Visualising Foreign Language Teachers and Students As Multilinguals: Advancing Social Justice in Education

This book fosters an awareness of multilingualism as lived or as subjectively experienced from the perspective of those involved in language education and teacher education. Responding to multilingual and visual turns, it widens the repertoire of methodologies dominating the field of language teacher education, from linguistic or verbal to visual. The chapters, written by practising language teachers and teacher educators, explore aspects of multilingualism accessed through visual means in a wide range of contexts. Using social justice as a transformative framework, they highlight the biases, inequalities and linguistic hierarchies within schools and teacher education, and promote respect for linguistic plurality and cultural diversity in these settings. They illustrate how visual methods can be used to reconstruct histories of individual multilingualism, identify present language ideologies and support teachers’ professional development by means of envisioning the future self in action. This book will be of interest to those involved in language education and language teacher education, including researchers, practising language teachers, student or trainee teachers and teacher educators.

This book is Open Access under a CC BY NC ND license.

Paula Kalaja is Professor Emerita at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research interests include individual learner differences, visual methods in research and language teacher education. With Sílvia, she co-edited Visualising Multilingual Lives: More than Words (Multilingual Matters, 2019).

Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer is Full Professor at the University of Hamburg, Germany. Her research focuses on visual methods, multilingual pedagogies and language teacher education. She is Co-editor, with Paula Kalaja, of Visualising Language Students and Teachers as Multilinguals (Multilingual Matters, 2024).