Speakers
Description
Who are our students? Where do they (and we) live, work, and study at present, and potentially in the future? Who lives, works, and studies in their (and our) communities? Who else might they (and we) encounter in and beyond those spaces? What unique knowledge, skills, and experiences do they (and we) possess? What challenges have they (and we) had, and do they (and we) continue to face, negotiating being, becoming, and belonging in and beyond the classroom? What experiences with language do they (and we) have, and how can we relate to each other in and beyond the classroom? How can we contribute to equipping and empowering them for interaction in the communities they engage with and belong to, teaching-wise? How can this contribute to the community building, and to the betterment of people’s lives therein, in general? How might our professional activities enhance this? What affordances, constraints and real consequences might we face in the educational settings in which we work and the communities in which they are situated?
In this plenary talk, we (Miso and Nat) seek to address these questions through a community-based, transdisciplinary approach (Hammine & Rudolph, 2025). Community-based language teaching is grounded in sociohistorical context. Teachers would seek to listen, share, reflect, and (un-)learn in dialogue with their students, colleagues, and other stakeholders. They would aim to learn and grow as members of the communities in which they, their students, and other stakeholders live. They would draw upon stakeholders’ lived experiences negotiating being, becoming, and belonging, as well as upon their own (Motha et al., 2012). Community-based approaches to teaching (as with research and theorization) include the need to pursue learning in a transdisciplinary fashion. Pennycook (2018) notes that teacher-scholars engage with questions/issues/realities that require transcending areas of study (or “fields” and corresponding bodies of “literature”), and, of course, the bounds of academia.
In order to unpack these concepts, we will utilize our current context (Japan; Osaka) to discuss the personal-professional communities in which we and our students negotiate belonging within and transcending that space, and demonstrate classroom ideas and activities to explore the ways of belonging in our communities. We will underscore the fact that “Japan” is a site of movement, diversity and complexity past and present, and that there are many ways to be “Japanese” and/or a member of Japanese society. This is a direct challenge to the dominant historical narrative that Japan is “homogeneous.” Tensions between the realities of belonging in Japan, and the homogeneity narrative, however, manifest politically, educationally and socially. “English” language education is no exception, as there exists tension between dominant notions of essentialized and idealized Selfhood (“Japaneseness”) and Otherness (“nativeness” in English) and the diversity and complexity characterizing classrooms and the communities in which they are situated.
Though Japan is our primary point of dialogic departure, our personal and professional lives and the communities to which we belong (as with many of you) are inseparably interwoven with the Korean peninsula. As we talk about “Japan,” therefore, we will also concomitantly touch upon “Korea.” In doing so, we will encourage participants based in both South Korea and Japan to imagine what a community-based, transdisciplinary approach to “seeing” in theory, research and teaching might begin to reveal. We look forward to collectively dialoguing, reflecting and potentially re-imagining our approaches to “English” language education.
Nathanael Rudolph is Professor of Sociolinguistics and Language Education at Kindai University (近畿大学) in Higashiosaka, Osaka. The scope of his research includes community-based, transdisciplinary explorations of being, becoming and belonging within and transcending (language) education (with a focus on “Japan” and the Korean peninsula), and conceptualizations of and attention to “criticality” and “(in)justice” in applied linguistics and language education.
Miso Kim is Associate Professor (Lecturer) at the Division of Language and Culture, Graduate School of Humanities, the University of Osaka. She is committed to promoting diversity and translanguaging in English-language classrooms. Her research interests revolve around language teacher identity, action research, and emotions in language teaching and learning.