In this personal reflection, Sonia Nieto recounts the lessons she learned about language and literacy from learning to speak Spanish and then English; to reading and writing; and the impact of these lessons on her identity, teaching, research, and life; and, more broadly, on the fields of education and literacy.

We base this work on central tenets of Black feminist thought. The core objectives of Black feminist thought are to clarify Black women's experiences and ideas through self-definition, to refute stereotypical depictions, to validate Black women's situated knowledge, and to resist marginalization that occurs as a result of our intersectional…

The article is principally written for adult educators. It models an auto-ethnographic approach situating this within a critical pedagogic orientation. As an adult educator working in the Republic of Ireland, I draw from two instances in my own life that helped me to re-think my racialised identity. By reflecting on discomforts in terms of my own…

One of the consequences of globalisation in recent years has been the unprecedented spread of English as the world's lingua franca. This has particular resonance in postcolonial countries, such as Pakistan and Australia, whose histories have been strongly shaped by English colonisers in contrasting ways. Written from the perspective of someone who…

In this essay, Chung-Hin Kevin Ho, a history education university student in Hong Kong, narrates his search for civic identity. Composed through a process of critical and reflective dialogue with Hayes Tang, the essay describes the tension between Chung-Hin's Chinese ethnic and cultural identity and the democratic values held by Hong Kongers. As a…

Exploring the Yiddish language of my father, grandmother, her grandmother, and beyond, this autobiographical article frames language as an ever-changing space where identities are negotiated, formed, and contested. Placing the history of Yiddish alongside my own familial relationship to the language, I explore how the stories of individual lives…

In this paper, I narrate highlights of my long process of learning and teaching English as a foreign language in mainland China and Australia, presenting a picture of the practices of learning and teaching English in mainland China from the bottom up. Over the past 50 years, English learners in mainland China, as Gao Yihong has written, have…

Guided by the concept of nepantleras and critical race nepantlera methodology, Nancy Acevedo presents the testimonios of Citlalli Bejarano and Natalie Ibarra Collazo, two Chicana students who attend urban high schools. Citlalli and Natalie share various forms of inclusion and exclusion that they experience as Chicanas attending private and public…

This research is nestled within Huber, Murphy, and Clandinin's (2011) understanding of curriculum making as situated not only in schools, but also in homes and communities and at the intersections of all three. It also relies on Clandinin, Murphy, Huber, and Orr's (2010) reconceptualization of tension as a space where educative experiences can…

Life stories, while a powerful method in social sciences and humanities scholarship, are still not widely accepted and used in the higher education classroom. This commentary encourages college and university professors, particularly those of minority backgrounds, to feel at ease in using storytelling as a classroom pedagogical tool. Stories can…

This article addresses the intrapersonal aims of music education with specific emphasis on musical identity. For the author, the question "Who am I?" is ingrained, shaped, and experienced by the contexts, relationships, and activities in which people are most deeply invested. Thus, he believes that music education should have mechanisms…

The past 50 years have witnessed a growing presence of critical theory within different social science academic departments across the western world. The joint existence of a theory committed to exposing and criticizing various inequalities of the social order within academic institutions based on traditional hierarchies and prestigious…

This essay -- written autobiographically as a confession -- charts uncomfortably and reflexively salient experiences and emotions of a queer educator of color. It unveils and analyzes unresolved feelings as messy examples in his journey as an urban school teacher, as a graduate student, and eventually as a university academic and administrator. In…

Teacher-researcher narrative accounts are essential and insightful for the science education field, yet they are few and far-between. In this forum, I engage in dialogue with Nicole Grimes's auto-ethnographic narrative on the affordances her femme-Caribbean identity allowed for some students to engage more deeply in science. While I agree with and…

In the counternarratives shared in this article, the readers will read accounts of day-to-day realities of being a professional that will help prepare them in their professional roles as educators and counselors, in particular, the educational life experiences that influenced their professional development. Each person reflects on their life--as…