Abstract
With globalization and the increasing numbers of English users worldwide, there has been a growing cohort of English teachers and teacher educators whose work occurs in transnational settings, that is, beyond or across national boundaries, and whose identities do not fit tidily within a simplified and potentially marginalizing native/non-native speaker dichotomy. As the editors of this volume explain, transnational English language teaching (ELT) professionals are adapting new pedagogies and practices, forming new identities, and redefining English language contexts, in essence, changing the landscape of ELT from within. Despite the contributions of these ELT professionals, their experiences have thus far been underrepresented in the literature. Although there are examples of research examining the practices of transnational ELT professionals, there is a need to include “voices of the practitioners and scholars themselves … focusing on their own transnational practices and identities in global settings” (p. 3). This gap presents the impetus for the book, which it fills by sharing the autobiographical experiences of 29 transnational ELT practitioners and academics across 15 chapters.
In the introduction, the editors welcome readers into the landscape of transnational ELT practices. Here they share their own transnational stories and lay the groundwork for some of the key ideas threading the book together, such as critical inquiry, translingualism, and transnationalism. They also preview what is to come through their openness and critical reflection.
The remaining chapters come from a diverse pool of ELT professionals—diverse in terms of countries of origin, language backgrounds, teaching contexts, and levels of experience, with contributors comprising English teachers, teacher educators, graduate students, early career researchers, and highly experienced professors and researchers. Their countries of origin and localities span much of the globe, with contributors from or living in each continent. The chapters are all examples of what could be described broadly as autoethnography or narrative inquiry, replete with appropriate citations grounding the work in relevant literature. However, it is notable that the editors allowed for flexibility and innovation as to how the chapters were constructed. For instance, the first seven chapters are all forms of collaborative research, such as duoethnography and dialogic inquiry. A further innovative approach came from the three chapters (Chapters 6, 9, and 13) that included photographs and visual artefacts to supplement the text.
Although the authors come from diverse backgrounds, with different experiences and perspectives, one thing tying all the contributions together is that each chapter is a form of critical inquiry into the experience of being a transnational ELT professional, and so each chapter has an element of activism in calling readers to consider the topic of transnationalism in their pedagogy, whether that be an English teacher in a classroom or a professor in a graduate seminar. Some of the themes or recurring topics are identity, race, culture, language use and translanguaging, privilege, marginalization, and the intersectionality of different aspects of identity. To give some examples of the calls to action, in Chapter 2, the authors problematize race in ELT, asking us to consider “adopting transnationalism as a pedagogical strategy” as “part of an antiracist agenda” (p. 14). In Chapter 5, the authors highlight their multiliterate and translingual identities as teacher educators, expressing how their identities as such influence their teaching and research. One suggestion they share is asking scholars to consider ways to take “culturally and linguistically liberating stances in their classrooms and research practice” (p. 88). In Chapter 7, the authors suggest that teacher education and graduate programs “incorporate explorations of the lived experiences of TESOL practitioners, including transnational individuals, as a critical component of their curricula” (p. 123). Doing so will help raise awareness of, and give voices to, more transnational ELT professionals.
In addition to providing critical inquiry, the volume contributes to the field by providing a platform for expressing unique or particular aspects of transnational ELT scholars. In Chapter 4, for instance, April S Salerno and Elena Andrei discuss family life and the linguistic and educational decision making that went on in their dual roles as mothers and transnational scholars. In Chapter 12, Yi-Wen Huang, originally from Taiwan, compares her experience teaching English in a Southwestern American university with those of her students, who are predominantly from the Navajo Nation. The essence of the chapter is captured in its title: “It's crazy that we are from very different countries, but we are similar” (p. 192). As Huang concluded, “By sharing my own transnational languages, cultures and identities, I validate my Navajo students’ transcultural, translingual and transnational identities” (p. 207), demonstrating “how migrant teachers’ tacit knowledge and transnational dispositions can be transformed into resources for local students and schools” (Gu and Canagarajah, 2019: 738, as cited on p. 207). I believe that this notion captures an important element of the book and demonstrates why, as the editors argue, it is important that the voices of transnational scholars gain more representation in the literature than they have been given.
In that regard, although not stated explicitly, it would be prudent to note that this book is the second of two concurrent volumes that the editors put together with transnational ELT professionals (see Yazan et al., 2021). The other volume, also a collection of autoethnographies of transnational ELT scholars, inevitably has a few similarities, such as drawing on many of the same topics discussed above. However, one key difference is that their other volume is more focused on the methodological considerations of autoethnography than the one being reviewed here, where the authors were afforded more methodological flexibility. Moreover, the respective chapters were composed by different authors in each volume, marking them as separate contributions—contributions that both help to fill the gap in research from transnational ELT professionals stated above. With these two volumes, the respective authors and editors have helped to make space for transnationalism in our field. These books will be of primary interest, I believe, to scholars working on identity in language teaching, but they also offer insightful points of reflection for ELT professionals more generally, so they may be a welcome addition to any department library.
