Advancing Language Teacher Agency Research: An Introduction

Language teachers at all career stages must navigate their way through complex social, cultural, political, and institutional environments in their work. Given that education and language education are politicized activities, (Ndhlovu & Ndhlovu-Gatsheni, 2024; Pennycook, 2001), and that pedagogy, along with teacher knowledge and practice, is highly situated (Cross 2010; Johnson, 2009), understanding teacher agency and its enactment or constraints is complex and multifaceted. The primary aim of this edited volume is to investigate the ways in which language teachers develop, assert, and exercise agency, or even find their agency constrained, across diverse contexts.

In the face of increasing diversity and deeply entrenched monolingual-centric ideologies and assumptions (Cross et al., 2022; Veliz & Chen, 2024; Veliz et al., 2023), it is imperative to examine the contextual, institutional, systemic, and ideological forces that shape language teacher education and, more specifically, language teacher agency. Notably, the movement of people and complex linguistic and cultural practices within and across nations challenges us as academics and educators to move beyond epistemological racism (Pennycook, 2022) or mono-epistemic understandings of language and language use (Ndhlovu, 2015). These limited perspectives isolate notions of language and identity within geographic, linguistic, or social silos, ignoring the lived experience of language teachers and learners (Heugh et al., 2021; Ndhlovu & Ndhlovu-Gatsheni, 2024; Ndhlovu, 2015; Veliz et al., 2025). Furthermore, while much of the recent scholarly work on language teacher agency has focused on contexts where English either is a medium of instruction or the dominant additional language, we advocate for amplifying the voices and 2agentic experiences of teachers, students, and educators of languages other than English as a decolonial, social justice act.

In response to these challenges, a key focus in this volume is to broaden the scope of language teacher agency research through different theoretical and methodological lenses which contribute to a more inclusive understanding of agency for teachers of languages in diverse contexts. Additionally, this volume also seeks to address reflections from Tao and Gao (2021) around the lack of methodological diversity that has broadly underpinned language teacher agency research to date. Through the chapters in this volume, we aim to diversify the theoretical and methodological approaches to research, fostering more holistic understandings of language teacher agency.