Language teacher agency for educational justice–oriented work: An ecological model

Abstract

AbstractRecent global social unrest that stems from historical racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic inequality and inequity has elevated the need for language educators to challenge traditional understandings of and practices in the language classroom. Such a development warrants an examination of language teacher agency in contemporary society. To this end and building on recent work on teacher agency in general education and second language teacher education research, we propose an ecological model to investigate teacher agency. Our ecologically oriented model draws specifically on Pantić’s (2015) model for social justice and the Douglas Fir Group’s (2016) call for an examination of language teaching as impacted by macro‐, meso‐, and micro‐level forces. Through our proposed teacher agency model that represents the multilayered complexity of second language learning and teaching, we seek to advance an educational justice agenda. To illustrate the power and potential of our analytic ecological model to teacher agency for educational justice, we focus on a focal English as a foreign language teacher from Chile, Camila. The article ends with discussion of pedagogical possibilities that can be explored in conjunction with the research model we put forward.