extensive notes in the margins of text and wrote expanded analytic memos for two reasons: to maintain research sensitivity and distance from site saturation and to intertwine the individual data into the whole database. Early on in the process of coding, I wrote initial memos on the events and phenomena. Later, I wrote integrative memos to help me identify alternative explanations or contrary statements, to reflect on the data and to name the generated themes. I shared the themes with the focal participants for clarification and verification at the beginning, in the middle and at the conclusion of the study. Researcher

I was raised and socialized in an environment with a mix of Buddhism and atheism in China before moving to the United States. I was open to spirituality and this openness facilitated my conversations with participants about spiritual life. I was typically on site from 17:15 to 20:00 every Wednesday evening and I also attended the program events and teachers’ meetings on weekends. I worked as a teaching aid and resource of ESL education for the teachers and learners. This role allowed me to elicit a richer account of pedagogical practices. By acknowledging participants as knowers and inviting their verification of my data interpretation, I learned from participants rather than studied them. Findings Spiritual positioning: ‘Teaching for the unity of love for God and neighbor’

My fieldwork illustrated that the teachers’ instruction was grounded in their Christian identity: ‘We are Christians’ (program brochure). Namely, the program was oriented to ‘reach out to our community in practical ways with the love of Christ’ (program brochure, 2009–2013; italics in original), as noted earlier. The teachers explicitly referenced an external Other, God, as the motivation for ESL teaching. As Cora reported, ‘The ESL program is about responding to God, an opportunity to share God’s love’. Theologically, the teachers felt that they were called to teach. As one teacher noted, ‘It is a very part of spirituality. I just do love’. For the teachers, sharing in a community was a way to exercise agency as both an ESL teacher and a Christian. They saw it as a social aspect of human life that God created. The teachers’ spiritual identity allowed them to perceive themselves as ‘friends’ and ‘neighbors’. Sally noted, ‘We really want to build friendship with our students, our newcomers, our neighbors’. The learners felt comfortable being seen as ‘us’, ‘neighbors’ and ‘friends’. Donna echoed, ‘I don’t want to see them as the

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others. We are God’s people’. The teachers viewed learners as part of themselves. This reflected their Christian spirituality: To love thy neighbors is to love oneself. The teachers’ use of the pronoun referents ‘us/ we’ blurred the boundaries between the teachers and learners. ‘Here is a family’, noted a learner from Mexico. Thus, the teachers’ self-positioning and learner-positioning was a central part of their spiritual practice. While Edge (2003) questions the morality of Christian ESL teachers, my classroom observations demonstrated that the teachers did not intend to preach to learners. The classroom appeared to become a space in which the teachers exercised their spiritual identity for both doing God’s love and being and becoming better themselves. Their teaching was associated with God’s love, care, hospitality and service. Teaching seemed to become spiritual agency in the teachers’ pursuit of God, making them eager to learn about the various spheres of learners’ lives. My field data indicated that the teachers listened to learners with humility and visited learners’ homes to build relationships between families and teachers. For example, the teachers learned about learners through a questionnaire. It was made up of two parts: the first part was about language skills such as listening and reading that learners expected to improve; the second part was concerned with practical issues that learners faced in daily communication including seeing a doctor and talking to children’s school teachers. The teachers reported that the questionnaire was a tool for them to listen to learners’ voices and to modify their pedagogical practices and materials to meet learners’ expectations and needs. Listening to learners helps the teachers create the curriculum from the learners rather than simply directing it to the learners. Also, the teachers came to the classroom about 25  minutes before classes started in order to help learners’ children with schoolwork. Luna, an immigrant mother of a second grader, noted, ‘I have no much schooling, speak little English. My son is so confused [at homework]. My teacher Donna helps him. She is my teacher, my son’s teacher too’. Like Luna, some learners clearly expressed their difficulty in helping children with school assignments because of a lack of education and English proficiency. Their children often called the teachers ‘abuelo [grandpa]’ or ‘abuela [grandma]’. The learners reported that the teachers viewed them as whole people – ‘parents’, ‘workers’, ‘neighbors’ and ‘customers’, rather than simply ‘ESL students’. They described the teachers as ‘life mentors’. This role was also reflected in Sally’s interview: We like to see a big life change. I hope our teaching will expand the opportunities, allow them to interact with their children’s teachers at school, help their neighbors fill in the medical forms, … Even their neighbors also gain benefits from us, from our students’ knowing English. (1/25/2011)

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The teachers enacted agency in and through pedagogical practices by attempting to bring learners ‘a big life change’, ‘opportunities’ and ‘benefits’. This agentive behavior helped learners gain access to re-educational resources and other systems of power such as their children’s schooling. The teachers believed that with access, learners could exercise their agency to perform, construct and organize their social positioning through the English language. As Roy’s email explained, ‘English could help students get a job, volunteer in their kids’ schools, etc. God teaches us sharing with others’. The teachers’ understanding of learners was associated with their spirituality in the power of Christ. From the agentive perspective, the teachers viewed their teaching as an achievement of agency for empowering learners to function independently in family, community and workplace contexts. They constructed the program as ‘a big life change’ for learners with ‘multiple needs’ and invested in learners’ being and becoming including ‘independent people’ and ‘functional parents’. The teachers exercised agency along with their guiding principle of ‘reach[ing] out to our community in practical ways with the love of Christ’ – an ideologically laden phrase that indexed Christian power as embedded within the program’s website and brochure. From the missionary perspective, the program offered a practical way to reach out to their new neighbors. Rather than providing learners with Bible study and worship services, the teachers practiced their love for God by offering learners ESL and life support. In their words, ‘We do our spirituality’; that is, their ESL teaching was about engagement with a powerful agent, God. Their personal agency can be seen to be enacted through ‘doing’ spirituality. However, viewed from the angle of critical discourse analysis, the teachers seemed to implicitly position learners as ‘needy others’. ESL teaching appeared to be a structural strength that gave ‘opportunity’, ‘access’ and ‘practical ways’ to learners who ‘desired’, ‘needed’ and were ‘ready to learn’, as the teachers noted in the interviews. I tentatively attributed the needy and/or disadvantaged positioning of learners to the teachers’ exhibition of their power as an English language, social and spiritual expert source. This position would potentially sustain the existing unequal footing that adult immigrants encounter because of their limited ESL proficiency and unfamiliarity with the social and cultural system. However, my observations in a variety of activities (e.g. cultural and talent shows, food affairs) demonstrated that the teachers’ spirituality guided them to care for and to view learners as knowers who owned expert knowledge. These beliefs helped the teachers build a safe, open and trusting environment for learners’ potential transformation. More importantly, the teachers’ spirituality shaped their pedagogical practices, as the next section explores, and made the practices slightly more complex.

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Enriching and transforming learners’ funds of identity: ‘Help people who are in need’

My fieldwork demonstrated that the teachers developed pedagogy in which learners’ identities and agency were presented in and through their everyday practices. Sally noted, ‘Jesus teaches us in meaningful ways. So we want to help students learn about local customs and culture and to speak English appropriately. Such learning can set up a social arena for people who are isolated’. The teachers followed Christian philosophy to structure their ESL pedagogy – coordinating around the various spheres of life as a whole. They connected language practices with the needs and problems that learners encountered in their daily lives. The most noticeable theme in my classroom observations was that the pedagogical practices got learners involved as ‘parents’, ‘customers’, ‘citizens’ and ‘dreamers of American dream’. Specifically, these practices accentuated two categories: real-life literacy (shown in Table 13.2) and imagined literacy. First, the teachers applied pedagogical practices with an explicit reallife agenda in order to ‘meet students’ practical needs’, ‘develop more social opportunities’ and ‘offer socio-emotional support’. For them, using authentic literacy practices such as customer literacy was to ‘fulfill students’ roles in life’. To create learner-centered pedagogy, the teachers employed Facebook as a platform to announce community information and activate online discussions. The teachers tried to establish ‘a friendly conversational place’ and ‘a comfort zone’ for learners so that learners would not isolate themselves in their homes. In line with the interview transcripts, my observation and online discussion data indicated that the ESL pedagogy was community informed, socioemotionally inviting and socioculturally based. The teachers tended to create an ecological condition to develop learners’ English and sociocultural access. Learners started to perceive themselves as agents to address the issues, native cultural experts and community members they encountered. Specifically, Table 13.2  Domains of classroom literacy practices Customer Information

Educational/ School-related

Health

Community information

Work

Shopping receipts

Parent home language survey

Spanish-Speaking doctors’ contacts

Employment forms

School reports and notices

Making doctor appointments

City and university newspaper

Tornado assistance and information

Job interview scenario

Commercial ads Car insurance

Apartment rentals Talking to teachers Traffic regulations Helping with homework Email scams Library newsletters Neighborhood associations’ Holiday greeting addresses cards

Reading appointment slips Doctor’s directions Instructions on prescription drug bottles

Job City-wide holiday interview celebrations etiquette

City, state, US and world maps

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they were invited to write about their personal experiences and reflect on their understanding of themselves and others, to visit the local police department or museums and to give a speech about their native cultures to the local K-12 schools. Prior to the community visits, learners drafted questions and speeches and practiced in pairs. These practices offered civic engagement and fostered group ownership and individual agency of learning. Some learners commented that these experiences were ‘selfexploring’, ‘a community platform’ and ‘fun’. Cora commented that this out-of-class practice was generated from their spiritual tradition: ‘God tells us, help people who are in need’. Second, the social imagination was embedded within the classroom as a distinctive part of literacy practice. The imagined topics focused on themes such as ‘my dream’ and ‘if I were born again’. These topics tended to develop learners’ critical awareness of the reality and imagination of the future. As a Mexican immigrant, a housekeeper wrote: ‘We drive two motors, our two sons; On the way to the Opportunity of Land; For freedom, for our American dream!’. In the imagined literacy practices, some Latina learners who were employed mainly in service jobs in hotels and private homes questioned the stereotypical and traditional images of Latinas: ‘mops, janitor, pushing cart, a Latino woman, an image for us’. The class dialogues related to these topics set up a space for learners to reflect critically on their own position in society and what they could do to improve such a situation. The dialogues placed learners in conscientization (Freire, 1973) through which critical attitudes toward the status quo emerged. By linking to past experiences, present situations and imaginations for the future (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998), the teachers’ agency in practice was exercised through combining ESL learning with ideological critique and possibility. Also, the teachers discovered that they got to know more about learners through these dialogues. Maggie said, ‘The discussions give them and myself an opportunity to share things that we probably would rarely share and mention in normal class time’. On the one hand, the teachers used to think that Latino families were not interested in children’s schooling. The deep discussions changed the teachers’ perspectives on learners. On the other hand, such classroom discussions gave learners the opportunity to exercise agency as independent and critical thinkers. The discussions posed problems and allowed learners to critically reflect upon their worlds. The real-life and imagined literacy practices invested in learners’ agency and possibilities to redefine themselves and transform into new selves. The learners felt their agency was enhanced: they became independent in their personal and professional lives and attached to the community with increased ESL proficiency. Carlos, a former learner from Mexico, taught English in his neighborhood after he had successfully learned English in the program. He noted that the program made him an ‘official teacher!’. Also, some learners could read school notices alone

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and directly communicated with their children’s school teachers; some could defend themselves and their families against unfair treatment; and some learners served as resources and language brokers to their neighborhoods and local schools. Instead of using normalization, the teachers used the real-life and imagined literacy practices from their students’ daily lives to develop ideological discussion, argumentation and analysis from the learners’ stance. In this sense, ESL teaching became a mode of forming desires and social relating for both the teachers and learners. This mode constructed ESL pedagogy as ‘meaningful’ and ‘practical’ to ‘set up a social arena’ as shown in the teacher interviews. Informed by the teachers’ spiritual identity, such instruction seemed to indicate that the program covered ‘English and more’. The ‘more’ accentuated the opportunities and social arena that the teachers set up for the learners. It was also an investment in learners’ agency for language use and community engagement. Thus, it would probably be safe to say that the church-based ESL pedagogy provided a space for an individual to read both the word and the world (Freire, 1973). Advancing ESL literacy to inclusion, justice and the common good: ‘The image of God’

The teachers practiced their sense of agency in ESL pedagogy based on their Christian principle regarding ‘the image of God’. The ESL pedagogy exercised literacy for inclusion, justice and the common good. Pedagogical practices orchestrated a variety of literacy activities embedded within social interactions in order to increase learners’ visibility to the community and opportunities for language use. For example, learners and their families were invited to participate in Wednesday evening meals at the church and other church-sponsored community-wide activities. My observations illustrated that these social gatherings provided church members with access to learn about, accept and participate in different cultures. Sally explained, ‘You yourself know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt’. Following from this spiritual tradition, the teachers exercised their agency by developing pedagogical and sociocultural practices such as cultural shows to increase learners’ public visibility. In this sense, the teachers served as cultural brokers and community mediators to help learners with social integration (Chao, 2013). The teachers’ spiritual identity also intersected with their agency of teaching for justice and equity. For the teachers, people are made in the image of God and should be treated equally and fairly. The teachers integrated social deliberative skills and ethical issues into pedagogical practices. They taught learners to write a report letter, deal with ignorance and discrimination and know about their rights and resources with regard to real-life problems and issues. These authentic discussions

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involved learners in making meaning of what they and the teachers perceived as justice, democracy and agency. The discussions also enabled learners to acquire and apply a culture of power that included the rules, values and ways of acting and being of the dominant culture that allowed them to exercise agency in dealing with social issues. Acquiring the culture of power not only increased learners’ social skills and agency, but also prepared them to participate in power negotiation. For example, Ben taught his class how to write a report about a school administrator’s neglect of bullying behavior. Furthermore, their Christian spirituality and the concept of the image of God helped the teachers deal with controversial or racial issues that arose in the classroom. For example, a Middle Eastern immigrant learner played a joke with the N-word in order to laugh at a black baby in class. The teacher, Maggie, asked the learner to stay after class. She told this student: ‘Nigger’ is the word people used to call black people. It is very hurtful. Your children will be with black children at school. They may have black teachers. I have black friends. I felt offended. (3/9/2012)

In the next class, Maggie discussed racist ideas or words of the past and the present. Concrete words that learners brought up included ‘skin color’, ‘race’ and ‘no schooling’. By engaging in critical reflection and dialogue about such concrete words, the teachers and learners connected these words to more abstract ones including ‘civil rights’ and ‘equity’. A learner from Guatemala who worked loading and unloading trucks connected racial discrimination to his accent. This critical discussion developed learners’ knowledge and critical awareness of justice and equity. After that, the Middle Eastern immigrant learner did not revisit the word. She called Maggie a ‘life mentor’ to acknowledge Maggie’s role in her perspective change. Maggie’s agency appears to be constructed and achieved through her spirituality. She conceptualized good teaching not only in pedagogical practices but in ideological development as well. Like Maggie, the teachers’ equity-mindedness bonds with their spiritual identity, which is significant in the production of their agentic actions. The spiritual lens first helped the teachers build friendly, open and dialogic ‘in between spaces’ (Bhabha, 1994: 2) where they themselves and learners could speak about their experiences, concerns and issues. Some learners described the teachers as ‘power people’ who helped them to voice concerns and appropriately deal with injustice. Experiencing pedagogical dilemmas with respect to religion and first language (L1)

Ellsworth (1997) illustrates the dilemmas associated with the pedagogical relations between teachers and learners. No matter how well

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planned, our pedagogy always misses its mark to some degree, especially when teaching contends with social and cultural differences. My data demonstrated that church-based ESL teaching seemed to pose problems and dilemmas with respect to religion and learners’ L1. The teachers did not intentionally set evangelical agendas or coordinate religious literacy activities. Instead, they viewed learners as ‘free religious beings’ who had the freedom to select their own religion and spirituality. The teachers intentionally freed themselves from the conceptions: ‘You are not a Christian, you cannot come here and learn’, as noted by Donna. Like other teachers, Donna specified her goals for teaching in noting that ‘my objective is to see them grow, learn English. So they may better support their families. Religion is never part of that. Jesus wants us to be kind and caring, not imposing’. For Donna, the program was a teaching place. The teachers were concerned that using Christian discourse would cause non-Christian learners’ unease and marginalization in the classroom. For the teachers, ESL teaching meant living out their spirituality instead of intending to convert their learners. The teachers’ spiritual identity highlights ‘a relationship of love and liberation’ (Freire, 1973: 44). Illustrated by the data of this study, the liberating relationship was built on the primacy of love in which the teachers gave up their God-like positions and certainties of Christianity as the only privileged and legitimate religion in the classroom. On the one hand, this liberating relationship seemed to embrace the potential for a pedagogy of possibility rather than a pedagogy of closure. On the other hand, the teachers were unsure how to address spiritual issues in teaching. Thus, a detour to avoid spiritual discourses in the classroom would have the potential to lose opportunities for meaning-making. Moreover, the teachers encountered another pedagogical dilemma – the long-term resistance from learners toward their homework assignments asking them to watch English TV and use English language at home. The teachers believed that watching English TV was an effective way to improve English and understand American culture. Maggie noted: ‘They all watch Spanish TV, listen to Spanish music. They need to pick up English by immersion’. Roy echoed Maggie’s thought: ‘Their children learn English rapidly. Teaching the parents English is important; that way there is no language barrier within the families’. While the teachers expected learners to watch English programs, soap operas and sitcoms, and/or speak English at home, most learners resisted doing so. Maggie stated, ‘It was a lot harder for them to do than I expected’. Some learners explained that they were so tired that they did not want to have to think about what they were watching on TV. Most Latino learners indicated that the homework assignment ‘was not good homework’. They considered Spanish as not only a heritage but also ‘an ability’ and ‘a comfort blanket’. For them, home was the only ‘place’ and ‘possibility’ for their children to practice Spanish.

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The dilemmas surrounding religion and L1 highlighted the oftencontentious nature of pedagogical relations between teachers and learners (Ellsworth, 1997). In particular, classrooms with learners from diverse backgrounds are likely to experience pedagogical dilemmas even more. Transformation and/or Reproduction: The Intersection of Church-based ESL Teachers’ Identity, Agency and Pedagogy

This study examines how church-based ESL teachers’ spiritual identity influences their sense of agency and pedagogical practices. The teachers’ spirituality radiates from their whole-people perspective of learners – learners as ‘neighbors’, ‘parents’ and ‘customers’ – to person-centered literacy practices coordinated with learners’ identities. These practices are grounded in the teachers’ spiritual identity and agency – ‘reach[ing] out to our community in practical ways with the love of Christ’. The teachers position themselves as both learners’ ‘friends’ and ‘neighbors’ and their families’ ‘life mentor’. These roles help the teachers co-create pedagogical practices with learners in a way that responds to the teachers’ Christian identity and the meaning- and identity-making of learners in their situated worlds. In their emphasis on Other-based agency, it appears that these teachers’ individual agency is oriented to their faith in God, a more powerful agent. This study reinforces Cassaniti’s (2012) argument that in the Christian context the agency of the self is mediated through the agency of God – an external agentive Other. It seems that the interconnection of Other-based agency and individual agency in the church-based ESL context forms an integrated way of being. Such being informs and situates pedagogical practices within the socially situated and spirituality-embedded context. Following Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) perspective that agency is a dialogic process, this study finds that the ESL teachers’ agency is expressed in practices of spiritual identity and transformed into teaching practices in and through dialogues with a spiritual power they perceive as God. These spiritual dimensions and Other-based agency not only help us to understand these teachers’ classroom discourses including teacher– learner relationships and pedagogical practices but also provide a rationale for understanding language education. This study treats agency in practice as identity engagement. Teacher identity, such as spiritual identity, is one of the determining factors for their agency in developing pedagogy. This study reinforces Morgan’s (2002: 148) perspective of teacher identity as ‘a way of conceptualizing pedagogy’. Spirituality conceptualizes the position of learners and teachers themselves and this positioning affects and constructs pedagogy that is agentive, practical and liberating.

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While agency has been considered in relation to self-positioning and identity construction (Norton, 2000), this study considers it from the spiritual perspective of how teachers’ spiritual identities and investments provoke responses from the teachers and construct classroom practices. These practices are laden with learners’ past, present and future experiences and desires. In and through these practices, the teachers act as agents to open up possibilities for learners to acquire English and invest in learners’ questioning of and resistance to dominant stereotypes. In Ben’s words, such investment helps learners to ‘speak out’ their ideas and feelings and to challenge stereotypes. My previous study found that some church-based adult ESL programs of the Southeastern United States tend to serve as institutional sites to enact agency in imposing Christian identity on adult immigrant learners (Chao, 2013). However, the churchbased ESL program explored in this study can be described as ‘English and more’. The ‘more’ accentuates a structural strength that gives learners a ‘big life change’, ‘opportunity’, ‘access’ and ‘a social arena’ they need, as the teachers emphasized in the interviews. The integrated pedagogy engages the various spheres of learners’ lives and helps them to become engaged community members and ‘critically active citizens’ (Giroux & McLaren, 1986: 237). It allows learners to ‘reflect about themselves and about the world they are in and with’ (Freire, 1973: 81) and to mobilize literacy practice for personal and social change. The teachers conceptualize teaching not only as pedagogy but as ideology as well. For instance, their equity-mindedness in viewing learners as ‘the image of God’ is spiritually constructed. Instead of cultural normalization, teaching shifts from language transmission to ideological critique and alternative modes of meaning-making. Although agency is often equated with liberating practices of change, this study finds that teacher agency in practice can also be used to maintain the status quo. The teachers’ ESL immersion homework assignments function practically and pedagogically. Learners, on the other hand, wanted to maintain their cultural identity at home through L1 use. Such assignments could legitimize and privilege English as the ‘standard language’ and risk essentializing and naturalizing learners and their children as a monolingual whole, thereby reproducing the linguistic deficit of immigrants. Because learners have a differential investment in relation to their identities, this study suggests that ESL teachers need to understand the situated contexts of adult learners and consider every aspect of learners’ emotional, social, cultural and linguistic beings in the process of helping their integration into mainstream society (Chao, 2016). The teachers’ agency for increasing learners’ language contact through English language immersion homework assignments conflicts with learners’ agency in maintaining their cultural and linguistic identity. This study

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highlights that teacher agency in practice is nonlinear, complex, interpersonal and nuanced in relation to the context and learners. It calls awareness to the issues of power and privilege in the classroom and beyond, because these issues may be associated with pedagogical dilemmas as shown in this study. It alerts us to investigate whether community-based ESL education acts as institutional power that essentializes, normalizes and reproduces social wrongs. Despite the teachers’ ESL immersion homework assignment conflicting with learners’ attitudes toward their L1, it is important to note the importance of spirituality in enabling the teachers to perform their agency in adapting and adopting teaching practices to meet learners’ needs. In the construction of teacher agency, the importance of spiritual identity should gain more attention. In the language education literature, spirituality has been considered as an ideological tool for dominating and discriminating against non-Westerners in general and is rarely addressed. However, this study illustrates how spirituality shapes the church-based ESL teachers’ agency, which, in turn, translates into their pedagogy to bring learners ‘a big life change’, ‘more possibilities’ and ‘opportunities for a better life’. Inspired by Ahearn’s (2001: 112) definition of agency as ‘the socio-culturally mediated capacity to act’, this study emphasizes that language teacher agency does not work the same in all cultural contexts. It differs from context to context for different people. An understanding of how language teacher agency is constructed and practiced is a complex matter. It depends on contexts and teacher identity. This study calls for a closer and more nuanced look at constructions of agency in different contexts, especially the spiritual dimension of teacher agency. Such examination may contribute to a broader conceptual understanding of the intersection between teacher agency and teacher identity. Regarding the assumed dichotomies of pro-Christian vs. anti-Christian and a pedagogy of possibility vs. a pedagogy of certainty in ESL education, this study takes into account the potential of Christianity or other modes of spirituality for a pedagogy of possibility and an act of teacher agency. This study indicates that teacher agency is lodged in their spiritual identity and shaped by the situated context. It suggests spirituality as a legitimate inquiry in understanding language teacher agency. References Agar, M. (1996) Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation. New York: William Morrow. Ahearn, L. (2001) Language and agency. Annual Review of Anthropology 30, 109–137. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (rev. edn). London: Verso. Archer, M.S. (2000) Being Human: The Problem of Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Auerbach, E. (1996) Adult ESL Literacy: From the Community to the Community. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

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Baurain, B. (2007) Christian witness and respect for persons. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 6 (3), 201–219. Bhabha, H.K. (1994) The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Biesta, G.J.J. and Tedder, M. (2007) Agency and learning in the lifecourse: Towards an ecological perspective. Studies in the Education of Adults 39, 132–149. Canagarajah, S. (2009) Introduction: New possibilities for the spiritual and the critical in pedagogy. In M.S. Wong and S. Canagarajah (eds) Christian and Critical English Language Educators in Dialogue: Pedagogical and Ethical Dilemmas (pp. 1–18). New York: Routledge. Campano, G., Ghiso, M.R. and Welch, B.I. (2015) Ethical and professional norms in community-based research. Harvard Educational Review 85 (1), 29–49. Carr, D. (1995) Towards a distinctive conception of spiritual education. Oxford Review of Education 21 (1), 83–98. Cassaniti, J. (2012) Agency and the Other: The role of agency for the importance of belief in Buddhist and Christian traditions. Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 40 (3), 297–316. Chao, X. (2013) Faith-based languaculture: Church as a place of language education and community-family connecting. Doctoral dissertation. Available from ProQuest Dissertations and Thesis database. (UMI No. 3562405). Chao, X. (2016) Community service learning as critical curriculum: Promoting international students’ second language experiences. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 13 (4), 289–318. Chao, X. and Mantero, M. (2014) Church-based ESL programs: Social mediators for empowering ‘family literacy ecology of communities’. Journal of Literacy Research 46 (1), 90–114. Corbin, J. and Strauss, A. (2008) Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory (3rd edn). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Edge, J. (2003) Imperial troopers and servants of the Lord: A vision of TESOL for the 21st century. TESOL Quarterly 37 (4), 701–709. Ellsworth, E. (1997) Teaching Positions: Difference, Pedagogy and the Power of Address. New York: Teachers College Press. Emirbayer, M. and Mische, A. (1998) What is agency? American Journal of Sociology 103 (4), 962–1023. Fairclough, N. (2012) A dialectical-relational approach to critical discourse analysis in social research. In R. Wodak and M. Meyer (eds) Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (pp. 162–186). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Feryok, A. (2012) Activity theory and language teacher agency. Modern Language Journal 96 (1), 95–107. Foucault, M. (1982) The subject and power. In H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow (eds) Beyond Structuralism (pp. 208–226). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Freire, P. (1973) Education for Critical Consciousness. New York: Seabury. Geertz, C. (1983) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Giroux, H. and McLaren, P. (1986) Teacher education and the politics of engagement: The case for democratic schooling. Harvard Educational Review 56 (3), 213–238. Heath, S.B. (1983) Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. New York: Cambridge University Press. Johnston, B. (2003) Values in English Language Teaching. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Kayi-Aydar, H. (2015) Multiple identities, negotiations, and agency across time and space: A narrative inquiry of a foreign language teacher candidate. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 12 (2), 137–160. Kubota, R. and Lin, A. (2009) Race, Culture, and Identities in Second Language Education: Exploring Critically Engaged Practice. New York: Routledge.

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Menard-Warwick, J. (2007) ‘Because she made beds. Every day’. Social positioning, classroom discourse and language learning. Applied Linguistics 29 (2), 267–289. Morgan, B. (2002) Critical practice in community-based ESL programs: A Canadian perspective. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 1 (2), 141–162. Norton, B. (2000) Identity and Language Learning: Gender, Ethnicity and Educational Change. London: Longman. Norton Peirce, B. (1995) Social identity, investment and language learning. TESOL Quarterly 29 (1), 9–31. Tisdell, E.J. (2000) Spirituality and emancipatory adult education in women adult educators for social change. Adult Education Quarterly 50 (4), 308–335. Varghese, M. and Johnston, B. (2007) Evangelical Christians and English language teaching. TESOL Quarterly 41 (1), 5–31. Varghese, M., Morgan, B., Johnston, B. and Johnson, K.A. (2005) Theorizing language teacher identity: Three perspectives and beyond. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 4 (1), 21–44. Warriner, D. (2004) ‘The days now is very hard for my family’: The negotiation and construction of gendered work identities among newly arrived women refugees. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 3 (4), 279–294. Weedon, C. (1987) Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. New York: Basil Blackwell.

14 English Language Instructors, Medium of Education and Professional Agency: An Indian Perspective Priti Sandhu

This chapter examines the intersectionality of medium of education (MoE) with the professional identity formations of English language (EL) instructors working in private English language institutions (PELIs) in India. Positioning theory (PT) and narrative analysis are used to study how instructors construct their professional agency (or lack thereof) vis-à-vis their MoE. The instructors were from three types of MoE backgrounds – English medium, Hindi medium or a combination of both. Findings reveal that the participants’ professional agency constructions on issues such as curriculum and textbook selection, lesson plans and materials development, in-class pedagogical practices and interactions with students are closely related to their MoEs. While MoE backgrounds are used as explanations by teachers to agentively (dis)empower themselves, diverse social variables such as age, academic fields and goals, personal interests and family commitments in intersection with MoEs are also utilized in unique, often (dis)empowering ways by the instructors to construct varied professional identities. Introduction

In urban India, as in several other developing postcolonial contexts, English occupies a preeminent position in education, urban professional spaces, judiciary at the central government level and in elite social circles. Despite this salience, maximal English fluency is imparted only in urban, private, elite English-medium education (EME) schools while government-run state schools use local vernacular languages as the medium of education (MoE). These private schools, while steadily increasing in number, serve only a fraction of the entire country’s population. 237

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For example, elementary EME schools educate only 6%–8% of Indian children (Annamalai, 2001). State schools do teach English but as an additional language and with limited resources as compared to elite, private EME schools, often resulting in their students’ limited acquisition of English. The inevitable consequence of such linguistic and structural dichotomies between private and state schools is the deepening of linguistic and class-based bifurcations among their graduates, which, in turn, limits the access of state-educated students to elite EME tertiary education. In this context, MoE has become an important identity marker across North India (LaDousa, 2014). Consequently, EME is often constructed as enjoying greater social, economic and educational prestige and advantages compared to vernacular-medium education. English preference has been shown to negatively impact the professional and personal lives of urban North Indian women (Sandhu, 2015a, 2015b, 2016) leading to a further fragmentation of society (Ramanathan, 2013). English is therefore viewed, however erroneously, as the route to professional and economic success by the rapidly expanding, urban, Indian middle classes, resulting in a disturbing commodification of this language (Rubdy, 2008, 2013). A direct consequence has been the mushrooming of private English language institutes (PELIs) in urban sites that are trying, albeit inadequately, to meet the ever-increasing demand for English. These institutes promise vernacular-medium educated students ‘quick’ proficiency in English, catering to their desire either for entrance into top-tiered universities or for securing highly paid private sectors jobs. The site of this study, the North Indian city of Dehradun, is one such urban center. Since 2000, when Dehradun was made the interim capital of the newly formed state of Uttarakhand, the city has undergone swift development in economic, political and educational spheres and has become an educational hub for neighboring towns, districts and provinces, which has led to a large influx of students. In addition, Dehradun has traditionally housed some of the most prestigious EME residential and day schools in the country while also being home to numerous state-run schools (Sandhu, 2016). As a result, the number of students wanting to enter EME institutes of higher education or those aspiring for well-paid professional placements has increased exponentially. This study examines a rarely investigated aspect of this situation – the intersectionality of MoE with the professional identity formation of English language (EL) instructors. More specifically, I inspect how EL instructors employed by PELIs narratively construct their professional agency (or lack thereof) vis-à-vis their MoE – EME, Hindi-medium education (HME) or a combination of EME and HME. Findings reveal that the participants’ professional agency constructions on various pedagogical issues are closely related to their individual MoEs. Additionally, social variables like age, academic fields and goals, personal interests and

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family commitments intersect with MoEs in their professional identity constructions. Literature Review Positioning theory

Positioning theory (PT) as theorized by Davies and Harré (1990) and Harré and van Langenhove (1991, 1999) and consequently developed by multiple scholars (e.g. Bamberg, 2004; Deppermann, 2013, 2015; Harré, 2005; Kayi-Aydar, 2019) is utilized to examine the constructions of agentively empowered, or conversely, agentively disempowered professional personas. Davies and Harré (1990: 48) theorized positioning as a ‘discursive process whereby selves are located in conversations as observably and subjectively coherent participants’ and posited two types of positioning: interactive positioning in which the speaker positions another and reflexive positioning where the self is positioned. Rather than being unitary and immutable, such subject positions can be compound, ambiguous, dynamic, evolving and modified within the interaction and, importantly, can also be taken up or resisted within the interaction (Davies & Harré, 1990). Subsequent scholars have developed PT further. Bamberg (1997) posited a three-fold theorization of PT that attends to both the interactional and referential aspects of positioning. At the first level, PT analysis examines how narrated characters are positioned in relation to each other within the story. At the second level, analysts investigate the interaction within which the story is told for ways in which the teller positions herself or himself vis-à-vis her or his audience, attending specifically to how the tellers’ actions and self-image are linguistically presented. At the third level, analysts examine how storytellers understand themselves as relatively more permanent, constant subjects with more enduring identities that are transportable beyond the current interactional moment (Bamberg, 1997). De Fina and Georgakopoulou (2012), while praising Bamberg for the significance he attaches to the action orientedness of the participants rather than to the represented or reflected aspects of the stories, point to the challenges of examining his third level of positioning since that assumes a stable, coherent identity in conflict with postmodern understandings of identity as multiple, temporary, fragmented and conflicted. Building upon Bamberg’s (1997) first two levels, Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann (2000) posit a complex communicative model of PT. At the first level, analysis focuses on the positioning of narrated characters in relation to each other and on the positioning of narrated characters through narrative design. At the second level, the analytic lens examines: (a) the self-positioning of the narrator both in the interactional and storied planes through extra- and meta-narrative self-reflexive moves; (b) the interactional positioning by narrative design whereby tellers

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position themselves interactionally toward their audience through their story design; (c) the interactional positioning by meta-narrative activities whereby the listener is variously positioned; and (d) the interactional positioning by the story recipient’s factual activities whereby through questions and answers the recipient co-authors the story while also negotiating interactive positions (Deppermann, 2013: 7–8). This complexity, they argue, results from the fact that different levels of positioning are related to each other in highly nuanced ways. Wortham and Gadsden (2006) proposed another iteration of PT, establishing four layers of positioning that lead to narrative self-creation: (a) how narrators position themselves as having experienced the narrated events in their past; (b) how narrators voice or position the characters in their stories, including themselves, as socially recognizable types of people who are associated as having a particular type of character; (c) how narrators, while voicing the characters in their narratives, including their own selves, adopt particular evaluative stances toward these characters; and (d) how narrators adopt particular positions vis-à-vis their interlocutors in the storytelling event. I use PT to examine two levels of positioning: (a) at the first level, following Davies and Harré (1990), I investigate how participants reflexively position themselves in their narratives; and (b) at the second connected level, I examine whether speakers discursively empower or disempower themselves vis-à-vis MoE and professional agency. I classify all those instances as discursive empowerment where participants construct positive, professionally agentive, self-positionings that destabilize prevalent discourses which challenge the ability of HME or combined EME and HME instructors to be effective EL teachers. All examples where participants position themselves as being unable to take professionally agentive positions because of their lack of EME are considered as instances of discursive disempowerment. (See Sandhu [2016] for detailed theorizations of discursive empowerments and disempowerments.) Agency, narratives and interviews

Scholars such as Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu ‘focused on the ways in which human actions are dialectically related to social structure in a mutually constitutive manner’ (Ahearn, 1999: 12). Recognizing the importance of sociocultural and linguistic elements for human agency, Ahearn (2001: 112) defined agency as the ‘socioculturally mediated capacity to act’. Such theorizations accept both the power of larger social structures to effect constraint upon the actions of individuals as well as the capacity of individual subjects to exercise some degree of control upon the former. A productive way to examine agency would therefore be to analyze the unique ways in which participants perform individual acts of agency as complex negotiations between a personal

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capacity to reflexively control their environment on the one hand and the constraining power of social structures like class, gender, race, etc., on the other. Such an examination could borrow from the analytic framework of linguistic anthropologists working with agency who examine specific speech events to see how people evaluate their own actions as well as those of others (Ahearn, 1999: 13). Additionally, agentive acts are not merely theorized as resistant actions but can potentially be acts that comply with, accommodate or reinforce existing power structures, often exhibiting elements of all of them in the same speech event (Ahearn, 1999: 13). Adopting this complex theorization of agency, I examine how MoE is variously constructed as a social structure that enables or constrains professional actions of EL instructors and the ways in which societal discourses that elevate EME over HME are agentively resisted, accommodated or reinforced in the narration of personal experiences of teaching. Aligning with the theorization of agency as a dialectic relationship between social structures and individual actions, narratives are viewed not as straightforward representations of lived experiences but are understood as both constituting and being constituted by the world. They are conceptualized as impacted by the social, cultural and historical conventions within which they are produced (Garrett & Baquedano-Lopez, 2002; Ochs, 1997; Pavlenko, 2007) and as being discursively fashioned and situated within the local societal and interactional contexts in which they are constructed (Bamberg, 2005). They are further viewed as being agentively wielded by storytellers to accomplish explicit goals within the interaction in which they are situated. Similarly, interviews, the primary data source for the present study (within which participants told specific stories), are understood to be speech events rather than direct routes to inner cognitive states (Roulston, 2010; Talmy, 2010) and are theorized as being co-constructed with situated meanings being assembled by all the interactants (Holstein & Gubrium, 1995; Mishler, 1986) for the accomplishment of specific interactional goals. Additionally, interview talk is understood to be governed by the exigencies of completing the ongoing task of posing and answering questions (Heritage, 2005) and interactants are viewed as occupying routine institution-relevant identities whereby interviewers can claim the right to ask questions while interviewees have the concomitant obligation to answer those questions (Drew & Heritage, 1992; Heritage, 2002). Despite such constraints, interviewees have the agency to shape their talk and to resist or challenge positions and interpretations proffered by the interviewer. Methodology

The site of this study is the North Indian city of Dehradun. Twelve EL instructors from three PELIs were interviewed by me between 2011 and 2014. Of these, eight were from EME backgrounds, three from

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combined HME and EME backgrounds and one from an HME background. Attempts to locate more HME and combined EME  +  HME instructors failed as these four instructors were the only people with such backgrounds employed by the participating PELIs. Of the 12 participants, 4 were selected in response to a classified advertisement in a local paper; the others were chosen based on word-of-mouth publicity as they heard about the project from their colleagues and approached me with requests to participate. There were three male instructors; all others were female. Their ages ranged from 22 to 27 years. While eight had an undergraduate (bachelor of arts/science) degree, four had graduate (master of arts) degrees. Notably, only the HME and combined EME + HME instructors had postgraduate qualifications. None of the participants had undergone any formal teacher training so no one possessed a general teaching certificate or a teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL)-related one. All had been educated in local schools and colleges of Dehradun and had been working for one year or less as EL instructors in PELIs. Table  14.1 provides detailed information about the participants. All names have been anonymized. Each participant was interviewed once. Each interview lasted two to three hours and were audio-recorded. Participants were given a choice between speaking in Hindi (the dominant local language) or English. All expressed a preference for English; however, the combined EME + HME and the HME participants often mixed both languages unlike EME participants who rarely did so. (English glosses of Hindi words are included in the excerpts.) All interviews began with an elicitation of background details such as names, ages, educational qualifications and professional Table 14.1  Participants Name

MoE

Gender

Age

Qualifications

Teaching experience

Aarti

EME

F

22

BA (history, English, commerce)

7 months

Bharti

EME

F

22

BA (English, political science, sociology)

9 months

Dipti

EME

F

23

BA (English, commerce, economics) 1 year

Garima

HME

F

25

MA (sociology)

5 months

Indu

EME

F

23

BA (English, economics, political science)

11 months

Kavita

EME

F

22

BA (English, commerce, sociology)

6 months

Meenu

EME + HME

F

25

MA (political science)

11 months

Rita

EME

F

23

BA (English, history, economics)

5 months

Vidhi

EME + HME

F

26

MA (history)

1 year

Dinesh

EME

M

23

BA (English, commerce, economics) 1 year

Mohan

EME

M

22

BA (economics)

5 months

Ramesh

EME + HME

M

25

MA (sociology)

8 months

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experience, which were followed by queries related to EL instruction. From this point, each interview took the shape of an informal conversation and followed different trajectories. Clarifying and probing questions were posed to elicit specific details or examples to substantiate their statements. At all times, the interviewees and I seemed to primarily enact our institutional roles of interviewee and interviewer in that I asked the questions and they answered my queries (Drew & Heritage, 1992; Heritage, 2002, 2005). Post-interviewing, I transcribed the recordings and classified the narratives and conversation segments within them based on commonly occurring sub-themes: curriculum and textbook selection, lesson plans, in-class pedagogical choices and interactions with students. Further analysis of the sub-themes revealed a hierarchical distribution of professional agency constructions and in-class positionings that were attributed to MoE by the participants, although various social variables intersected with MoEs in interesting ways. A comparative cross-sectional analysis of participant excerpts (one or more from each MoE) is discussed under each sub-theme. Excerpts that were the most representative of the views expressed by participants in the three MoE categories were selected for analysis. Member-checks were conducted with the participants to confirm the analysis. Findings Curriculum and textbook selection

In this section, the conversational interactions of Kavita (EME), Ramesh (EME + HME) and Garima (HME) are analyzed. While Garima and Ramesh both had an MA in sociology, Kavita had a BA in English, commerce and sociology. All three were employed by the same PELI. Excerpt 1: Kavita (EME)

 1. P: Do you have a set curriculum?  2. K: Yes. We are told which grammar rules to teach at each  3.    level. But we can choose the topics. The management does  4.    not prescribe those.   5. P: I see. And what about text books?   6. K: We can choose one from several which are suggested for   7.    specific levels.   8. P: How do you normally select text books for the courses you   9.    teach? 10. K: I have a couple of favorites. I mean I like the topics. I think 11.    they are interesting. The exercises are also very good. 12.     Students enjoy them so I select them. But I keep changing 13.     them. Otherwise it becomes very boring for me ((Laughs)). 14. P: Yeah. Do you need permission from the management for

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15.    16. K: 17.    18. P: 19. K: 20.    21.    22.    23.    24. P:

this, I mean the change of textbooks? Not really. I just inform the office of my choice and they let the students know. Do you only use textbooks? Actually, no. I read a lot of English news online and also magazines and newspapers. Whatever I find interesting and which is related to a topic in the book, I use in class ((Laughs)) after all my students are only a few years younger than I am, so we have similar interests. I see.

Excerpt 2: Ramesh (EME+HME)

 1. P:  2. R:  3.     4.     5. P:  6. R:  7. P:  8. R:  9.    10.    11. P: 12. R: 13.    14. P: 15. R: 16.    17.    18. P:

So I was wondering if you had a set curriculum. Yes. The institute tells us what to teach in every class. Grammar rules need to be covered. Type of language – questions, requests, wagerah (etc.) is also set. I see. And what about text books? We can choose from the library. I see. So how do you select your text books? When I first started teaching, I was unsure which book would be best. So, I asked a senior teacher and used the book he told me. I use the same book every time. I see. And is the management ok with your choice? Well, when I told them I selected the same book as the senior teacher they were ok. ((Laughs)) I see. And I have only studied sociology you know so my knowledge is limited to that area. I don’t know what types of topics or books will interest my students. Hmm, I see.

Excerpt 3: Garima (HME)

 1. P:   So how do you select your curriculum?  2. G: The school tells me.  3. P:   I see. And what about the text books?  4. G: Woh bhi ((That also)) they only tell me.  5. P:   Aren’t you allowed to select your own textbooks?  6. G: Nahin, nahin ((No, no)). That would be too difficult. The  7.    English medium teachers do that. Mera mutlab ((I mean))  8.    they are better in English so they have already selected the  9.    books. I just follow them. 10. P:   I see. Do you mind?

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11. G:   Nahin ((No)). Its better this way. 12. P:    Why is that? 13. G:   Meine kaha nah, woh log ((Like I said, those people)) are 14.    better teachers so they know which books to use. Their 15.    English is also better than mine. 16. P:    I see. 17. G: And my interests are connected more to my MA degree – 18.       sociology – and students are not so much interested in that. 19.       All these books look the same to me. 20. P:    I see. I asked all participants about the curriculum they followed and the extent to which they had the independence to select textbooks. The views expressed by Kavita were echoed by most other EME instructors in that, like her, they spoke of the almost unlimited professional agency they exercised in selecting their topics as well as textbooks (Excerpt  1, Lines  2–3, 6–7) with the only requirement being specific grammar for each level (Excerpt 1, Lines 2–3). Kavita, echoing other EME instructors, also spoke of her selection being governed by her interests, her positive evaluation of the activities, her desire for novelty and the freedom allowed her by the administration (Excerpt 1, Lines 10–13, 16–17). In contrast, Ramesh described the greater prescriptive nature of the curriculum he is required to follow vis-à-vis content and grammar (Excerpt  2, Lines  2–4). Although his institution granted him freedom in textbook selection, sharing his uncertainty, he preferred to select the textbook utilized by his senior teacher (ST) (who is from an EME background as Ramesh stated elsewhere); a book he continues to use to date. Tellingly, he indicated that the institutional authorities were happy with his choice upon learning the ST used the same book. Still lower down in professional agency was Garima, who was allowed no freedom either in curriculum or textbook selection by her institution (Excerpt 3, Lines 2, 4, 6). Saliently, she constructed herself as willingly complying with this institutional decree, thereby reinforcing the established status quo that positions HME EL instructors as less capable than EME ones (Excerpt 3, Lines 6–9, 11, 13–15). By constructing herself as capable of taking independent curriculumbased decisions that are fully backed by her institution, Kavita enacted powerful discursive empowerment, thereby reflexively positioning herself as a proficient EL instructor with the ability to take agentive professional decisions. Ramesh, by enacting an unsure professional persona as someone unwilling to make independent curriculum decisions despite being granted this opportunity, enacted a discursively disempowered professional self and so presented himself as agentively constrained by his personal uncertainties. Garima reflexively positioned herself as unable to

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make any independent curriculum-based decisions both due to structural constraints and her own internalized, hegemonic beliefs described as her limited English fluency and her lesser EL instructor skills (Excerpt 3, Lines  11, 13–15). By unproblematically performing this professionally constrained self, Garima, in the interactional space of the interview, depicted herself as compliant with societal discourses that position EME people as more fluent in English and as better EL teachers than HME instructors. Additionally, academic backgrounds, personal interests and age were utilized as variables intersecting with MoEs to either deepen or constrain their agentive choices vis-à-vis textbook and supplemental materials selection. Ramesh and Garima, who studied sociology for their master’s degrees, held responsible their academic backgrounds for limiting their ability to select materials. Ramesh conveyed this as his ‘limited’ knowledge (Excerpt 2, Lines 15–17), while Garima said sociological topics were uninteresting to her students (Excerpt 3, Lines 17–19). In contrast, Kavita depicted her interest in reading English news as providing her with an unlimited supply of materials to augment her textbooks. Furthermore, she attributed her age – 22 years – as being close to her students and used this to claim a similarity of interests between her students and herself (Excerpt 1, Lines 19–23). Lesson plans and materials development

Another theme discussed in the interviews pertained to lesson plans and materials development. In their responses, participants enacted varied professional agencies by referencing their MoEs and perceived EL proficiencies. Excerpt 4: Dipti (EME)

 1. P:  2.     3.     4. D:  5.     6.     7. P:  8. D:  9.    10.    11.    12. P: 13.    14. D: 15.   

How do you plan your lessons? I mean do you have institutionally prescribed lesson plans? Or do you make your own? It depends. Sometimes I just use a set of activities from the textbook. Other times, I bring in my own materials like interesting pictures of local events, or an article. So, its ok to use your own materials? Yes, as long as we can make a good lesson - you know tie the materials to language learning, its ok. And the students also enjoy new things. You know it’s not boring ((Laughs)) Where do you get these materials from? I mean does your institution have magazine and newspaper subscriptions? No, not really. But I read newspapers and magazines at home and so I use them.

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16. P:   I see. Do you ask for help from colleagues to construct 17.    exercises for these materials? 18. D: Not really. I like to do it myself because I know what my 19.    students need. It’s not that difficult, you know ((Laughs)). Excerpt 5: Meenu (EME+HME)

 1. P:      So could you tell me how you plan your lessons?  2. M: I usually plan them at work.  3. P:     I see. And do you prefer to use the textbook or do you also  4.     use outside materials?  5.    M: The textbook.  6. P:      Why is that?  7. M: It’s easy nah ((right)). All the activities are already there. If  8.     I use my own materials, then I have to spend so much time  9.     making activities. It’s too much tension. ((Laughs)) Aur 10.      phir galtiyaan ho jati hain grammar wagerah mein ((And 11.      then mistakes also get made in grammar etc.)) 12. P:     I see. So, you never use outside materials then? 13. M: Only when another teacher shares her materials with me. 14.       You know sometimes woh boltein hain ki ((they say that)) 15.       something new bahut achcha gaya ((worked very well)). 16.       Then I ask them to share with me. Us tarhan ((That way)) I 17.    know the activities are correct and students will like them. 18. P:      I see. Excerpt 6: Garima (HME)

 1. P:   So how do you plan your lessons? Do you use the textbook  2.         or make your own materials?  3. G: I always use the text book.  4. P:    Why is that?  5. G: Mujhe pata nahin kaise banaate hain ((I don’t know how to  6.      make them))  7. P:   Have you ever tried?  8. G: Nahin baba ((No man)). Bahut mistakes kar doongi ((I’ll  9.      make many mistakes)) ((Laughs)). Students haseinge 10.    mujh pe ((Students will laugh at me)). 11. P:   I see. As stated above, the three instructors included here, like all others in this study, were not trained language instructors. Their qualifications encompassed either a BA or an MA degree in non-education areas. Consequently, none of them had any pre-service training about language

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learning theories, research in the field, materials development or any in-class teaching experience prior to assuming their current positions. It could thus be surmised that as relatively new, untrained teachers, they might all be equally unsure and hesitant about developing their own materials. However, on analysis, this uncertainty was evidenced only by HME and combined HME and EME participants while all the EME instructors exhibited greater confidence in lesson planning and materials development. Deepti’s (with an EME and a BA) responses reflexively positioned herself as moving fluidly between textbook-based activities and her own materials (Excerpt  4, Lines 4–6) and of being casually confident about developing interesting new materials while promoting her language teaching goals (Excerpt 4, Lines 8–10). Moreover, she constructed herself as fully capable of independently and effortlessly creating materials targeting her students’ needs (Excerpt 4, Lines 18–19). In contrast, Meenu (with a combined HME and EME and an MA in political science) linked her usage of textbook-based activities to negative aspects of materials development that she enumerated as excessive time consumption, tension generation and potential linguistic inaccuracies (Excerpt 5, Lines 7–11). Furthermore, her dependence on and confidence in others’ materials contributed toward reflexively positioning herself as unsure of her professional skills in this area (Excerpt 5, Lines 13–17). Yet further along was Garima (with an HME and an MA in sociology) who reflexively signaled her comprehensive dependence on the textbook, which she attributed to her lack of knowledge about materials construction and her certainty that her materials would be error filled. This contributed to her fear of being ridiculed by her students (Excerpt  6, Lines  3, 5–6, 8–10). Interestingly, the EME instructors never mentioned being concerned about negative in-class positionings, leading me to tentatively posit that MoE might be a contributing factor, among others, in the positions ascribed to instructors by students. This certainly seemed to be the case for Garima who repeatedly referenced her fear of being derided by her students due to her ‘limited’ and ‘insufficient’ English abilities. MoE and EL proficiency were connected to the professional agency these participants indexed in their talk about lesson planning and materials development. Deepti enacted the greatest discursive empowerment through her portrayal of effortless self-confidence in materials development whereas Meenu and Garima discursively disempowered themselves when they narratively related their lack of confidence in constructing relevant or linguistically accurate pedagogical materials. Neither of the latter two linked their self-proclaimed ‘limited’ English proficiency to their MoEs, making it difficult to analytically connect their constrained professional agency to their MoE. However, none of the EME instructors attributed their varying dependence on textbooks to limitations in their English proficiency while the other two combined EME  +  HME

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teachers (i.e. Vidhi and Ramesh) made the same connections between their dependence on textbooks and their self-proclaimed ‘limited’ English proficiency levels as Meenu and Garima. In-class pedagogical practices regarding lesson plans

I elicited information about the in-class pedagogical practices of the instructors, especially the extent to which they followed their lesson plans while teaching, to generate discussions about how comfortable they felt making online alterations to prepared plans. As previously, the instructors’ responses were broadly categorizable according to their MoEs with EME participants reporting maximum in-class variation to their plans. Responses from Aarti (EME, BA), Vidhi (EME  +  HME, MA in history) and Garima’s (HME, MA in political science) are analyzed here. Excerpt 7: Aarti (EME)

 1. P: So, while teaching, do you always try to teach your lesson  2.    as planned?  3. A: Yes, mostly that’s what I try to do. But sometimes I also  4.    change things.  5. P: Could you give me an example?  6. A: Like if I have planned some activities but I see students do  7.     not understand the topic or have difficulty with word  8.     meaning, then I just stop and explain the difficulties. There  9.     is no point in carrying on if they don’t understand, you 10.     know. 11. P: I see what you mean. Excerpt 8: Vidhi (EME+HME)

 1. P:   While teaching, do you always teach according to your  2.    lesson plan?  3. V: Haan ((Yes)). That is my main goal. I always try for that.  4. P:  Are there times when you teach things you haven’t  5.     planned?  6. V: Nahin ((No)). I try to avoid that.  7. P:   Why is that?  8.  V: Dekho ((See), I am confident about what I have planned.  9.     So, meri koshish yeh hi rehti hai ((my efforts are only)) to 10.    teach that. 11. P: I see. And if you feel that students need more practice or 12.    explanation then what do you do? 13. V:   Toh ((So)) I plan for the next day. 14. P: I see.

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Excerpt 9: Garima (HME)

 1. P:   So, when you are teaching, do you always teach according  2.    to what you have planned?  3. G: Haan ((Yes)).  4. P:   Why is that?  5. G: I prepare a lot. Meaning, I try to learn all the new words  6.    and rules wagerah (etc.). That way I can answer student  7.    questions on anything.  8. P:   I see. Are there times when you do things differently than  9.    your lesson plan? 10. G: Nahin, nahin ((No, no)). If I do that, toh phir ((then)) things 11.    go wrong. 12. P:   What do you mean? 13. G: Mutlab ((Meaning)) everything upar-niche ho jaata hai 14.    ((everything turns upside-down)). Chaos ho jaata hai 15.    ((Chaos happens)). 16. P:    Why is that? 17. G:  Itni English I don’t know ((I don’t know so much 18.    English)). So I have to prepare everything before I teach. 19. P:    I see. Aarti explained making alterations to her plan in response to the perceived online needs of her students as good pedagogy (Excerpt  7, Lines 6–9). Vidhi stated that she stayed with her plan (Excerpt 8, Line 3) and on being probed for an explanation, she spoke of being confident of the materials in her plan (Excerpt 8, Lines 8–10). On further elicitation, wherein I raised instances of potential student difficulties, she said she addressed these in subsequent planned lessons (Excerpt 8, Line 13). Garima, like Vidhi, also asserted that she adhered to her lesson plan. However, her justification for doing so differed in that she reported preparing thoroughly for her lessons, which enabled her to confidently answer student questions (Excerpt  9, Lines  5–9). On further probing, Garima clarified that she never deviated from her planned lesson as that led to chaos. She attributed this to her limited English proficiency (Excerpt 9, Lines 13–15, 17–18). Aarti’s easy confidence to make in-class changes in her planned lessons was in sharp contrast to Vidhi’s and Garima’s firm adherence to their plans. Aarti, through her utterances, reflexively positioned herself as an agentively empowered teacher capable of introducing flexibility into her planned activities to better address her students’ in-class needs, thereby enacting a powerful discursive empowerment. On the other hand, Vidhi and Garima, by reflexively positioning themselves as agentively constrained to adhere to their lesson plans because of their

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negative self-evaluations of their English proficiency levels enacted discursive disempowerments. As in the previous section, the HME and combined HME and EME participants did not causatively link their ‘limited’ English proficiency to their MoEs, but it bears repetition that participants from EME backgrounds never mentioned any English proficiency restrictions in this dataset, leading me to posit that such constraints were felt, or at least expressed, by members of the other two MoE categories. Interactions with students

Another topic discussed with all instructors was their perceptions of their students. All the instructors were forthcoming on this matter; however, their responses could be categorized based on their MoEs with the EME background teachers expressing easy-going, friendly relationships with their students while the EME + HME and HME instructors constructed more constrained associations. However, other variables intersected in telling ways with MoE. Excerpt 10: Bharti (EME) 1. P: Can you tell me something about your students? 2. B: They are wonderful! Really nice you know, very friendly. 3.    Before joining this place, I had been worried about this you 4.    know because most are from Hindi medium schools so I 5.    wasn’t sure if I they would like me. But after coming here, 6.    I find them very sweet. They always eager to talk even after 7.    class. They say they like my English and want to speak like 8.    me ((Laughs)). 9. P: I see. Excerpt 11: Dinesh (EME)

 1. P: So, can you tell me something about your students?  2. D: They are great! We have a lot in common. They are only a  3.     few years younger than me and most want to study  4.     commerce and economics like me. Many are preparing for  5.     entrance exams to management schools as am I.  6. P: I see.  7. D: Yeah, they are always asking questions about entrance  8.     exams to management schools. Many times, we chat in the  9.    breaks and sometimes we meet for tea in the cafe outside. 10. P:  I see. 11. D: Yeah, and they also want to practice their English you 12.    know ((Laughs)).

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Excerpt 12: Vidhi (EME+HME)

 1. P:   So, can you tell me something about your students?  2. V: Sach bolein toh ((To be honest)), I’m a little nervous of  3.        them.  4. P:   Why is that?  5. V: Kyunki ((Because)) they know I am not from a good school  6. P:   Hmm?  7. V: Mutlab ((Meaning)) an English school, so sometimes I can  8.        hear them laughing at me in class. I get tense then. Mutlab  9.        ((meaning)) it makes me nervous. 10. P:   I’m sorry. 11. V: Its ok. I just teach my lesson and go home. 12. P:   I see. So, do you speak with them after class? 13. V: No, no. After class, they leave immediately. 14. P:   I see. Have you tried getting close to them? 15. V: Nahin ((No)), not really. We don’t have much in common. 16.       ((Aur phir)) I need to get home quickly. I have a small 17.       daughter ((aur)) and my mother-in-law can’t take care of 18.       her. 19. P:   I see. 20. V: Haan ((Yes)) I don’t really have the time you see. 21. P:   Yes, I understand. Excerpt 13: Garima (HME)

 1. P:   So tell me something about your students.  2. G: They can become quite noisy so I am very strict with them.  3. P:   Strict, how?  4. G: Mutlab ((Meaning)) I don’t allow them to talk in class.  5.        When I am lecturing, they have to keep quiet and listen.  6. P:   I see. And what about at other times?  7. G: Mein unhe zyaada bolne ke liye encourage nahin karti ((I  8.        don’t encourage them to talk too much))  9. P:   Why is that? 10. G: I don’t want them to ask too many questions. Dar lagta hai 11.       ki ((I’m afraid that)) I won’t be able to give them the right 12.       answer. 13. P:   Why is that? 14. G: Kyunki ((Because)) my English is not so strong. 15. P:   I see. 16. G: Haan toh mein teacher-student ka rishta rakhti houn. 17.    ((Yes, so I keep a teacher-student relationship)). Not like

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18.      the English school teachers. Woh log toh bahut friendly ho 19.      jaate hain ((Those people become very friendly)). I don’t 20.      want that. 21. P: I see. Bharti (EME, BA) and Dinesh (EME, BA) spoke of different aspects of their education that helped them connect with their students. For Bharti, her pre-teaching apprehension of her HME students’ dislike of her due to her MoE was presented as unfounded. Instead, her English was reported as forging stronger bounds between her and her students (Excerpt  10, Lines  2–8). For Dinesh, in addition to his English fluency, his many commonalities with his students (e.g. his undergraduate studies in economics and commerce, his interest in and preparation for entrance examinations for management schools and his age proximity with them) provided multiple avenues for building strong bonds with them that transcended classroom interactions (Excerpt 11, Lines 2–5, 7–9, 11–12). On the other hand, Vidhi (EME + HME, MA) mentioned feeling tense and nervous when her students laughed at her in class because of her nonEME schooling (Excerpt 12, Lines 2–3, 5, 7–9). She also cited limited common interests between herself and her students (Excerpt 12, Line 15) as another factor constraining her relationship with her students. Additionally, Vidhi, one of the few married instructors in this dataset, mentioned the lack of childcare support due to her mother-in-law’s inability to take care of her young daughter for long stretches of time as yet another reason for the limited time she can spend with her students outside of class hours (Excerpt 12, Lines 16–18, 20). This is in sharp contrast to Dinesh’s extended after-class interactions with his students. It could be surmised that the scorn of her students as well as their limited common interests would further inhibit Vidhi in contrast to the acceptance showered upon Bharti and Dinesh. Garima (HME, MA) described maintaining a ‘strict’ relationship with her students and discouraging excessive student talk as she feared she would be unable to answer their questions (Excerpt  13, Lines 7–8, 10–12). She also distinguished her formal relationship with her students with the more informal ones of the EME teachers in her institute (Excerpt  13, Lines  16–20). It might additionally be surmised that both Vidhi at 26 years and Garima at 25 years had more of an age difference with their students than Bharti at 22 years and Dinesh at 23 years. Most students who attended these PELIs were either high school graduates or enrolled in undergraduate degrees, making their approximate age range between 17 and 22 years. Bharti and Dinesh reflexively positioned themselves as being agentively capable of deploying varied aspects of their MoE and academic backgrounds as well as other factors to build friendly, interactive

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relationships with their students, thereby performing discursively empowered selves. However, both Vidhi and Garima reflexively positioned themselves as being agentively constrained in their relationships with their students. By attributing these restricted associations with their students to their MoEs, limited English fluency and other contributing factors, both discursively disempowered themselves. Discussion

The elevated position ascribed to English in postcolonial countries like India has been critiqued by several scholars for deepening existing social structurations (LaDousa, 2014; Ramanathan, 2005, 2013; Rubdy, 2008, 2013; Sandhu, 2015a, 2015b, 2016). While English has become commodified in India, as elsewhere, more research is needed to understand the many ways in which this language is inextricably enmeshed in the everyday lives of its citizens who live in a country that is undergoing a rapid rise of the middle classes while simultaneously experiencing the ever-escalating forces of globalization, modernization, urbanization and digitization, which are cumulatively creating new inequalities (Rubdy, 2008). LaDousa (2014), a linguistic anthropologist, has shown how MoE has become a common category of identification across North India. Ramanathan (2005, 2013) has conducted research in western India to reveal the difficulties experienced by vernacular-medium students when they encounter EME in tertiary education. I have investigated the ways in which MoE, especially HME, have been narrated as being deeply, and most often negatively, implicated in the lives of North Indian women (Sandhu, 2016 among others). These and similar studies have highlighted the problematic salience of English and EME in the lives of enrolled students and of adults who experience academic-, class-, gender- and profession-based disadvantages because of their vernacular MoEs. The present study adds to this body of work by examining how MoE is involved in constraining (or facilitating) the self-reported professional agency constructions of EL instructors. Just as postmodern constructions of identity need to be examined within the intersectionalities of race, gender, language and class, so too, studies of EL instructor agency need to attend to the impact of social structures like MoE on teacher agency, especially in countries like India where multiple types of schools utilize varied MoEs. Social discourses posit that graduates of elite private EME schools speak the most fluent and ‘desirable’ English, branding such an education as premier social capital. Hegemonic internalizations of such discriminatory attitudes were evidenced in the narrated, agentively constrained constructions of the pedagogical experiences of the HME and combined EME  +  EME instructors in this study. Except for a few cases in which these instructors recounted stories of being negatively positioned by their students,

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the majority of conversations revolved around instructors’ own reflexive claims of their limited linguistic proficiencies. For the most part, this reported negative self-evaluation was implicated in their constructions of professional personas that were severely restricted across varied pedagogical practices. This is especially telling as, apart from using occasional Hindi words and phrases, the single HME and the three EME + HME EL instructors spoke fluent and accurate English with me during our interviews, leading me to conclude that these four participants seem to have internalized dominant discourses that equate English fluency with EME. In contrast, the EME participants constructed agentively empowered professional personas that leveraged their, often implied, English proficiency levels. In addition to MoE, other social variables such as age, areas of academic study, personal interests and family responsibilities were seen to intersect in salient ways with the varied MoEs of the language instructors. Instructors who were closer in age to their students such as Dinesh or Kavita (as was the case with most EME instructors in the dataset) were shown to wield this factor to build close connections with their students, which enabled them to claim greater agency in their professional roles. Similarly, common interests ranging from current affairs, online news (Kavita and Dipti) or common goals for further studies (Dinesh) were shown to positively contribute to the positive associations and professional skills of certain instructors. Conversely, a lack of such common interests was reported as inhibiting other instructors (e.g. Ramesh and Garima whose sociology backgrounds were reported as leading to a gap in interests between them and their students). Such findings, even though the positive variations of which were restricted to the EME instructors in this study, suggest that social variables other than MoE could potentially be harnessed successfully by teachers from HME and combined HME  +  EME backgrounds to professionally empower themselves and in so doing dismantle hegemonic belief systems according primacy to EME. Similarly, critical approaches in second language teacher education would help teachers from such backgrounds to overcome many of the uncertainties and agentive constraints expressed in this study. References Ahearn, L. (1999) Agency. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9 (1–2), 12–15. Ahearn, L. (2001) Language and agency. Annual Review of Anthropology 30, 109–137. Annamalai, E. (2001) Managing Multilingualism in India: Political and Linguistic Manifestation. New Delhi: Sage. Bamberg, M. (1997) Positioning between structure and performance. Journal of Narrative and Life History 7 (1–4), 335–342. Bamberg, M. (2004) ‘I know it may sound mean to say this, but we couldn’t really care less about her anyway’. Form and functions of ‘slut-bashing’ in male identity constructions in 15-year-olds. Human Development 47, 331–353.

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Bamberg, M. (2005) Narrative discourse and identities. In J.C. Meister, T. Kindt and W. Schernus (eds) Narratology beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity (pp. 213–237). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Davies, B. and Harré, R. (1990) Positioning: The discursive positioning of selves. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 20 (1), 43–63. De Fina, A. and Georgakopoulou, A. (2012) Analyzing Narratives. Discourse and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deppermann, A. (2013) Positioning in narrative interaction. Narrative Inquiry 23 (1), 1–15. Deppermann, A. (2015) Positioning. In A. De Fina and A. Georgakopoulou (eds) The Handbook of Narrative Analysis (pp. 369–387). Malden, MA: John Wiley. Drew, P. and Heritage, J. (1992) Analyzing talk at work: An introduction. In P. Drew and J. Heritage (eds) Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings (pp. 3–65). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garrett, P.B. and Baquedano-López, P. (2002) Language socialization: Reproduction and continuity, transformation and change. Annual Review of Anthropology 31, 339–361. Harré, R. (2005) Positioning and the discursive construction of categories. Psychopathology 38, 185–188. Harré, R. and Langenhove, L.V. (1991) Varieties of positioning. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 21 (4), 393–407. Harré, R. and Langenhove, L.V. (eds) (1999) Positioning Theory: Moral Contexts of Intentional Action. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Heritage, J. (2002) The limits of questioning: Negative interrogatives and hostile question content. Journal of Pragmatics 34, 1427–1446. Heritage, J. (2005) Conversation analysis and institutional talk. In K.L. Fitch and R.E. Sanders (eds) Handbook of Language and Social Interaction (pp. 103–147). New York: Lawrence Erlbaum. Holstein, J.A. and Gubrium, J.F. (1995) The Active Interview. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kayi-Aydar, H. (2019) Positioning Theory in Applied Linguistics: Research Design and Applications. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. LaDousa, C. (2014) Hindi is Our Ground, English is Our Sky: Education, Language, and Social Class in Contemporary India. New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books. Lucius-Hoene, G. and Deppermann, A. (2000) Narrative identity empiricized: A dialogical and positioning approach to autobiographical research interviews. Narrative Inquiry 10 (1), 199–222. Mishler, E.G. (1986) Research Interviewing: Context and Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ochs, E. (1997) Narrative. In T.A. Van Dijk (ed.) Discourse as Structure and Process (pp. 185–207). London: Sage. Pavlenko, A. (2007) Autobiographic narratives as data in applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics 28 (2), 163–188. Ramanathan, V. (2005) The English-Vernacular Divide: Postcolonial Language Politics and Practice. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Ramanathan, V. (2013) A postcolonial perspective in applied linguistics: Situating English and the vernaculars. In M. Hawkins (ed.) Framing Languages and Literacies: Socially Situated Views and Perspectives (pp. 83–104). New York: Routledge. Roulston, K. (2010) The Reflective Researcher: Learning to Interview in the Social Sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Rubdy, R. (2008) English in India: The privilege and privileging of social class. In P.K.W. Tan and R. Rubdy (eds) Language as a Commodity: Global Structures, Local Marketplaces (pp. 122–145). London: Continuum.

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Rubdy, R. (2013) Hybridity in the linguistic landscape: Democratizing English in India. In R. Rubdy and L. Alsagoff (eds) The Global–Local Interface and Hybridity: Exploring Language and Identity (pp. 43–65). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Sandhu, P. (2015a) Stylizing voices, stances, and identities related to medium of education in India. Multilingua: Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication 34 (2), 211–235. Sandhu, P. (2015b) Resisting linguistic marginalization in professional spaces: Constructing multi-layered oppositional stances. Applied Linguistics Review 6 (3), 369–391. Sandhu, P. (2016) Professional Identity Constructions of Indian Women. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Talmy, S. (2010) Qualitative interviews in applied linguistics: From research instrument to social practice. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 30, 128–148. Wortham, S. and Gadsden, V. (2006) Urban fathers positioning themselves through narrative: An approach to narrative self-construction. In A. De Fina, D. Schiffrin and M. Bamberg (eds) Discourse and Identity (pp. 315–341). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Afterword

As Margaret Archer (2007: 35) observed of her own works, ‘Although the respect due to one’s readers necessarily means that each book one publishes should be self-standing, that does not (and cannot) mean it is self-contained’. This comment captures the relationship among researchbased Chapters 3–15 in this collection: Each stands alone, yet none exists alone, since each speaks to agency in language teachers and therefore speaks to each other as well. I have tried to relate some of what I have heard of this conversation in three ways. First, I address some of the broader topic-related messages in the section ‘Messages’. Second, I address the title of this book. Because the title mentions theory, I have grouped the studies based on how they have been framed, whether this is done explicitly or implicitly. Because the title also mentions analysis, I also comment on the methods employed. I therefore have divided the studies into three groups, which are in reverse chronological order to their appearance in the world of ideas, for rhetorical reasons. These are ‘Achievements and Effects: Ecological and Network Approaches’; ‘The Power of Positioning: Discursive Approaches’; and ‘Conquering Contradictions: Dialectical Approaches’. Third, I sum up what I have learned about agency, a very welcome outcome for which I particularly thank the editors, in a final section called ‘Agency, Routinization and Transformation’. Messages

One message from the introduction of this book is for more diversity in research on agency, but this book certainly makes its own contribution in that direction. The exception is that English dominates in terms of the target language taught by teachers, with only two studies looking at teachers of another target language, Spanish. However, the studies are considerably more diverse in terms of participants and research sites. Although six studies take place in the United States, they show the variety of its language teaching situations. US studies included variously qualified and experienced language teachers in high schools coping with teacher 258

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evaluation (Warren) and reluctant Spanish learners (Back). They collectively collaborated in (Fones) and even challenged and changed (Kasun, Clark, Kaneria and Staker) local school English language learner (ELL) teaching. Other language and teaching situations ranged from qualified and experienced bi/multilingual Spanish–English dual immersion primary teachers (Venegas-Weber) to minimally trained monolingual teachers of adult ELLs (Chao) to writing teachers with MAs in English language and linguistics of university ELLs (Mayes). There is considerable diversity in the other six chapters, including Mexican teachers of Spanish as a foreign language in Mexican public and private universities and private language institutes (Zotzmann); a grassroots Filipino teacher organization whose members teach ELLs in private language institutes and public schools in Japan (Stewart); Australian teachers of ELLs in programs associated with Australian universities (Edwards); a Chinese teacher of ELLs who teaches privately from his home in China (Li and De Costa); and Indian teachers of ELLs in private language institutes in India (Sandhu). One of the strongest messages is that there are many different and sometimes unexpected ways in which teachers’ agency is exercised or extinguished in relationships with administrators and evaluators (Back; Fones; Edwards; Kasun, Clark, Kaneria and Staker; Warren), as well as colleagues (Stewart; Venegas-Weber) and students (Chao; Li and De Costa; Mayes; Kasun, Clark, Kaneria and Staker; Sandhu; Zotzmann). Particularly striking are the arguments and evidence that teacher agency can support learner agency in different ways, through kind love (Chao; Kasun, Clark, Kaneria and Staker) and harsh love (Venegas-Weber), through acquiescence (Zotzmann) and authority (Mayes), through organizations (Chao; Stewart), materials and methods (Edwards; Li and De Costa) and stories (Back; Kasun, Clark, Kaneria and Staker). Another very strong message with implications for how agency is researched is that agency matters to teachers. When teachers perceive themselves as having agency, they feel good enough in some way to keep on trying, whereas perceiving themselves as not having agency makes them feel bad enough in some way to question themselves and their role as teachers (see Sandhu for a poignant contrast between these feelings). It doesn’t seem to make any difference how agency is defined, what the theoretical framework of a study is, which kinds of data are collected or even how the data are analyzed: virtually every study in this book shows how strongly people are affected by their perception of their agency. In other words, perceptions of agency are related to self-efficacy beliefs. As Bandura (2006) emphasizes: Among the mechanisms of human agency, none is more central or pervasive than belief of personal efficacy (Bandura, 1997). This core belief is the foundation of human agency. Unless people believe they can produce

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desired effects by their actions, they have little incentive to act, or to persevere in the face of difficulties. Whatever other factors serve as guides and motivators, they are rooted in the core belief that one has the power to effect changes by one’s actions. (Bandura, 2006: 170)

Agency is, of course, a more complex concept than just self-efficacy beliefs. However, given how frequently and powerfully the teachers in the research studies in this book psychologize their agency, the centrality of self-efficacy to agency and Kayi-Aydar’s inclusion of Bandura in her chapter, it seems that psychological approaches to agency have an important contribution to make. By psychological approaches, I mean research that focuses on the real psychological experiences of embodied subjects who have causal efficacy (Bandura, 1989) – approaches in which the everyday assumptions that the teachers make in their own words about their psychological experiences have some degree of theoretical credence. Another message is that agency can be collective and even collaborative. In order to focus on collaboration, it is useful to distinguish it from collective agency, and to note that cooperation is about helpful attitudes and actions (which often accompany collective and collaborative agency). Bandura (2000: 75) describes collective agency as an emergent property of a group based on ‘people’s shared beliefs in their collective power to produce desired results’. I understand collaboration to go beyond beliefs by emerging in the actions of people working together toward a common end, which might involve different people doing different tasks, but which all contribute to the same goal. The studies by Fones, Mayes and Stewart are all examples of collective and collaborative agency. I will conclude this section with a final message about evidence of progress, albeit not entirely positive progress. Apparently, those lacking language teaching qualifications or equivalent experience no longer need to be Anglo-American native English speakers. In Japan, native English speaker Filipino teachers felt invisible in English teacher organizations, which appeared to be dominated by Anglo-American teachers. One participant had only taken workshops; the other had an education degree (although language teaching was not mentioned). By participating in collective grassroots institution-building, they were able to project their professional identity and agency (Stewart). In China, an English language user without any formal English language or language teaching education, unable (not surprisingly) to qualify as an English language teacher in schools, opened a private school in his home. He agentively resisted normative communicative language teaching practices by actively promoting the ‘deaf and dumb model’ of English language teaching, believing that his students would profit more from learning to read critically (Li and De Costa). In India, there were stark differences, based on the medium of their past education, between private language school teachers, none of whom had any language teaching training or education.

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Those who had been educated through English were confident and agentive, whereas those who had been educated through Hindu were unconfident and unagentive (Sandhu). The apparent levelling of some of the teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) playing field probably has more to do with availability, rural and urban schooling differences and profiteering than with any altruistic aim to provide a range of Englishes, model language learning success or offer opportunities to those in need of employment. In other words, they are about the structural differences between those who hire and those who need to be hired: class. Sandhu explicitly discusses the role of class in relation to medium of education. Class also seems to be at work in the other two studies in less than obvious guises, with the Chinese teacher talking about how English teachers’ ‘look’ and referring to urban–rural differences, and Filipino teachers talking about the expectation in Japan that they work as nannies or in factories. These studies indicate the need for more explicit discussions of social structures (Block, 2013) and class (Block, 2014, 2015) in research on agency in language teachers. Achievements and Effects: Ecological and Network Approaches

Several studies embraced approaches with sociological origins and poststructuralist influences. Two of the studies did this through the ecological approach of Biesta, Priestley and their co-authors, and another also drew on several poststructuralists. A fourth study used actor-network theory. Because this approach is thoroughly discussed in Kayi-Aydar’s chapter, I will only say a few words here. The ecological approach is heavily indebted to the relational sociologists Emirbayer and Mische (1998). One of Emirbayer and Mische’s contributions is the idea that actors orient to agentive actions in three temporal dimensions: past time through habitual patterns, present time through practical-evaluative judgments and future time through imaginative projection. One of the contributions of the ecological approach is to describe agency as an achievement (Priestley et al., 2015). Achievement is also a psychological concept, and I wonder whether characterizing agency as an achievement may help to emphasize the presence of a psychological actor, as I discussed above. Kasun, Clark, Kaneria and Staker focus on the emergence of agency in narratives used by a high school teacher of ELLs. This study also uses the concept of nepantla, in-between, leading me to wonder how it compares to the apparently similar concepts of hybridity and third space. Narratives had a powerful effect on the development of the teacher’s own agency, which shows a number of habitual, practical-evaluative and imagine-projective elements. She therefore used narratives, along with love and the subversion of power, to help her students develop their

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agency. Throughout the chapter there are examples of the teacher acting agentively by breaking out of habitual responses by imagining alternatives, and also by teaching other people to do so by presenting them with stories that prompt them to imagine alternatives. There is a strong sense of agency as a hard-won achievement that must be repeatedly performed. Chao’s study focuses on a church group who tried to change the lives of adult immigrants to the United States through the teachers’ sense of identity and agency mediated by their spirituality. Chao is the only author who explicitly embraces a poststructuralist approach to agency. Not all of the many theories that make contributions to the study are obviously poststructuralist and so would have benefited from being more explicitly related to each other. Methodologically, the study shows the value of an ethnographic approach to collective agency, particularly since we hear the refugees’ views too. Despite the teachers’ perception of the immigrants as disadvantaged others, Chao argues that their efforts were sincere (and the refugees’ views corroborate this), as they focused on real-life present problems and used literacy to support the refugees in imagining the future. Li and De Costa’s study is of a colorful Chinese English language teacher who opened a private school in his home. A wide range of data sources make this a convincing study. Seeing himself as a rule-breaker, the teacher challenged expectations about how English teachers looked and acted. He developed his own teaching approach based on his own experiences learning and teaching English in the same context as his students. He resisted normative language teaching practices by actively promoting the ‘deaf and dumb model’ of English language teaching, believing that his local students would profit more in the future from learning to read critically than from communicative language teaching (Li and De Costa). His agency, therefore, was deeply embedded within his local environment, leading the authors to argue it was a postmethod pedagogy. Stewart’s study differs from the previous studies by using actornetwork theory, which differs from relational and ecological theories by de-emphasizing the centrality of human agency and positing uncertainty instead of intentionality as salient to agency. The theory assumes that anything that causes change is an actor; any change shows agency; and one effect of change is identity. Therefore, the analysis focuses on identifying the moment and trajectory of change. In Stewart’s study, Filipino teachers working in Japan, who felt out of place in Anglo-Americandominated organizations, used their own social networks to collectively build their own organization. Many agents of change were individuals with goals and commitments. While these were tied to the change trajectories, it might have been useful to visualize the agency of human actors embedded within the larger change trajectories. Kitade has created such trajectories for individual teacher agency (Kitade, 2015) and identity

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(Kitade, 2014) using activity theory, and doing something similar for network trajectories would be a wonderful contribution to showing how human and nonhuman interact to create agency, and through it, identity. These four studies focus on the achievement of agency in actions, as described by participants, recorded in documents and observed by the researchers. Methodologically, focusing on achievements and effects provides a clear way to identify agency that might be more fully exploited in future research. In the ecological approach, the three temporal dimensions are eminently suited to creating codes that could be deductively applied in a rigorous yet sensitive analysis of qualitative and ethnographic data. Such data include discourse, but their analysis does not explicitly focus on its discursive qualities. Studies in the next section do. The Power of Positioning: Discursive Approaches

Discursive approaches to agency focus on how agency is performed, attributed, reproduced, resisted, legitimated and otherwise apparent in discourse. Again, I will not say much here because Kayi-Aydar covers it in her chapter. There are many different approaches with different ontological and theoretical commitments, from the strongly methodological focus of some conversation analysts (ten Have, 2007) to the Marxist foundations of some critical discourse analysts (Fairclough & Graham, 2002). Whatever the approach, the evidence involves analysis of language. Three studies used positioning theory. All three drew on Davies and Harré (although Sandhu also discussed other approaches). One aspect of positioning theory concerns the types of positioning. Harré (2012) notes that in early work (Davies & Harré, 1990), two senses of positioning are conflated. One is performance of a position ‘at that moment and with those people’ in which rights and duties are discursively accomplished. The other is the attributes of a person that are relevant to positioning (e.g. group membership), which Harré now refers to as pre-positioning. All three studies focus on pre-positioning. Venegas-Weber focused on the jointly produced storylines in the life histories of two bi/multilingual teachers working in an immersion school, who despite reflexively positioning themselves differently in terms of their own languages, similarly drew on their bi/multilingualism through pedagogical noticing. Some of the joint production of their storylines occurred as these teachers were pre-positioned by others based on their language status. For example, one teacher remembered being called upon as a student to support new immigrants because she was bilingual, while the other teacher felt her limited access to English interfered with her teaching when it was done in English and prevented her from developing collegial relationships. The dual language immersion program underlined how their bilingualism also had positive effects by contributing to

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their agentive noticing of constraints and resources. Rights and duties were apparent in the findings, in particular in that the teachers positioned their own agency in terms of their duties toward meeting student needs through inquiry- and equity-based practices. This study stands out for taking a critical stance on the participants’ views of themselves. Sandhu’s study of Indian teachers of English examined the intersectionality of medium of education and professional identity. Many of the participant narratives involved reflexive pre-positioning based on these two categories. The teachers educated in English felt that their students appreciated them because of their education, and apparently the school thought highly enough of them to give them free rein in how they taught. Those educated in Hindu seemed afraid of losing face in front of their students and did not appear to be free to depart from an established textbook. Both groups were pre-positioned by others based on their educational background, and accepted that pre-positioning in their reflexive positioning. The two groups, therefore, had different rights and obligations in the workplace, which could have been stated more forcefully. Sandhu attributed the positioning of the teachers to social class by drawing on Giddens’ structuration theory. This study makes a strong case for the value of studies focused on intersectionality, although it is unclear whether in spirit the study is more aligned with poststructuralism, as positioning theory would imply, or practice theory, as structuration theory implies. Another aspect of positioning theory involves a triangle of storylines, actions and speech acts, and positions with rights, obligations and duties (Harré, 2012). Warren’s study of a teacher subjected to high-stakes teacher evaluation mentioned these components, and focused on specific linguistic features. In particular, the distinction between narration (describing events) and declaration (evaluating them) is important in establishing the teacher’s reflexive positioning in the interaction with the researcher, as well as what happened in the described content of the story. In the interactions with the researcher, the teacher was able to position herself agentively, often drawing on pre-positions, such as her experience and qualification. The lack of agency Warren’s participant experienced because of her perceived duties to students and the evaluator’s perceived rights as a proxy of the employer suggests that a more explicit approach to the local moral order might have added force to an issue that the author raises, of using a one-size-fits-all approach to pedagogy and teacher evaluations. Back analyzed how participants reflexively and interactively positioned themselves in research interviews and how they reactively positioned their students. She also analyzed how the participants performed their agency in the interviews and stimulated recalls of classroom observations, which offered scope for practical implications to support teacher development. It was particularly interesting to see how the very different

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administrative contexts mediated the agency of the three participants she studied. A lack of accountability can be as problematic for a teacher as the presence of accountability (e.g. through evaluations in Warren’s study). However, the very supportive environment in which one teacher worked apparently helped him achieve 100% target language use, which demonstrates the importance of triangulation because self-reported data might have been hard to believe. That said, I wondered about the teachers’ positioning of their students as reluctant, and how the students felt about their classes. I can imagine that native speakers of Spanish might be reluctant participants in a Spanish class taught by a self-identified monolingual English teacher who focused on grammar. What I really wondered about, however, was how students perceived their class with the teacher who only used Spanish, used content that may not have appealed to them and had such low expectations for them. Is it possible the students were positioned into being reluctant because of such factors? Therefore, I wondered whether considering the rights and duties of teachers and learners might have contributed to a discussion of how their contexts mediated the moral positions the teachers took up. Maybe using English was both agentive and the right thing to do, regardless of the policy. Positioning theory has different resources that can guide analysis. Although these studies raised compelling issues and were methodologically sound within their parameters, they made limited use of the resources of positioning theory, possibly because the only interactional data were those generated by the research. I therefore wonder whether alternative approaches to analyzing positions in interview data might sometimes be more appropriate. Sandhu briefly discusses Bamberg’s (2006) narrative approach to positioning, and although Harré (2012) criticizes it, it is because Bamberg focuses more on pre-positioned attributions (often in big and small stories) rather than interactional attributions of rights and duties, which is what the three positioning studies here tended to do. One discursive study did closely examine interactional attributions of positioning. Drawing on Ahearn’s (2001) definition of agency as a mediated capacity to act, Mayes analyzed interactional data for the discursive positions of teacher and student rights. Rather than using positioning theory, she took an interdisciplinary approach, using a strong methodological focus through conversation analysis combined with interactional analysis. This is clearly evident in the close turn-by-turn analysis of interactional data showing how authority and agency were distributed between teachers and students. The teacher supported student agency through various strategies that relied on the deontic rights, or institutionalized ‘rules’, and epistemic rights, or knowledge stances, of teacher–student interactions. For example, the teachers’ authority was shown in their greater knowledge of writing and the expectation

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of student compliance to directives, and they agentively strategized how they could support students into displaying their agency and authority by appropriately using language forms to display their knowledge. Importantly, the author points out that interactions in different pedagogies and institutions would have different discourse patterns. The study offers solid evidence of how a detailed and sensitive analysis of interactional data can reveal agency in action as situated within broader practices and co-constructed between participants. It also shows why it is valuable through clear pedagogical implications that link agency to language learning. In this section, several studies theoretically extended Ahearn’s definition by embracing positioning theory. Examining agency by examining positioning through language forms is clearly supported by Ahearn’s discussion and examples of anthropological contributions to agency through linguistic analyses of grammatical agency. The next section includes practice theories, the type of anthropological theory that Ahearn explicitly discusses, which are dialectical. Conquering Contradictions: Dialectical Theories

The three chapters discussed here use theories that conceptualize the relationship between human agency and social structures as dialectical. There are different kinds of dialectics, but generally speaking, it is the idea that Dialectic consists in formulating a ‘contradiction’, bringing it to the fullest sharpness and clarity of expression, and then finding a real, concrete, object related, and therefore obvious, resolution of it. (Ilyenkov, 2007: 24)

It needs to be underlined that the contradiction is not a logical one (i.e. asserting that a and not a are identical), but an internal contradiction in how things develop. The relationship between individual agency and social structures is such a contradiction, which turns on whether structure or agency has power (such as causal power) over human actions. Although all of the theories discussed here use the term praxis, two of them are commonly referred to as practice theories. Giddens’ structuration theory is used in Fones’ chapter, and Archer’s critical realism in Zotzmann’s chapter. Edwards’ study uses sociocultural theory, a praxis theory in which theory guides practice and practice shapes theory (Vygotsky, 1987). Although all of the theories acknowledge that humans are social and act collaboratively, both structuration theory and critical realism conceive of agency as an individual capacity. Sociocultural theory differs because it conceives of psychological functions as being socially mediated. Innate psychological functions naturally develop as children grow; some of these psychological functions, such as language and will (agency) further develop in response

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not only to the material environment, but also the social environment. As children grow, they engage in different social situations involving different expectations, which children experience as contradictions that stimulate socially mediated development. As they learn from their new experiences, development occurs through repeated transformations of mental functions and their interrelationships that dissolve psychological contradictions. For example, children begin developing agency during the ‘terrible twos’ when they experience a contradiction between their desire to be independent and their reliance on adults, which is often experienced as a constraint on their freedom. Adults say ‘no’ to children, who learn to say ‘no’ to adults. When children learn to master themselves, essentially by redirecting ‘no’ from others to themselves, the contradiction dissolves. They psychologically experience independence because the more they learn to control themselves, the less adults have to do it. Fones draws on Giddens, who resolves the agency–structure contradiction by focusing on the mutual constitution of individual agency and social structures. Giddens (1984) argues that agency arises from the rights and duties of social positions, rather than from individual intentions, because responsibility extends beyond intended consequences to include the unintended consequences that we do not anticipate because of limits to our knowledge. Fones also looks to Ahearn’s definition of agency and sociocultural theory for its focus on agency as mediated and social (including collective). Purposeful sampling was used to identify two high schools in the same district that could be compared. The departments and programs were shaped at the level of the schools, but teachers were able to influence the departments and classes through collective and collaborative agency. However, there were also differences, as one department was more established and did not need to interact with other departments much, which may have limited opportunities to exercise agency, whereas the other department was small and still establishing itself, which meant that there were more affordances for agency. The findings therefore fit Giddens’ recursive loop of structure and agency. One of the ways the recursive loop functions is through memory, through which actors can recall structures in order to appropriately perform social actions, which in turn contribute to the reproduction of structure. In this study, one department is reproducing structure; its institutional memory is visible in its structures. In the other department, new actions are creating new structures; its institutional memory is being created. This raises the issue of whether agency is transformed into routines, as opposed to constrained by routines, which will be discussed below. Zotzmann uses Archer’s (2000) critical realism, which claims that while we may discursively construe the social world in various ways, there is a real social world that agentive human beings create and maintain (in part by acting on the real material world). Like Giddens, Archer

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also resolves the contradiction between agency and structure by asserting the mutual constitution of agents and structures. However, she underlines that they are analytically different because they operate on different timescales, which can be analyzed to find causal relationships between the two, and thus is where individual agency operates. Zotzmann’s study examines data from Mexican teachers of Spanish in two different work contexts: private institutions and universities and public universities. Teachers who worked in differently structured institutions faced different problems, showing the role of structure, whereas those who worked within similarly structured situations faced similar problems but did not necessarily deal with them in the same ways, showing their agency. In all cases, teachers constructed causal theories in order to act appropriately, from which the author concludes that these theories were based on ontological claims about social reality. People who accept the logic of transcendental arguments will be convinced (as I am). The opening sentence of this paragraph is the core of a traditional argument against objections to transcendental arguments. In short, most people believe that reality is real. So, although we can learn to suspend belief in reality for a while – long enough to enjoy live theater and pass university classes in poststructuralism – we don’t (we can’t) live our lives as if they were a mere performances by decentered subjectivities without any consequences for those decentered subjectivities. Edwards’ study uses sociocultural theory. Vygotsky (1931/1997) argued that we are social beings who become individuals, which occurs as our psychological development is mediated by resources in the social environment. This includes becoming attuned to the rhythms of one’s native language(s), being born into a family, culture and society, and finding personal significance in the social environment by participating in everyday activities. The mediation of innate drives into ‘will’ (agency) occurs as individuals transform their social environment (e.g. family life, elementary school, high school and perhaps university, work) into resources for individual purposes (being a loved and loving child, a studious pupil, an imaginative student, a reliable worker). Edwards’ study focuses on the role of an action research project and the tools developed in it for mediating the identity and agency of English language teachers. This study clearly shows how the social context of different work environments mediated the participants’ agency, in terms of what their action research projects would change and the extent to which the project was accepted and supported by the school administration. At the same time, it also shows how individual differences in the participants’ future-self goals and level of commitment also mediated their agency. This study is strongly theory driven, which is reflected in the detailed and theoretically guided analysis. The last of several practical and praxical implications concerns the role of school

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administrators and educational leaders in mediating agency and identity development in teachers. The dialectical approaches of sociocultural theory and practice theories are an obvious way of responding to some of the unanswered questions that follow Ahearn’s (2001) rough definition of agency. The next section explores some of the ramifications of agency in terms of routinization and transformation. Agency, Routinization and Transformation

Much of Ahearn’s (2001) article is devoted to examples of how anthropology has contributed to our understanding of agency, in part by using linguistic analyses to show how different languages handle grammatical agency. Although grammatical structures constrain what is possible in a language, people can use those constraints as resources to ‘reflect, reinforce, and sometimes reconfigure agency and status hierarchies in the society’ (Ahearn, 2001: 124). People use language to do things that go beyond language to act not only in language, but also with people on the world. Thus, one of Ahearn’s points is that close analysis of language forms in use can contribute to understanding how social reproduction becomes social transformation. Transformation attracts attention because it is about something new coming into being. We notice novelty and react to it; it is an innate survival response, the basis for learning and it occurs across phyla – even bacteria have it. Novelty is noticeable because it stands out against a background that appears the same. The background appears the same because of the scale at which we view it. Whether we speak of space or timescales, if we zoom in to a microscopic scale or out to a macroscopic scale, that sameness teems with noticeable changes. The reaction of bacteria to novelty occurs over generations, meaning it is both spatially and temporally distributed. The effect of the novelty can only be seen from a different perspective than that at which it began. In the case of bacteria, it is quite literally through reproduction over generations that transformation occurs. Tomasello (1999) has argued that culture comes into being through faithful transmission, which means people don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel, they can move on to inventing tires for the wheels. It is therefore not only important to understand transformation, it is also important to understand how cultures and societies reproduce and transmit practices. Routines do so in structuration theory, where they appear to be implicit and unrecognized by their practitioners, which maintains social structures. Routines are notoriously difficult to change, yet routines are often what most need changing. This is a contradiction. Its dialectical solution is recognizing that the underlying problem is not

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the routine, it is the routinization – how and why the routines develop that are implicit and unrecognized. Sociocultural theorists (Gal’perin, 1978/1992) have discussed the routinization of new learning, and how if something is learned consciously (which is facilitated by visualizing or verbalizing the learning process) and then routinized (internalized), then that process may be recallable. (Other learning theories, such as Anderson’s [1983] very influential adaptive control of thought [ACT] model – which has been repeatedly updated – differ in some fundamental respects, but describe a similar process known as proceduralization.) Learning something unconsciously, such as through repeated cycles of trial and error, does not allow such recall. As anyone knows who has ever lost the instruction manual for a remote control and randomly pushed buttons to find a setting, buttons can be randomly pushed again and again without ever actually learning which buttons are for which settings – hence trial and error learning requires repeated cycles in order for the brain to have enough data to induce a pattern. Consciously and systematically trying to find which button performs which function – possibly mediated by taking notes, in effect replacing the lost instruction manual – is more efficient. New cultural inventions cannot be passed on if the process of making them is not passed on; they have to be reinvented again and again. Conscious routinization facilitates the reproduction and transmission of culture through conscious learning and teaching. What does routinization have to do with agency? Some of the simplest ways many of us show agency is by passing up a pastry at breakfast or a drink before dinner or by getting up early enough to walk to work or leaving work early enough to go to the gym. These are all obviously socially mediated actions. Others – family, friends and the media – exhort us to do them, and the most common advice for maintaining these actions is to do them with other people. I chose this example because it obviously shows that if we routinize these initially agentive acts, we can transform ourselves. But is it still agentive action if it is routine action? I am not sure whether once actions are routinized, if they should still be called agentive, but my initial inclination is yes, mostly because the studies in this book have shown so many teachers routinely acting agentively in their classes by doing the same things with different students and classes. Would the proof of agency be that they are intended actions? Would it be the ability to explain how and why one acted? And many other questions can also be asked. It is no surprise Ahearn gave a nondefinitive definition! But I will say something about how agency develops. Agency develops by becoming consciously aware of how and why other people act, so that we begin to consider our own actions by deciding what and when and where and how and why to act. In going through that process, we

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are also learning and making who we are. Perhaps those who stand out as leaders, geniuses and prophets are simply those who, rather than allowing unconscious routinization to determine what they do, believe and hope and who they are, instead make it a routine, so that acting agentively is not rare, but simply part of living and being through considered – and considerate – acting. Anne Feryok University of Otago References Ahearn, L.M. (2001) Language and agency. Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (1), 109–137. Anderson, J.R. (1983) The Architecture of Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Archer, M.S. (2006) Being Human: The Problem of Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bamberg, M. (2006) Stories: Big or small: Why do we care? Narrative Inquiry 16, 139–147. Bandura, A. (1989) Human agency in social cognitive theory. American Psychologist 44, 1175–1184. Bandura, A. (2000) Exercise of human agency through collective efficacy. Current Directions in Psychological Science 9 (3), 75–78. Bandura, A. (2006) Toward a psychology of human agency. Perspectives on Psychological Science 1 (2), 164–180. Block, D. (2013) The structure and agency dilemma in identity and intercultural communication research. Language and Intercultural Communication 13 (2), 126–147. Block, D. (2014) Social Class in Applied Linguistics. London: Routledge. Block, D. (2015) Social class in applied linguistics. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 35, 1–19. Davies, B. and Harré, R. (1990) Positioning: The discursive positioning of selves. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 20 (1), 43–63. Emirbayer, M. and Mische, A. (1998) What is agency? American Journal of Sociology 103 (4), 962–1023. Fairclough, N. and Graham, P. (2002) Marx as a critical discourse analyst: The genesis of a critical method and its relevance to the critique of global capital. Estudios de Sociolingüística 3, 185–229. Gal’perin, P.Ia. (1992) Stage-by-stage formation as a method of psychological investigation. Journal of Russian and East European Psychology 30 (4), 60–80. (Original work published 1978.) Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Harré, R. (2012) Positioning theory: Moral dimensions of social-cultural psychology. In J. Valsiner (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology (pp. 191–206). New York: Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195396430.013.0010 Ilyenkov, E.V. (2007) Our schools must teach how to think!. Journal of Russian & East European Psychology 45 (4), 9–49. Kitade, K. (2014) Second language teachers’ identity development through online collaboration with L2 learners. CALICO Journal 31 (1), 57–77. Kitade, K. (2015) Second language teacher development through CALL practice: The emergence of teachers’ agency. Calico Journal 32 (3), 396–425.

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Priestley, M., Biesta, G. and Robinson, S. (2015) Teacher Agency: An Ecological Approach. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ten Have, P. (2007) Doing Conversation Analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Tomasello, M. (1999) The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vygotsky, L.S. (1987) The historical meaning of the crisis in psychology (R. van der Veer, trans.). In R.W. Rieber and A.S. Carton (eds) The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky, Vol. 1: Problems of General Psychology (pp. 233–343). New York: Plenum Press. Vygotsky, L.S. (1997) The history of the development of higher mental functions (R. van der Veer, trans.). In R.W. Rieber (ed.) The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky, Vol. 4: The History of the Development of Higher Mental Functions (pp. 1–259). New York: Plenum Press.

Index

beliefs, 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 12, 15, 16, 17, 19, 42, 48, 51, 54, 55, 61, 74, 77, 79, 83, 98, 102, 103, 112, 115, 124, 130, 136, 161, 167, 170, 171, 174, 176, 177, 179, 183, 207, 209, 210, 214, 219, 223, 226, 246, 259, 260

action research, 6, 141, 142, 151, 155, 158, 159, 268 actor-network theory, 5, 82, 83, 261 administration, 4, 16, 29, 31, 47, 92, 109, 112, 166, 245, 268 agency action-oriented conceptualization of, 162 as internalized capacity, 13 collaborative, 260, 267 collective, 12, 19, 20, 27, 260, 262 conceptualizations of, 15 ecological, 45, 46, 48, 50, 55 individual, 15, 19, 91, 98, 228, 232, 266, 267, 268 learner, 259 mediated, 6, 28, 30, 39, 142, 144, 146, 148, 156 opportunities for, 25, 35, 37, 38, 44, 46, 57 professional, 1, 8, 9, 17, 18, 21, 79, 80, 99, 177, 237, 238, 240, 243, 245, 248, 254 projective dimension of, 50, 58 proxy, 12 alternative certification program, 111 anxiety, 17, 106, 107, 109, 116, 117, 119 aspirations, 1, 11, 12, 13 assessment performance-based, 164 authority, 3, 6, 7, 14, 77, 150, 161, 180, 181, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 198, 259, 265, 266

capability, 11, 13, 46 capacity, 10, 11, 12, 13, 27, 35, 36, 39, 69, 97, 102, 103, 106, 109, 111, 113, 115, 118, 125, 130, 142, 144, 161, 162, 181, 183, 199, 218, 234, 240, 241, 265 case study, 4, 6, 21, 48, 49, 61, 64, 69, 101, 105, 118, 160, 178, 198, 216, 221 change agents, 2, 145 cognition, 16, 21 communicative language teaching, 207, 260, 262 community of practice, 124, 169 competence, 1, 12, 17, 163, 164, 173, 174, 185 confidence, 66, 150, 151, 248, 250 constraints as resources, 269 categories of, 164 contextual, 6, 45, 161, 167, 174, 176, 204 curricular, 51 institutional, 2, 184 societal, 46, 168, 177 structural, 13, 53, 211, 246 cosmopolitanism, 161, 168, 175

273

274 Index

critical realist perspective, 7, 8, 199, 202, 214, 215, 216 culturally relevant pedagogy, 53, 54, 120 culture, 16, 47, 53, 76, 87, 92, 111, 129, 133, 152, 153, 154, 161, 164, 175, 178, 183, 200, 218, 219, 221, 227, 230, 231, 268, 269, 270 curriculum choices, 8 decisions, 245 development, 149 ELL, 51, 56 mandated, 53, 74, 75 prescriptive, 53 decision-making, 10, 17, 34, 35, 41, 45, 60, 61, 69, 122, 162, 174, 177, 185, 195, 198 dual language immersion, 5, 121, 263 ecological approach, 3, 6, 11, 12, 13, 17, 19, 20, 97, 160, 162, 177, 261, 263 efficacy, 11, 20, 63, 79, 259, 260, 271 emotions, 3, 17, 18, 19, 20, 49, 159, 202, 216 empathy, 45, 47, 51, 59, 62 engagement, 5, 7, 12, 48, 95, 117, 142, 148, 154, 162, 200, 204, 217, 219, 226, 228, 229, 232, 235 English language arts, 31 English language development, 31, 132 English-only, 67, 110 equity, 3, 41, 49, 78, 129, 131, 132, 134, 135, 229, 230, 233, 264 ethnicity, 3 ethnographic approach, 262 ethnography, 119, 200, 217, 218, 221 Facebook, 91, 92, 98, 227 fluency, 8, 237, 246, 253, 254, 255 globalization, 2, 17, 99, 136, 162, 163, 175, 254 grammar-based instruction, 163

collective, 85 intersectional, 2 professional, 5, 21, 61, 65, 124, 134, 135, 142, 145, 146, 148, 156, 157, 159, 179, 237 sexual, 3 socio-economic, 7 spiritual, 7, 233 teacher, 1, 10 identity–agency relationship, 18 ideological factors, 5, 134 ideologies, 2, 17, 83, 87, 97, 122, 124, 130, 133, 137, 138, 164, 168, 175, 177, 220 immigrant, 7, 31, 55, 129, 217, 220, 221, 223, 225, 228, 230, 233 innovation, 84, 147, 158 intentionality, 11, 84, 262 internationalization, 2, 17, 86, 175 Latinx, 51, 123, 127, 128, 129, 135 learning outcomes, 97, 164, 174, 177 lesson planning, 70, 248 lingua franca, 160 literacy acquisition, 132, 220 activities, 229, 231 competencies, 132 content area, 70 education, 220 ESL, 21, 220, 229 for inclusion, 229 imagined, 227, 228, 229 practices, 128, 227, 232 real-life, 227 longitudinal study, 6, 141, 147 materials development, 150, 157, 237, 246, 248 mediation, 6, 141, 142, 143, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 157, 268 mobility geographical, 212 social, 212 motivation, 1, 11, 117, 155, 209, 212, 224

heritage speakers, 106, 109, 116, 117 ideal self, 6, 156 identities

narratives, 4, 8, 13, 18, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 67, 69, 72, 82, 88, 98, 128,

Index 275

136, 199, 200, 204, 240, 241, 243, 256, 261, 264 native Japanese teachers, 86 native speakers English, 82, 222, 260 White, 163 native-speakerism, 207 neocolonialism, 163 non- native speakers, 42, 87 non-native speakers of Spanish, 103 oppression, 3, 51, 52, 53 pedagogical noticing, 5, 123, 128, 129, 130, 131, 134, 263 perceptions, 2, 80, 111, 118, 143, 147, 168, 198, 200, 251, 259 policy, 2, 4, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 24, 27, 29, 33, 35, 37, 38, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 82, 90, 92, 96, 99, 102, 110, 137, 160, 163, 174, 177, 199, 200, 265 positioning analysis, 4, 8, 18, 63 definition of, 14 theory, 13, 67, 68, 237, 239, 265, 271 postmethod pedagogy, 6, 160, 165, 172, 176, 177, 178, 262 poststructuralist approach, 7, 217, 218, 221, 262 power, 1, 7, 12, 16, 17, 18, 48, 51, 52, 53, 56, 59, 61, 85, 108, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128, 129, 131, 134, 138, 143, 144, 145, 150, 151, 157, 159, 161, 162, 163, 168, 197, 198, 201, 202, 208, 212, 214, 218, 219, 220, 221, 223, 226, 230, 232, 234, 235, 240, 241, 260, 261, 266 pride, 17 privilege, 7, 56, 84, 233, 234, 256 professional development, 1, 3, 6, 29, 30, 34, 39, 54, 64, 65, 67, 77, 84, 89, 93, 94, 101, 124, 132, 135, 142, 144, 145, 146, 157, 158, 161, 162, 201, 204, 206, 216 professional learning community, 36 professionalism, 1, 77, 80

race, 2, 3, 52, 61, 128, 129, 230, 241, 254 reform, 2, 28, 42, 78, 79, 99, 100, 178, 179 religion, 3, 56, 127, 203, 230, 231, 232 schools Chinese, 161 elementary, 82, 87, 90, 126 elite, 204 English-medium, 8 high, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 38, 39, 79, 90, 95, 102, 147, 166, 258, 267 K-12, 222, 228 middle, 126 private, 7, 237 public, 4, 24, 25, 63, 82, 83, 88, 165, 169, 170, 259 state, 237, 238 urban, 4 self-reflection, 11, 144 social justice, 3, 6, 21, 47, 60, 62, 135 social media, 5, 167 socio-cognitive theory, 3, 10, 11, 19, 20, 271 sociocultural theory, 3, 159, 266, 267, 268, 269 socio-economic class, 3 socio-economic status, 7, 164, 214 standards, 18 stories, 49, 51, 52, 53, 61, 64, 72, 88, 93, 124, 134, 135, 159, 239, 240, 241, 254, 259, 262, 265 structures institutional, 7, 201, 214 social, 9, 12, 201, 202, 207, 215, 240, 241, 254, 261, 266, 267, 269 socio-economic, 204 teacher training, 8, 84, 89, 90, 91, 98, 111, 169, 242 teachers Anglo-American, 260 Australian, 259 Christian, 218, 222 Christian ESL, 225 dual language, 124, 125, 137 experienced language, 258

276 Index

Filipino, 83, 87, 89, 91, 92, 98, 260, 261, 262 Indian, 259, 264 monolingual, 259 multilingual, 6, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 130, 133, 134, 138, 263 primary, 259 volunteer, 7, 222 writing, 180, 181, 184, 186, 194, 196, 259 technology, 97, 145, 151 testing, 30, 65, 164, 174 textbook -based activities, 248 selection, 8, 237, 243, 245

textbooks dependence on, 248, 249 international, 211 language, 203 third space, 261 transdisciplinary framework, 16, 136, 177 tutoring, 166, 169 values, 7, 12, 16, 17, 48, 65, 122, 124, 130, 164, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 209, 210, 211, 213, 214, 230 Whiteness, 49, 56, 57 world languages, 101