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 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…

Narrative research in TESOL still remains very much in its infancy. And the predominant mode of narrative research in TESOL--following the trend in educational research, as well as in other social sciences--has clearly been that of narrative inquiry, with its concomitant privileging of autobiographical "big stories", or researcher-elicited…

This paper highlights the significance of teacher identity to debates about the disconnect between digital literacies within and beyond school by exploring pre-service teachers' perspectives on digital literacy practices in their personal and professional lives. It uses aspects of Giddens' work on self-identity to frame an analysis that suggests…

This chapter is based on heuristic research and phenomenology which honors the dialectic of personal narratives as a way to process and understand the politics of change centered on hegemony, discourse, and cultural plurality. This methodology utilizes personal narrative and dialog as way to consider the importance of reflecting on individual…

While interest in the voice of children and young people has grown alongside concern for their rights and participation, for those excluded from mainstream education or with a label of behavioural, emotional and social difficulties, the issue of student voice takes on particular relevance. Yet the voices of these young people, and particularly…

This paper is based on a multidimensional study employing a heuristic methodology termed "creative narrative" that combines arts-based methods with narrative inquiry. Six female teachers' narratives of identity are explored through artistic, visual images to illuminate if and how they story "unconscious". The creative narratives, illuminated…