Orientating Multilingualism: Navigating Teacher Identities

The impact of conversations about language, multilingualism and multiculturalism in education contexts—and their impact on student and teacher interaction—has been frequently remarked upon (Motha, 2014; Cummins & Early, 2010). However, limited research has been undertaken to date to explore the ways in which the normative conditions of language, culture and identity, and their underlying structures and behaviours play out in the practices of Languages and EAL/D teaching.

The data that frames our study was taken from a research project which explored recent changes to Australian Languages and EAL/D curriculum and policy, and its impact on teacher experience and practice. Analysis of the teachers’ conversations about these policies, and their daily experience and practice, made visible the ways in which the discipline areas Languages and EAL/D—and the teachers who taught these subjects —were understood.

The embodied and normative conditions of identity are negotiated and mediated within the frame of language and culture as a multidimensional and reflexive construct defining and shaping normativity and difference (Arber, 2014; May, 2014; Norton, 2013; Spivak, 1999; Weinmann & Arber, 2017). Moreover, Languages and EAL/D teachers’ identities are shaped by the normative terms and conditions of an understanding of languages, Languages and EAL/D education that remains rooted in national, monolingual and unequally empowered perspectives. The authors argue that a deeper interrogation of the production and reproduction of identity and difference, and how these are shaped within the systems teachers work in (Young, 2017) is key to orientating multilingual approaches to Languages and EAL/D education.