Can multilingual curricular space emerge in monolingual schooling
An autoethnography of a KSL teacher advocate’s emotional tensions and agency
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19234544 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Yeonghwi Ryu (0000-0002-0514-8704, Gwangju National University of Education, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-17 |
| Publication date | 2026-05-13 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Language and Education (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0950-0782 • E-ISSN: 1747-7581 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/09500782.2026.2671146 |
| OpenAlex | W7161029572 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 59 |
Language teacher advocates often confront emotional tensions produced by monolingual schooling, yet less is known about how such tensions become, or fail to become, agency in everyday teaching contexts where formal support is limited. Drawing on poststructural scholarship on teacher emotion and agency, and conceptualizing multilingual curricular space as both ideological and implementational, this autoethnographic study examines how emotional tensions mediated the agency of a Korean-as-a-Second-Language teacher advocate committed to asset-based pedagogy in South Korea. Across four episodes, the study shows that critical emotional reflexivity emerged as the teacher came to read discomfort, frustration, and anxiety in relation to monolingual norms and relational feeling rules. Yet such reflexivity did not readily stabilize into visible action; instead, agency was often redirected toward protective silence or fragile micro-resistance. The findings further show that collaboration with an external research team provided social, material, and discursive resources that made multilingualism sayable and pedagogically usable, enabling concrete pedagogical moves. Finally, the study demonstrates that agency was reconfigured through the affective curricular work of building a multilingual writing space. It contributes to research on language teacher emotion and agency by showing that agency is mediated by available resources and reshaped through affective curricular space-making
Autoethnography · Discourse analysis · Ethnography · Literacy · Multilingualism · Qualitative research · Teaching method · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning · Multilingual Education and Policy · Second Language Learning and Teaching
“Structures of Feeling” in Curriculum and Teaching
Navigating Emotion Work by Using Community Cultural Wealth
A monolingual approach in an English primary school
Emotion labor in teacher collaboration
Translanguaging and emotionality of English as a second language (ESL) teachers
Emotion as pedagogy
Exploring an elementary ESL teacher’s emotions and advocacy identity
Emotions and activism
The emotions of language teachers
The Place of Emotion in Teacher Reflection
The Transformation of Ms. Corazón
ESL Teachers’ Acting Agentively Through Job Crafting
Teacher Advocacy in Bilingual Programs
Being ‘the strange one’ or ‘like everybody else’
Linguistic discrimination in higher education
Racism without race in South Korea
ESL teacher advocacy beyond the classroom
The kids are terrific
Teacher Agency in Curriculum Making
Mapping the research on language teacher emotion
Rescuing “emotion labor” from (and for) language teacher emotion research
When language teacher emotions and language policy intersect
Emotions as agency
Language teacher agency, emotion labor and emotional rewards in tertiary-level English language programs
The emotional landscape of online teaching
I just only speak English English”
Exploring bilingualism in a monolingual school system
Agency as a Form of Discursive Practice. A Classroom Scene Observed
Dynamic Bilingualism as the Norm
Good for me to Leave it for Good”
Feeling Worlds
Undoing Appropriateness
Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language
Graduates' Reports of Advocating for English Language Learners
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |