Call for Chapter Proposals

Language teacher educators at a crossroads: Exploring the intersections of identities, emotions, and agency

Juyoung Song, Murray State University
Amber N. Warren, Vanderbilt University
Bedrettin Yazan, The University of Texas at San Antonio

Goals and Scope

This volume will present studies that explore language teacher educators’ (LTEds) identity, emotion, and agency in their practices with pre-service and in-service language teachers. Despite their critical role in language teacher education, LTEds’ work has received limited attention in applied linguistics and language education research (Banegas et al., 2022; Barkhuizen, 2021; Wright, 2009; Yazan, 2019; Yazan et al., forthcoming; Yuan & Lee, 2022, forthcoming). While recent scholarship has begun to examine how LTEds construct their knowledge base and articulate their beliefs, values, and priorities in teacher education practices (Peercy & Sharkey, 2018; Yuan & Yang, 2022), much more work is needed to understand the complex nature of their roles and responsibilities and how they navigate that complexity in their personal/professional lives (Edge, 2011). These responsibilities often involve negotiating and enacting multiple roles, such as teaching and supervising student teachers, collaborating with schools, universities, and educational stakeholders, developing teacher education curricula and programs, and engaging in policy development.

This volume examines how these various responsibilities intersect with LTEds’ identity negotiation, lived emotional experiences, and ongoing efforts to maintain and enact agency. The chapters will foreground institutional, discursive, and cultural dimensions of LTEds’ work by analyzing how their identities unfold as they engage in varied tasks and roles across multiple professional communities. LTEds often confront conflicting ideologies involved in local and national policies, institutional norms, and discourses around language teaching and teacher education. At the same time, they pursue professional growth across career stages and navigate evolving identities, frequently crossing boundaries from language learners and teachers to becoming LTEds. These boundary crossings give rise to identity tensions—and, at times, identity crises—that are integral to their professional journeys and merit deeper scholarly attention (López-Gopar et al., 2022; Trent, 2013; Yazan, 2018, 2022; Yuan, 2017; Yuan et al., 2022).

LTEds’ work also requires heightened emotional reflexivity in relation to dominant discourses and ideologies surrounding language and social identity (Song, 2021, 2022). While emerging scholarship has begun to explore LTEds’ emotional experiences (e.g., Nazari & De Costa, forthcoming) more research is needed to understand the emotional challenges they face and how they express, manage, or strategically mobilize emotions in their work. Although research in language education increasingly recognizes teaching as an “emotional practice” (Hargreaves, 1998), far less attention has been paid to how the work of teacher education involves similarly complex emotional dynamics that affect LTEds’ professional identities and teacher education practices.

Agency is another significant dimension of LTEds’ work. In this volume, agency is understood not as an individual trait, but as a situated, relational, and affectively charged practice (Eteläpelto et al., 2013). While research on teacher educators’ agency is emerging in the broader field of teacher education (Hökkä et al., 2017), specific scholarship on agency with respect to LTEds remains scarce. We are particularly interested in how LTEds navigate institutional constraints and sociocultural expectations, as their work is often shaped and bounded by broader institutional, cultural, and material contexts. Because agency is always enacted and mediated within such conditions, both LTEds’ identities, negotiated and constructed through their engagement with these contexts, and their lived emotional experiences must be taken into account (Eteläpelto et al., 2013). LTEds are called to exercise active agency in interpreting and implementing teacher education practices and in negotiating their professional identities. In doing so, they must respond to a range of institutional and pedagogical challenges while also striving to maintain their well-being—often in tension with institutional agendas.
From this perspective, we view the work of LTEds as a dynamic interplay of identity, emotion, and agency. This edited volume aims to generate critical dialogue around these intersecting dimensions by exploring the multifaceted roles LTEds play in preparing language teachers and contributing to the professional knowledge base of the field. Acknowledging the inevitable intersections between identity, emotion, and agency in LTEds’ lives, we expect each chapter to foreground one specific dimension while also demonstrating how it intersects with the other dimension(s) in the context of LTEds’ work.

Timeline

Call for chapter proposals: June 15, 2025
Chapter proposals due to volume editors: August 1, 2025
Invitations to submit full manuscripts: August 15, 2025
Completed chapters submitted: February 1, 2026
Revised manuscript submitted: May 1, 2026
Full volume submitted to publisher: June 30, 2026

We ask interested or invited authors to submit their abstract via the following link:
https://forms.gle/ZAaLP6sQiNRPXWba9
The submission should include the following:
A manuscript title (up to 12 words)
An abstract of up to 500 words (excluding references)
Short author bios (approximately 150 words per author)
We will review all abstracts and send notifications inviting authors to submit their full chapter manuscripts to be considered for inclusion in the volume.

References

Banegas, D. L., Edwards, E., & de Castro, L. S. V. (Eds.). (2022). Professional development through teacher research: Stories from language teacher educators. Multilingual Matters.

Barkhuizen, G. (2021). Language teacher educator identity. Cambridge University Press.

Edge, J. (2011). The reflexive teacher educator in TESOL: Roots and wings. Routledge.

Eteläpelto, A., Vähäsantanen, K., Hökkä, P., & Paloniemi, S. (2013). What is agency? Conceptualizing professional agency at work. Educational Research Review, 10, 45-65. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2013.05.001

Hargreaves, A. (1998). The emotional practice of teaching. Teaching and Teacher Education, 14(8) 835-854. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0742-051X(98)00025-0

Hökkä, P., Vähäsantanen, K., & Mahlakaarto, S. (2017). Teacher educators' collective professional agency and identity–Transforming marginality to strength. Teaching and Teacher Education, 63, 36-46. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2016.12.001

López-Gopar, M. E., Sughrua, W. M., & Huerta Cordova, V. (2022). The journey of a critical-oriented ELT curriculum and the identities of teacher educators: a collaborative and analytic autoethnography. Teachers and Teaching, 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2022.2062733

Nazari, M., & De Costa, P. (forthcoming) (Eds.) Language teacher educator emotions. Cambridge University Press.

Peercy, M. M., & Sharkey, J. (2022). Who gets to ask “Does race belong in every course?”: Staying in the anguish as white teacher educators. In Self-Studies in Urban Teacher Education (pp. 95-112). Springer, Singapore.

Song, J. (2021). Emotional reflexivity in language teacher education: Focusing on the role of emotion in teacher educator identity and pedagogy. In R. Yuan & I. Lee (Eds.) Becoming and being a TESOL teacher educator: Research and practice. Routledge.

Song, J. (2022). The emotional landscape of online teaching: An autoethnographic exploration of vulnerability and emotional reflexivity. System, 106, 102774. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2022.102774

Trent, J. (2013). Becoming a teacher educator: The multiple boundary-crossing experiences of beginning teacher educators. Journal of Teacher Education, 64(3), 262-275. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487112471998

Yazan, B. (2018). TESL teacher educators’ professional self-development, identity, and agency. TESL Canada Journal, 35(2), 140-155. https://doi.org/10.18806/tesl.v35i2.1294

Yazan, B. (2019). An autoethnography of a language teacher educator: Wrestling with ideologies and identity positions. Teacher Education Quarterly, 46(3), 34-56. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26746049

Yazan, B. (2022). Language teacher educator identity. In J. Liontas (Ed.), TESOL encyclopedia of English language teaching. Wiley-Blackwell Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118784235.eelt1025

Yuan, R. (2017). ‘This game is not easy to play’: a narrative inquiry into a novice EFL teacher educator’s research and publishing experiences. Professional Development in Education, 43(3), 474–491. https://doi.org/10.1080/19415257.2016.1182936

​​Yazan, B., Song, J., Yuan, E., & Lindahl, K. (Forthcoming). Language teacher educator identity. TESOL Journal.

Yuan, R., & Lee, I. (Eds.) (2022). Becoming and being a TESOL teacher educator: Research and practice. Routledge.

Yuan, R. & Lee, I. (Forthcoming). TESOL teacher educators in a time of flux and transformation. TESOL Quarterly.

Yuan, R., Lee, I., De Costa, P. I., Yang, M., & Liu, S. (2022). TESOL teacher educators in higher education: A review of studies from 2010 to 2020. Language Teaching, 55, 434–469. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444822000209

Yuan, R., & Yang, M. (2022). Unpacking language teacher educators’ expertise: A complexity theory perspective. TESOL Quarterly, 56(2), 656-687. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.3088

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics
Language Acquisition