There are long and diverse strands of thinking about how schools and schooling, teaching, curriculum, and learning could be conceptualized and developed so as to foster what is often loosely called social justice. Many of these strands go back (in Europe) at least to the French Revolution. The original term that encompasses this area is 'radical…

This article investigates the significance of the use of multilingual language assistants (MLAs) in second language teaching for adult migrants with limited formal schooling. Norton's theories of investmentand critical pedagogy serve as an analytical backdrop. An emic perspective is adopted, with interviews with nine adult learners taking centre…

Critical pedagogy and social justice education have gained increasing attention in recent years in many subject matters, and world language education has been no exception to this trend. There are a number of works dedicated to critical pedagogy in world language education. At the same time that such concerns have gained attention, another…

This article reports about a 2-year participatory action research (PAR) study in which three instructors engaged in an ongoing PAR cycle to develop and implement an explicit social justice teaching approach in their differing instructional contexts in the Northeastern US: a graduate course for teacher education and two secondary school Spanish…

This study reports on the journal entries written by undergraduate students (N = 42) after participating in Spanish as a foreign language classes with a critical pedagogy orientation which unfolded from the exploration of homophobia in a poem by Luis Cernuda. Students were requested to express their views on how the lessons had impacted their FL…

To address racial inequity and the exclusion of African Americans in applied linguistics, second-language acquisition, and world language (WL) education, our field must reckon with social justice problems of racism and anti-Blackness. Theoretical frameworks of critical race theory (CRT) and critical race pedagogy (CRP) elucidate how such…

In this article, we are interested in three things: an effective methodology for implementing critical dialogic pedagogy (CDP) in English First Additional Language (FAL) poetry in a South African classroom, the forms that dialogue can take in the English FAL poetry classroom, and the effect of CDP on adolescent learners' identity development.…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to support advocacy for racial and linguistic justice by examining teachers' efforts to contest their colleagues' language-exclusive policies and practices. Design/methodology/approach: The author used a critical and reconstructive discourse analysis guided by interest convergence theory to analyze narratives…

Given the increasing concern about the scarcity of Dual Language Bilingual Education (DLBE) teachers, it is crucial to understand the trends in teacher retention and attrition from the perspective of DLBE teachers themselves. DLBE teachers departing from their jobs imposes a significant burden on schools and students and affects the implementation…

This article, relying on a series of epiphanies throughout my journey as a researcher and scholar-activist, shares my relationship with criticality and how it has guided my research and teaching agendas. I share how critical theories have informed my main research areas and the questions and issues I have raised in my own work. The article also…

In this personal reflection, the author explores her own learning in becoming a language teacher educator who aims to develop preservice teachers' critical intercultural praxis. By revisiting the course reflections of one of her preservice teachers, the author confronts her failures and perceptions about what it means to be a "critical"…

In this interview with Terry A. Osborn, whose work set the stage for the momentum that is currently building around social justice in language education, Dr. Osborn shares his perspective on the past, present, and future of language education.

Unexpected conflicts, or eruptions, in class during discussions of controversial issues are not uncommon in the field of English language teaching (ELT). This can be especially true for critical English language teachers who hope to address social justice issues in their classrooms. Existing literature of these events often mentions emotional…

This entry concerns issues of social justice within TESOL internationally, and approaches to building social justice within the TESOL field. Given the broad nature of TESOL and social justice education, there are many different areas that can be discussed both in theory and practice. This entry focuses more on the context of schooling, teachers,…

This study investigates how critical intercultural pedagogy, creative arts methods, inspired by new materialism, can support new forms of language and intercultural learning in contexts of conflict. Columbian university scholarship recipients in pre-service English language education from disadvantaged backgrounds, co-research alongside the…