Transnational Identities and Practices in English Language Teaching

Critical Inquiries from Diverse Practitioners

Rashi Jain, Bedrettin Yazan, Suresh Canagarajah, Rashi Jain, Bedrettin Yazan, Suresh Canagarajah

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781788927543
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Teaching Language Arts
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The self-inquiries in this edited volume exemplify the dynamism that permeates global ELT, wherein English language educators and teacher educators are increasingly operating across blurred national boundaries, creating new 'liminal' spaces, charting new trajectories, crafting new practices and pedagogies, constructing new identities, and reconceptualizing ELT contexts. This book captures the diverse voices of emerging and established ELT practitioners and scholars, originally from and/or operating in non-Western contexts, spanningnot only the so-called non-Western 'peripheries', but also peripheries created within the 'center' when certain members are minoritized on the basis of their race, language, and/or place of origin. The chapters address a range of related issues occurring at the intersections of personal and professional identities, pedagogy and classroom interactions, as well as research and professional practices in liminal transnational spaces.

1An Invitation into the Transnational ELT Landscape of Practices

Rashi Jain, Bedrettin Yazan and Suresh Canagarajah

The field of English language teaching (ELT) and learning is widely dispersed and incredibly diverse. Past historical events and current global trends have collectively shaped the ELT landscape in variously documented as well as unprecedented ways, and the field continues to evolve dynamically along different directions. Amid these changing realities, English language educators and teacher educators increasingly operate within and across national boundaries, creating new ‘liminal’ spaces (Bhabha, 1992, 1994; Canagarajah, 2018), charting new trajectories (Jain, 2013, 2021), crafting new practices and pedagogies (Canagarajah, 2012b, 2019; Jain, 2014, 2017), constructing new identities (Motha et al., 2012; Yazan & Rudolph, 2018) and reconceptualizing ELT contexts (Selvi & Rudolph, 2018). In the process, the field of teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) is being changed from within by such transnational practitioners. Now, more than ever, we need to diversify the stories that are being told and heard in ‘mainstream’ scholarship, and we need to include practitioners’ narratives of engaging in their everyday practices around teaching and research in settings around the world across a global ELT landscape.

However, one of the challenges that West-based academic publishing currently faces is creating community spaces where the diverse voices of emerging and established ELT practitioners and scholars, originally from and/or operating in non-Western contexts, may find a common democratic platform along with Western and West-based scholarship. These contexts span not only the so-called non-Western ‘peripheries’, but also peripheries created within the ‘center’ when certain members and their communities are minoritized on the basis of race, language and/or place of origin. This volume is an attempt to address this gap.

As editors, we have aimed to facilitate a book that serves as a community space where inquiries from transnational practitioners across the complex landscape of ELT practices (Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2015) may find a permanent home. As part of creating this ‘transnational home’, we invited ELT practitioners and scholars, or pracademics (see Jain, 2013, 2021) as we ‘reimagine’ them (and ourselves), to bring their unique transnational perspectives into the community space. The chapters in this book encompass those perspectives, spanning both identities and practices. This volume thus comprises critical transnational inquiries of diverse pracademics (see also Yazan et al., 2021) who engage in second and foreign language pedagogy and research, as well as language teacher education and research, within the USA and around the world, with chapters that report on individual and collaborative inquiries.

In this first chapter, we introduce the volume and contextualize the collective work within the most current scholarship around transnational language education and research (see Canagarajah, 2018, 2019; De Fina & Perrino, 2013; Duff, 2015, 2019; Phan, 2016; You, 2018). There have been past instances of TESOL practitioners and academics who have provided narrative accounts of their journeys across countries, cultures and languages (e.g. Belcher & Connor, 2001), as well as written pieces that attempt to ‘demystify’ border-crossing and boundary-spanning professional trajectories (see Kubota & Sun, 2013), but without specifically focusing on the transnational scope of these journeys and trajectories. At the same time, transnationalism itself has been a topic of scholarly interest and discussion for many years now, especially in the field of migration studies (e.g. Levitt, 2001; Vertovec, 2009), as also discussed in more detail within the other chapters in this book (especially Chapter 7).

More recently, however, there seems to be increasing interest in examining the transnational construct in the context of English language instruction. In their recently published volume, Robinson et al. (2020), for instance, focus on undergraduate and graduate programs in the USA and explore the intersections of the translingual practices and transnational identities of their domestic and international students of color. The authors offer an analytical framework that is ‘based on the prefix trans-, which brings translinguality and transnationality together’ (Robinson et al., 2020: 12). They first explore everyday translinguality and then transnational translingual literacies in their two-part volume. Insightful and timely as the work of Robinson et al. (2020) is, it is also delimited to its focus on the US higher education context, thus offering only a partial snapshot of a global landscape of ELT practices. Canagarajah (2018) has also recently focused on the interconnections between transnationalism and translingualism and espoused the use of transnational literacy autobiographies by migrant scholars and students as translingual writers in his US-based second language education courses. This work is unique in the sense that Canagarajah first provides his own literacy autobiography along with scholarly discussions in the first part of the book, followed by selective student literacy autobiographies in students’ own ‘voices’ in the second half – an instance of an academic looking back on his own practices in the classroom (and therefore embodying the role of a pracademic), in addition to validating his students’ authentic voices within a scholarly publication. In a three-part edited volume, You (2018) also focused on transnational writing education, albeit with a more global scope by bringing together scholars from and/or embedded in Asia-Pacific nations including China, Japan, Nepal, Syria and Taiwan, in addition to the USA. You (2018) defines transnational writing education as ‘efforts made to enable students to recognize with, deconstruct, and transcend … boundaries in the teaching of writing, ultimately cultivating flexible and responsible global citizens’ (You, 2018: x). While You’s work is more global in scope, it still primarily encompasses the voices of scholars and academics, only some of whom examine their own classroom practices or focus on their own roles as practitioners in the volume (e.g. Canagarajah, 2018; Liu, 2018; Yang, 2018). It seems, therefore, that while there are instances of researchers and academics examining the practices and identities of other stakeholders in transnational ELT, there is a need to balance these perspectives by including more, conceptually vigorous and, at the same time, linguistically accessible voices of the practitioners and scholars themselves, especially those focusing on their own transnational practices and identities in global settings. This volume attempts to address this gap.

As co-editors, we also reflect upon our own transnational journeys that have transcended borders, in keeping with the personal nature of this genre of research and publication. Our journeys have taken us from the so-called ‘periphery’ to the so-called ‘center’ across a myriad and diverse landscape of practices. Rashi Jain and Suresh Canagarajah are both originally from South Asia – India and Sri Lanka, respectively. Bedrettin Yazan is originally from Turkey, a transcontinental country that has been a borderland between Asian and European identities. After engaging in ELT in our countries of origin, we all transitioned to the USA at different times to pursue graduate studies – Suresh in 1985, Rashi in 2004 and Bedrettin in 2009 – and gradually integrated into the US academia in different ways and to different extents. Suresh’s trajectory involved some transcontinental shuttling, as he returned to war-torn Sri Lanka for a few years of teaching before fleeing the fighting to the USA in 1994 (see Canagarajah, 2001). Upon completing their respective doctorates, both Suresh and Bedrettin moved more deeply into the academic ‘center’ by following the path of securing tenure at large public universities and working in the field of language teaching and teacher education (Canagarajah, 2012a; Yazan, 2019). Rashi, on the other hand, followed a trajectory out of the university system, post-PhD, by eventually becoming a full-time ELT practitioner in a community college setting and staying connected to the academic community more peripherally (Jain, 2013) for a few years. She then began to re-engage more proactively in the academic community through practice-based research and scholarship (Jain, 2021) and scholarly collaborations such as this one.

To explain the idea of professional trajectories further, we draw upon Wenger’s (1998) seminal conceptualization of communities of practice vis-à-vis Western academia. Suresh has a tenured position as a professor at a large Northeastern US public research university and an exemplary publication record that spans many global contexts and comprises groundbreaking scholarship. His journey can be identified as embodying an insider trajectory, where ‘the formation of an identity does not end with full membership … [and] … new events, new demands, new inventions, and new generations all create occasions for renegotiating one’s identity’ (Wenger, 1998: 154). Suresh can also be seen as a veteran and insider in US-based academia who, for at least two decades now, has been serving as a role model for emerging scholars, especially those who self-identify as persons of color and/or originally hail from a non-‘inner-circle’ English context, like himself. As a ‘more experienced peer’ and ‘role model’, Suresh can also be identified as being on...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• 1. An Invitation into the Transnational ELT Landscape of Practices
• 2. Critical Transnational Agency: Enacting through Intersectionality and Transracialization
• 3. The Person in Personal Narrative: Two ESOL Instructors Teaching Away from Home
• 4. Dialoguing as Transnational Professional Mothers: Our Intersectional Identities as Transnationals, Parents and Language Teacher Educators
• 5. Three ELT Transnational Practitioners’ Identities and Critical Praxis Through Teaching and Research
• 6. Unpacking Identities and Envisioning TESOL Practices through Translanguaging: A Collective Self-Study
• 7. ‘My transnational experiences shape who I am and what I do’: Reflections of a Latina Transnational Teacher–Scholar
• 8. An Autoethnography of Trans-Perspective Development Through Translanguaging Research and Practice
• 9. Ni de aquí, ni de allá: How Technology has Changed the Way We See Transnationalism
• 10. Shifting Roles and Negotiating Returns in Transnational TESOL Research
• 11. Globalized Writing Instruction: The Multilingual Composition Section as a Fluid Pedagogical Space
• 12. ‘It’s crazy that we are from very different countries, but we are similar’: My Navajo Students’ and my Co-Existing Translingual Identities
• 13. The Inclusion of Culture and Shift Toward Translingualism in my TESOL Classes
• 14. Negotiating Boundaries while becoming a TESOL Practitioner in Southern Thailand
• 15. A Transnational TEGCOM Practitioner’s Multiple Subjectivities and Critical Classroom Negotiations in the Indonesian University Context
• Subject Index
• Author Index