Agency in Motion: An Autoethnographic Inquiry of a Transnational Language Teacher Educator

Abstract

As English-medium instruction (EMI) programs expand globally, teacher educators play a crucial yet understudied role in navigating multilingual, sociocultural, and institutional complexities. Understanding their agency is essential for examining how pedagogical reasoning, language ideologies, and context-responsive practices develop in educational spaces. This autoethnographic research explores how I negotiate and enact my agency as a language teacher educator in a language teacher education program at an EMI institution. Drawing on teaching journal entries, retrospective reflections, and course artifacts, the analysis showed how my pedagogical agency was enacted through reframing translanguaging and multilingual perspectives, navigating critical perspectives in context, and fostering teacher candidates’ agency and professional identity. These enactments emerged through ongoing negotiation among transnational trajectory, insider– outsider positioning, students’ realities, evolving educator identities, and negotiation with the context. The study offers nuanced understandings of teacher educator agency in transnational educational contexts and implications for promoting multilingual, context-responsive, and agency-oriented language teacher education in EMI settings.