ABSTRACT This study investigates how student-centered pedagogy (SCP) shapes teacher-student power relations in English classrooms. Drawing on Bernstein’s theory of classification and framing, it explores whether SCP’s weak framing has reconfigured teacher authority or whether traditional hierarchies persist. Conducted in five private rural secondary schools in East Java, the study employs a qualitative design with semi-structured interviews and classroom observations involving five experienced EFL teachers. Findings reveal that while teachers conceptually support SCP and value its pedagogical flexibility, their practices are shaped by cultural norms, institutional constraints, and student behavior. When interactive strategies falter, teachers revert to strong framing, reinforcing traditional images of the ‘good student’ as obedient, attentive, and deferential. These dynamics reflect a regulative discourse that limits the realization of SCP’s participatory ideals. Rather than rejecting reform, teachers appear to adopt contingent pedagogies by selectively applying SCP principles in ways that align with their classroom realities. This study makes a novel contribution to critical language education by showing how learner-centered reforms are mediated by power, culture, and institutional regulation, thereby complicating pedagogical ideals and highlighting pedagogy as a socially situated and power-laden practice rather than a neutral method or policy prescription.

ABSTRACT This study critically examines how classroom participation is defined and assessed in postsecondary language education. While participation has traditionally been equated with verbal engagement, such as speaking in class or contributing to discussions, its pedagogical value and fairness as an assessment criterion remain contested. Drawing on a mixed-methods approach, this study analyzes 32 participation rubrics from multiple language courses (Spanish, Italian, French, Latin, Chinese, and Arabic) across national and international institutions. Specifically, this research explores the underlying criteria used to assess in-person participation. Rubrics were submitted voluntarily by language instructors, program coordinators, and teaching assistants. Employing open coding and reflexive thematic analysis, the study identified five recurring assessment criteria: (1) monoglossic language use; (2) voluntary and active engagement with in-class activities, materials, and peers; (3) attendance and punctuality; (4) technological and behavioral distractions; and (5) perceived student preparedness. These findings reveal that participation rubrics are often grounded in teacher beliefs, language ideologies, and anecdotal assumptions about language learning, rather than in evidence-based pedagogical principles. The study contributes to ongoing debates in language assessment by highlighting the need to reimagine participation through a more equitable lens.

ABSTRACT As teacher preparation programs incorporate anti-racist pedagogies to address deficit and racialized ideologies affecting students’ learning opportunities, emotions, and racialized language ideologies have been found to individually influence pre-service English teachers. These influences shape their engagement or disengagement with their professional training as they learn to adopt the role of ESL teachers, with limited research focusing on the emotional experiences they have toward the intersecting issues related to race and language. This case study focuses on three undergraduate students who were training to be TESOL-certified teachers during the 2020–2021 academic year. Through semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, assignments, and course materials, the study adopts a new materialist perspective to present how our participants experienced, embodied, and mobilized racialized emotions. The findings also reveal how all participants experience positive and negative racialized emotions – emotions people experience related to race within a particular situation. The article concludes by considering how racialized emotions can be situated within TESOL training and noting directions for future research.

ABSTRACT This theoretical paper critically unpacks the racialized experiences and emotions that Black children experience while using Black Language in a Spanish/English dual language bilingual program (DLBE). Employing Critical Race Theory, Raciolinguistics, and Emotions as Entanglements as theoretical lenses, this article interrogates the nuanced phenomena of Black children’s racialized experiences that are shaped by interconnected dynamics in bilingual programs. In this article, a composite counterstory details how raciolinguistic ideologies influence the specific racialized emotions and experiences of Black children that often place them on the margins in bilingual education spaces, such as performing respectability politics. In this counterstory, we argue that these racialized emotions are unique to Black children with Black Languaging practices in DLBE programs, highlight how their emotions are racialized differently from other participants in bilingual programs, and explain how DLBE programs become an extension of spaces that promote Whiteness for Black children. In sharing these tensions, we demand careful attention to the framing of Black children’s linguistic practices in DLBE programs and offer recommendations toward justice for Black children in DLBE programs.

ABSTRACT This theoretical article draws on more than a decade of the authors’ collective and individually published research on emotion in racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse English classrooms and community organizations. The authors argue that students’ acts of refusal to perform their own vulnerability and to endorse the myth of racial progress are affective strategies for addressing racialized relations of power. Drawing on Ahmed’s scholarship on complaint, happiness, and the politics of good feeling, it presents two extended examples, preceded by a summary of a third to illustrate how racialized emotions shape subjectivities in multimedia learning contexts. Across these settings, critical reading and production of multimedia texts entailed moments of intense and sometimes uneasy coexistence, revealing the emotional border-crossing youth must undertake as they navigate expectations to display positive feelings within the so-called progressive democracy of schooling as an ultimately white institution. The youth navigated these tensions by engaging in acts of refusal and negotiation, adopting varied and shifting stances that drew on their resources and their resolve to imagine more agentive and liberatory futures. These refusals led to alliances, and in the end, managed to preserve the social connections they valued in each learning community.

ABSTRACT Reflexivity is often treated as a sign of methodological rigor meant to signal being “serious” (e.g., rational, careful, credible) while leaving the politics of knowledge-making intact. This article argues that reflexivity is central to critical language education because it recenters the who of representation: who speaks, from where, with what responsibilities, and toward which ethical ends. We conceptualize reflexivity as a lifelong praxis with four entangled facets (i.e., positioning, criticality, awareness, reciprocity) and situate this praxis within Indigenous-informed orientations that foreground relational accountability and the de/re-centering of the self. Tracing reflexivity across critical, feminist, contemplative, and Indigenous epistemic traditions, we critique Western Cartesian logics that privilege objectivity, binary reason, and extractive representation, including the ontological severance of humans from nature. Against epistemic demands for coherence and neutrality, we argue that reflexivity reframes messiness, contradiction, and in-betweenness as evidence of power, history, and entanglement rather than problems to be resolved. We also model reflexivity through disclosures of complex transnational and mixed-race positionalities as ethical labor that unsettles who is authorized to know in language education. We conclude that reflexivity is an ongoing practice of unlearning and relearning that ethically reorients language education amid persistent coloniality and rapidly changing ecologies.

ABSTRACT This study examines how residents in Columbus, Ohio, interpret super-multilingual signs within the sociopolitical context of the 2020 U.S. election. Drawing on the framework of spatial repertoire, this study focuses on two signs: a digital ‘Hello’ sign in a commercial arts district and a ‘Hate Has No Home Here’ yard sign in a residential neighborhood. Data were drawn from a larger linguistic landscape study. Ten residents were recruited following an online survey and participated in semi-structured Zoom interviews during which they interpreted the selected signs. Visual-spatial analysis of the signs shows that both signs visually center English and frame multilingualism as a symbolic gesture of inclusivity. Thematic analysis reveals that participants constructed meaning not through linguistic knowledge alone but through affective, spatial, and ideological repertoires shaped by personal and political experience. Their readings suggest that multilingualism has been resemiotized to index liberal political values, while also exposing selective inclusion and symbolic erasure. These findings call for approaches to multilingual signage that attend to the emergent and relational nature of meaning-making while also recognizing the political and socioeconomic inequalities that such displays can obscure.

ABSTRACT Recent research has demonstrated that many racial and linguistic inequities exist in dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs. The increase of DLBE programs in districts across the nation has complex connections to existing racial hierarchies embedded in educational landscapes. Less research has examined how these dynamics impact teachers, particularly multilingual teachers of Color. This critical, qualitative study followed a group of five multilingual teachers of Color over two years. The study centered on teachers’ experiences with racial and linguistic inequities, and their emotional reactions to these inequities. I draw on an understanding of emotion labor as linked to racial and linguistic identity to argue that multilingual teachers of Color in DLBE are required to engage in additional, unrecognized, emotion work. This study has significant implications for research on emotions and emotion labor from a raciolinguistic perspective and their connections to racial and linguistic (in)justice.

ABSTRACT This study examines how racialized emotions shape the personal and professional lives of English language teachers in Japanese higher education. Drawing on a narrative multiple-case study of ELT educators of color working in Japan, it shows that emotions are not simply personal responses but are produced through raciolinguistic ideologies and institutional practices that govern legitimacy, belonging, and professional worth. The findings demonstrate how credentialism and native-speakerism function as forms of affective governance, requiring racialized instructors to continually prove themselves and generating feelings of anxiety, shame, frustration, and emotional exhaustion. Participants also described how pay inequities, limited promotion opportunities, and ambiguous recognition contributed to anger, disillusionment, and insecurity, while Whiteness was often associated with ease, confidence, and institutional trust. At the same time, teachers mobilized emotions such as care, pride, and solidarity to create supportive classrooms and to speak back against racialized marginalization. Conceptually, the study advances an understanding of emotions as entangled with race, language, and institutional power, showing how emotional life in English language teaching is unevenly organized by racial hierarchies that both constrain and enable educators’ agency.