Critical Action Research Challenging Neoliberal Language and Literacies Education: Auto and Duoethnographies of Global Experiences

This book is a collection of auto, duo and multi-ethnographies written by frontline language teachers and teacher educators in different parts of the world, including Asia, Africa, Latin America, and North America. These ethnographic accounts report how the authors mobilized different forms of action research to resist against neoliberal educational models and the profit-oriented principles by which they are run. The teachers involved in these projects write about a variety of ways in which they engaged with activist and critical research projects that highlight current socio-political movements, invite marginalized students’ communities into the process of teaching and learning, use language education as a means of identity negotiation, fight back institutional restrictions, and show how we can teach language for peace and happiness. The writers also explain how they have created an inquiry community to meet and support each other and used auto, duo or multi-ethnography as insiders to bring attention to their embodied knowledge of the challenges involved in contemporary neoliberal educational settings.

Antoinette Gagné has been a professor at the University of Toronto since 1989. Her research has focused on teacher education for diversity and inclusion in various contexts as well as the experiences of newcomers and their families in Canadian schools and university-level plurilingual students.

Amir Kalan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. His research interests include critical literacy and second language education. In his research, he mobilizes methods such as narrative inquiry and autoethnography to study sociocultural contexts of literacy engagement.

Sreemali Herath is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba. Her research includes post-conflict reconciliation, arts based approaches to identity and language teaching research, critical approaches to teacher education and narrative inquiry.