Conference Agenda

This presentation examines agency in the field of heritage language education (HLE), a marginalized area of schooling that is unevenly available and typically restricted to students who use a heritage language (HL) in the family (Gürsoy 2024). The meaning of heritage language varies across national and sociopolitical contexts, encompassing indigenous languages, migrant and autochthonous minority languages, as well as recognized and unrecognized minority languages. Owing to HLE’s marginal position within school systems, teacher agency becomes a critical factor in processes of professional positioning, particularly as heritage language teachers navigate dominant cultural and linguistic ideologies shaped by coloniality (Mignolo & Walsh 2018) and language racism (Dirim & Khakpour 2018).

Critical approaches to language teacher education foreground awareness of power relations, inequality, and discrimination while simultaneously emphasizing possibilities for social transformation (Norton 2005). Beyond critique, such approaches stress the need to reconfigure power, belonging, and language hierarchies in globalized societies (Priestley et al. 2013). Recent scholarship conceptualizes teacher agency as resistance to neoliberal educational policies and positions teachers as agents of change who challenge dominant structures within schools and society (Rosen et al. 2024). This perspective is reinforced by research highlighting the role of collaborative critical communities, justice-oriented reflection, Freirean pedagogy, and the processes of learning and unlearning dominant ideologies in fostering transformative educational practice (Banegas & Gerlach 2021; Rosen et al. 2024).

Agency has traditionally been associated with autonomy and decision-making, yet contemporary scholarship conceptualizes it as relational, temporal, and achieved through engagement with structural conditions rather than as an individual possession (Biesta 2020). From this ecological perspective, agency emerges through identifying challenges and enacting responses in context. In language teacher education, this entails fostering continuous professional learning, critical self-reflection, and context-sensitive, inclusive pedagogies that support multilingual learners academically and socioemotionally (Banegas & Gerlach 2021; Iversen 2024). Although European institutions promote multilingualism, schooling remains shaped by monolingual ideologies, deficit views, and native-speakerism (Ndhlovu 2015; García 2009), conditions that both reproduce inequality and create spaces for teachers to enact agentic, transformative practices.

An essential dimension of developing an agentic language teacher identity lies in recognizing lived language experiences as complex and deeply embedded in socio-political and sociocultural contexts. The persistence of homogenizing “one nation, one language” ideologies within many nation-states contributes to pervasive linguistic racism and discrimination directed at speakers of minority languages and dialects. Consequently, teachers require structured opportunities to identify, name, and critically examine injustice in order to transform curricula and pedagogical practices and to avoid reproducing bias and systems of domination in classroom contexts.

This symposium adopts multiple analytical perspectives to examine how teachers of heritage and minority languages conceptualize, negotiate, and enact agency. Incorporating the perspective of Kichwa in South America broadens the predominantly European focus represented by cases from Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, and Germany. Across four presentations, the symposium also brings together diverse methodological approaches, including autoethnography, interview analysis, and school development research.

Holding a critical lens to agency and power relations inherent in Language Education and schooling, this paper is the collaborative autoethnography of four Heritage Language Teacher Educators from Sweden, Germany and Austria about their understanding of agency. We have: i) sought to understand our notions of agency and how we position agency in terms of our work and working conditions and ii) explored agency associated with Heritage Language Education in terms of the broader educational system and society. We align with understanding agency as a critical factor for heritage language teachers in navigating their roles within school settings (see Hägi-Mead & Flubacher 2022; Ayten & Atanasoska 2019) and seek to understand our own Language Teacher Identity. The data consists of our own pre-interview journals about us and our work, transcripts of our Austrian colleague interviewing us individually and annotations and the conversations we have had during the iterative writing of the article. The methodology builds upon the work of others (most notably Cann & De Meulenaere (2012) who define and describe critical co-constructed autoethnography as a methodology situated within the traditions of critical theory, critical pedagogy, and critical race theory. We contend that a critical co-constructed autoethnographic methodology aligns with activist research by capturing the process of praxis (Freire, 1970/1993), rooted in critical theory and pedagogy and appropriate to reflect upon our own biographies, our work and working conditions. We understand that working collaboratively we can strive to acknowledge and accurately represent the tempo (Bourdieu, 1977), friendship (Tillmann-Healy, 2003), uncertainty, and complexity of relationships—creating a space for us to work and reflect together about our experience as teacher educators. Structured content analysis (Kuckartz 2018) conducted by the four us and an openness towards collaboratively sharing our experiences allowed us to capture the key dimensions of agency, critical reflection, and affective experience. Agency emerges as a multifaceted construct, closely intertwined with experiences of belonging, becoming, voice, hierarchy, creating spaces, and academic freedom. Our discussions indicate constraints within educational structures that result in failure to fully recognise our own and our students' linguistic resources and alternative ways of being and knowing. From within these constraints as Educators, we turn to enablements to understandings of agency, to becoming and belonging, attentive to our own voices and the voices of our students.

Ayten, A. C., & Atanasoska, T. (2019). “Turkish is a stepchild.” A case study of language policies in North Rhine Westphalia, Germany. Heritage Language Journal, 17(2), 156–178. https://doi.org/10.46538/hlj.17.2.3 Bourdieu, P. (1977). The economics of linguistic exchanges. Social Science Information, 16(6), 645–668. https://doi.org/10.1177/053901847701600601 Cann, C. N., & DeMeulenaere, E. J. (2012). Critical co-constructed autoethnography. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 12(2), 146–158. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708611435214 Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.; 30th anniversary ed.). Continuum. (Original work published 1970) Hägi-Mead, S., & Flubacher, M.-C. (2022). Schule in der postmigrantischen Gesellschaft am Beispiel des muttersprachlichen Unterrichts. In K.-B. Boeckmann et al. (Eds.), Mit Sprache handeln & Rahmenbedingungen des Sprachenlehrens und -lernens. IDT 2022 (Vol. 1, pp. 131–145). Erich Schmidt Verlag. Kuckartz, U. (2018). Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse: Methoden, Praxis, Computerunterstützung (4., überarb. Aufl.). Beltz Juventa. Tillmann-Healy, L. M. (2003). Friendship as method. Qualitative Inquiry, 9(5), 729–749. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800403254894

In this presentation, we will look at “agency” in the field of heritage language education (HLE). HLE is a marginalised subject in school (Gürsoy 2024), which is not offered at all schools and is only open for students that use that Heritage Language (HL) in the family. The data base consists of 18 interviews with HL teachers in Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands, teaching the languages Arabic, Turkish, Ukrainian, Russian, Somali and Farsi. All teachers took part in the Erasmus+ project “Your Language Counts” and were interviewed at the beginning (September 2024) in situ in the three countries. The second interview, also semi-structured like the first, took place online in May/June 2025, at the end. Altogether, the transcripts of those 18 interviews consist of 173,728 words. The qualitative data was analysed using content analysis in the programme MAXQDA (see Schroedler et al., 2025). As the focus of this symposium is agency, in this presentation agency of heritage language teachers as teachers for a specific student population and for a marginalized language/school subject will be analysed. Especially, but not only, HL teachers’ agency emerges as a critical factor for heritage language teachers in navigating their roles within school settings (see Hägi-Mead & Flubacher 2022; Ayten & Atanasoska 2019). A critical approach to language teacher education emphasizes raising awareness of power structures, inequality, and discrimination while exploring possibilities for social transformation (Norton, 2005; Pennycook, 2004). This critical view on hierarchy and discrimination should examine the given dominance structures in school and society. But it should not stop there, instead it should seek change to the “better” (Thoma 2021). Therefore, not only critique should be included but also prospects for shifting power and belonging, especially in relation to language hierarchies in globalized societies. Biesta (2020) notes that agency is traditionally linked to decision-making and autonomy, yet it must be understood within relational and temporal contexts. It is not something possessed but something achieved through interaction with structural conditions. Bandura (2021) describes agency in this sense, as identifying challenges, developing responses, and implementing action. The aspects of agency that are visible in the data, will be presented with regard to 1) which aspects the teachers identify as challenging for their students and 2) what teachers report how they act in order to react and actively push back discriminating or minoritizing aspects in the (school) lives of the students.

Ayten, A., & Atanasoska, T. (2020). “Turkish is a stepchild.” A case study of language policies in North Rhine Westphalia, Germany. Heritage Language Journal, 17(2), 156–178. Bandura, A. (2001). Social cognitive theory: An agentic perspective. Annual Review of Psychology, 52(1), 1–26. Biesta, G. J. J. (2020). Perfect education, but not for everyone. On society’s need for inequality and the rise of surrogate education. Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, 66(1), 8–14. Gürsoy, E. (2025). (Nachhaltiger) Erhalt von minorisierten Sprachen und translingualen Sprachpraktiken. Zeitschrift für migrationspädagogische Zweitsprachdidaktik, 4, 106–124. Hägi-Mead, S., & Flubacher, M. C. (2023). Schule in der postmigrantischen Gesellschaft am Beispiel des muttersprachlichen Unterrichts. In K. B. Boeckmann et al. (Eds.), IDT 2022: mit.sprache.teil.haben. Band 1. Erich Schmidt Verlag. Norton, B. (2006). Second language identity. In K. S. Goodman & Y. M. Goodman (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Elsevier, 502–508. Pennycook, A. (2004). Performativity and language studies. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies: An International Journal, 1(1), 1–19. Schroedler, T., Diekmann, C., Atanasoska, T., & Gürsoy, E. (2025). An evaluation report of the Your Language Counts project: Findings and implications. Thoma, N. (2022). Biographical perspectives on language ideologies in teacher education. Language and Education

This presentation examines teacher agency in Heritage Language Education (HLE) in Germany through the lens of teacher/caregivers relationships. It focuses on how HL teachers perceive parental expectations, articulate their own expectations towards families, and negotiate communication practices within the organizational conditions of HSU. The study addresses a research gap at the meso level of multilingualism research, which has been described as an underexplored “grey zone” between family language practices and macro-level language policies (Juvonen et al. 2020), particularly in the German context (Lengyel & Neumann 2017; Mehlhorn 2022). HL classes in Germany are institutionally embedded in different ways depending on the federal state. In North Rhine-Westphalia, teachers are employed on permanent contracts and work with relatively stable learner groups from grade 1 to grade 10. HL counts as a regular school subject, replaces a second foreign language, and is graded and examined. In Saxony, teachers are employed on yearly contracts, and learner groups are typically formed in primary school. HL is offered as an elective and is recorded in the school certificate only as a notice, without grades or examinations. The study is based on ten semi-structured expert interviews conducted online between 2022 and 2025 with teachers of Russian as a heritage language from North Rhine-Westphalia and Saxony. The interviewees have between 1 and 28 years of teaching experience and speak as experienced practitioners with in-depth knowledge of everyday instructional decision-making. Given the strong dependence of HLE on individual teacher choices, expert interviews provide insight into how agency is enacted under structurally constrained conditions (Misoch 2019). The presentation is guided by the following research questions: (1) How do HL teachers perceive and interpret parental expectations regarding heritage language learning? (2) Do teachers formulate expectations towards parents, and if so, of what kind? (3) How do teachers’ beliefs about parents relate to other organizational and pedagogical aspects of HLE mentioned by them, such as language maintenance and language shift and differentiation in heterogeneous learner groups? The interviews were coded using MAXQDA and analyzed through structuring qualitative content analysis following Kuckartz (2018). Teachers’ agency becomes visible in how they interpret parental expectations, actively shape communication, and strategically balance language maintenance goals with experiences of language shift and institutional limitations. A comparison between NRW and Saxony illustrates how differing macro-level frameworks shape the scope and forms of teacher agency in teacher–parent relationships within HLE.

Juvonen, P., Eisenchlas, S. A., Roberts, & Schalley, A. C. (2020). Researching social and affective factors in home language maintenance and development: A methodology overview. In A. Schalley, & S. Eisenchlas, (2020) (Eds.). Handbook of Home Language Maintenance and Development: Social and Affective Factors (38-58). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Kuckartz, U. (2018). Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse: Methoden, Praxis, Computerunterstützung (4th edition). Beltz Juventa. Lengyel, D. & Neumann, U (2017). Herkunftssprachlicher Unterricht in Hamburg. Eine Studie zur Bedeutung des HSU aus Elternsicht (HUBE). Die Deutsche Schule 109:3, 273–282. Mehlhorn, G. (2022): Unterricht in der Herkunftssprache – Zum Forschungsstand. Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht 27:2, 1–16. Misoch, S. (2019). Qualitative Interviews (2nd edition). De Gruyter.

Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution recognizes a plurinational, plurilingual state and enshrines sumak kawsay (good living) as the horizon for an intercultural society (Asamblea Constituyente del Ecuador, 2008). Yet the education system remains bifurcated: General Basic Education (EGB) advances Western epistemologies and mandatory English, while Intercultural Bilingual Education (EIB)—rooted in Indigenous ancestry and sumak kawsay—serves only Indigenous populations and is persistently under-resourced. English is prestigious and an avenue for social mobility (Alm, 2003); Kichwa, by contrast, bears the weight of coloniality, low status, and systemic discrimination. “Time To Speak” signals a dual commitment: to be vocal about this inequity and to improve didactics so graduates can effectively speak Kichwa and transform EIB from within. We present a participatory, practice-driven initiative that positions Kichwa educators and allies as agents of change in teacher education—embracing language agency and co-governance to co-create innovative didactic solutions. Grounded in Participatory Action Research (PAR) and Latin American traditions of educación popular and sistematización de experiencias (Fals Borda, 2007; Freire, 2005; Jara Holliday, 2012), our objectives are to: (1) jointly generate didactic guides that foster meaningful, critical, and reflective learning based on indigenous onto-epistemologies; (2) promote linguistic and cultural revitalization by developing communicative competences among future educators of Kichwa; and (3) prototype an innovative didactic proposal for Kichwa that can model pathways for other Indigenous languages. Data were analyzed through qualitative content analysis and comparative matrix displays (framework analysis) across three corpora: community-led workshop videos (interactional evidence), participant reflections (perceptions of change), and EIB/Kichwa policy-curricular documents (institutional frames) (Abela, 2002; Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2018; Ritchie & Spencer, 1994). Triangulation and brief dialogic validation informed the synthesis. Framed by Kichwa onto-epistemology of sumak kawsay and driven by teacher agency, this initiative offers a feasible route to elevate Kichwa within teacher education, confront the second-class status of EIB, and ensure that graduates can speak—and sustain—Kichwa in schools and communities. Beyond Ecuador, the approach is transferable to European programs focused on minoritized and heritage languages of migrants. Participatory design of culturally sustaining pedagogy, and ethical governance of community data can strengthen teacher education curricula, support teacher agency, and help institutions move from symbolic inclusion to effective language vitality.

Asamblea Constituyente del Ecuador. (2008). Constitución de la República del Ecuador. Abela, J. A. (2002). Las técnicas de análisis de contenido: Una revisión actualizada. Fundación Centro de Estudios Andaluces. Alm, A. (2003). English in Ecuador: Prestige and social mobility. Fals Borda, O. (2007). Investigación-Acción Participativa: Enfoques y aportes en América Latina. Freire, P. (2005). Pedagogía del oprimido. Siglo XXI. Jara Holliday, O. (2012). La sistematización de experiencias: Práctica y teoría. CEAAL/ALFORJA. Miles, M. B., Huberman, A. M., & Saldaña, J. (2018). Análisis de datos cualitativos. Morata. Ritchie, J., & Spencer, L. (1994). Qualitative data analysis for applied policy research. In A. Bryman & R. G. Burgess (Eds.), Analyzing qualitative data (pp. 173–194). Routledge.