Orientating multilingualism: navigating languages teacher identities

The impact of conversations about language, multilingualism and multiculturalism in Western education contexts—and their impact on student and teacher interaction—has been frequently remarked upon. There have been very few attempts, however, to explore the ways in which these norms and their underlying structures and behaviors play out in the practices of languages teaching. Through interrogating teachers’ conversations about their daily experience and practice, we discovered that some languages—and the teachers who spoke or taught them—were understood differently from others. These differences were produced and reproduced in complex interactions between race, class, education and Western hegemony, marking some languages and languages teachers as being more prestigious and knowledgeable than others. We argue that, in the transnational contexts of Australian schools, these discussions are framed within discourses that are raced, neo-colonial and neoliberal. They appear to be wrought within a world of dissolving national, linguistic and cultural boundaries that is experienced as unsettling and disempowering. Moreover, the languages teachers identities are shaped by the normative terms and conditions of an understanding of languages and languages education that remains rooted in parochial, monolingual and pecuniary perspectives. If we are to reorientate approaches to languages education, and develop a more sustainable and socially just approach in Australia’s multicultural schools, these conversations—and the norms and behaviors that frame them—need to be better understood.