Conference Agenda

Where we come from and the life trajectories we follow, profoundly shape who we are. Research into teacher identities and teacher subjectivities have confirmed that the ways in which teachers come to see themselves have direct consequences for how they approach teaching (Iversen, 2024; Kim & Kim, 2016). Thus, it is no wonder that the field of teacher subjectivity is a rapidly growing field of study (Kayi-Aydar, 2019; McNamara, 2019; Melo-Pfeifer & Tavares, 2024). In the case of heritage language (HL) education, researchers have for decades documented how the precarious conditions under which most HL teachers work influence their subjectivities (Afreen & Norton, 2022; Driver & DeRobles, 2024; Feuerverger, 1997; Valenta, 2009). For example, the marginalisation of HL education leads many teachers to develop a weak sense of professional subjectivity (Feuerverger, 1997; Wu et al., 2011) or to distancing themselves from their role as HL teachers in exchange for their role as general teachers (Valenta, 2009). Other teachers are primarily motivated by a personal commitment to the maintenance of their language and culture in the diaspora (Afreen & Norton, 2022; Driver & DeRobles, 2024; Tisizi, 2020; Wu et al., 2011). Moreover, studies have found that HL teachers’ subjectivities influence how they see their students (Iversen, 2024; Kim & Kim, 2016). Indeed, Kim and Kim (2016, p. 372) conclude that ‘we cannot overemphasize the role of the teachers’ constructed identities both for students and for themselves’.

Building on this research, the current paper analyses the stories – or narratives – that three Arabic HL teachers shared during a fieldwork in their classrooms. The purpose is to examine how divergent approaches to organizing Arabic HL education in Europe can shape Arabic HL teachers’ subjectivities. Thus, this paper contributes to our understanding of the consequences of organising HL education as an integral part of public education or relegating the instruction to community-based complementary schools. This is a particularly urgent question in a time when HL education in public education is under increasing pressure in many places in Europe (Alisaari et al., 2023).

This paper draws on a poststructuralist understanding of subjectivity. From a poststructuralist perspective, subjects are only recognized when they take up already discursively constructed positions (Foucault, 1980). Indeed, McNamara (2019, p. 1) has argued that ‘although subjectivity is powerfully experienced as a private feeling (…) its origins lie outside us, in the social world and in the discourses that circulate within it’. In other words, subjectivity has little to do with cognitive and emotional processes within the individual. Rather, subjectivities emerge through social engagement, where people are continuously engaged in processes of aligning themselves with certain discursively constructed types or categories of people and aligning oneself with such categories (Foucault, 1980).

This process of aligning oneself with recognisable subject positions, is what is often described in the literature as positioning (Bamberg, 1997, 2011). On the one hand, positioning is the result of how others see an individual and recognise their position based on the socially and discursively constructed subject positions available to them. On the other hand, people willingly take up particular subject positions to achieve certain social actions. What positioning analysis offers to our understanding of subjectivity, is a practical and fine-grained approach to describing how people socially and discursively achieve social actions by taking up certain subject positions. Rather than exploring the essence of the Self, positioning analysis is, thus, a non-essentialist and practice-oriented approach to the study of subjectivity (Deppermann, 2015).

As such, a poststructuralist approach to analyzing subjectivity offers an opportunity to consider how teacher subjectivities are shaped by the ways in which HL education is organized.

Integration language training and heritage language education have gained some visibility in Europe over the past two decades due to intensified mobility, migration, and linguistic diversification. These policy responses make language-in-education policy a critical site for challenging monolingual, hierarchical, and Eurocentric assumptions that structure European schooling.

European policy documents and scientific research create wide-ranging mappings of how regional, minority, and heritage languages are governed (Alcántara et al., 2023; European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice, 2019; Yağmur & Extra, 2011). These mappings reveal the unequal treatment of immigrant minority languages, e.g., compared to regional minority languages. Uneven policy landscape in which linguistic hierarchies remain deeply embedded is expressed in the instruction of heritage languages as fragmented, weakly institutionalized, and positioned at the margins of formal education systems (Extra & Yağmur, 2004; Hélot et al., 2018).

Heritage language education is often organized through bilateral agreements with countries of origin, consular arrangements, municipal initiatives, or community-based organizations, rather than embedded within mainstream schooling structures (Eurydice, 2019; Council of Europe, 2020). These governance forms have profound implications not only for access and continuity of provision, but also for the professional status, working conditions, and career trajectories of the educators who work within this sector (Meier, 2017).

This discussion, however, predominantly focuses on policy arrangements, with educators appearing largely as implementers of policy or recipients of training initiatives, rather than as professional actors with situated expertise, agency, and evolving identities. Professionalization is frequently conceptualized in narrow institutional terms, such as certification, formal recognition, or curricular inclusion. As a result, questions of professional life, knowledge production, and long-term career development remain underexamined.

Such frameworks make alternative pedagogical traditions, transnational expertise, and community-based knowledge less visible or less legitimate (Fricker, 2007; Santos, 2014). Such epistemic injustice overlooks how educators negotiate legitimacy, inhabit marginal institutional positions, and respond to precarious employment conditions (Evetts, 2011; Noordegraaf, 2015). This creates a scarcity of perspectives on, e.g., collective agency and professional knowledge production. Heritage and integration language educators are often positioned as recipients rather than producers of pedagogical knowledge, even as they operate in complex and under-defined instructional spaces. Decolonial scholarship highlights the importance of collective knowledge-making as a means of contesting epistemic hierarchies and reclaiming professional authority in contexts shaped by inequalities (Santos, 2014).

Reflecting on these gaps and methodological limitations, this literature review addresses the following questions:

1. How is the professionalisation of heritage and integration language educators conceptualised in existing European literature?
2. What gaps, silences, and methodological constraints characterise current research on the professionalisation of this educational sector?

In this presentation we share findings based on our comparative, longitudinal (2023-2026) qualitative research project in northeastern Estonia, where we ask “How are schools de-empiring the Soviet (and Russian imperial) legacies that shape language-education policy?” We conceptualize de-empiring’ as an effort to counter, address, and undo multiple empiring processes in schools -- a long, ongoing, and complex process of de-Sovietization in Estonia. This process addresses, among other aspects, the systemic organization of separate schools linked to the medium of instruction, curricular materials based on these distinctions, and uneven Estonian language acquisition in connection with these school distinctions. Our project focuses on the twin defining aspects of de-empiring language in the region’s largest city, Narva, which is ~95% Russian-speaking, during the ongoing period of systemic unification: (i.e., bringing together the Estonian- and Russian-medium schools): (1) the diverse directions of de-empiring resulting from consolidation and (2) categorical mismatch.

Our research draws on spatial theory in large part to understand the de-empiring process. In using spatial theories, we center the intersection of space and power in relationships, concepts, and time to investigate how state power is expressed and operates through educational policies related to de-empiring and relationships during this process. We draw on theorists who understand space as something socially constituted through cultural practices (Massey 1995) and policy as spatial (Gulson, 2015). The temporal aspect of space provides an additional key theoretical dimensionsfor this research. The construction of space, and spatial notions of quality, over time has implications and consequences for advancing, or stalling, efforts to promote equity through schooling. Attention to shifts across time helps, as Vavrus (2016) argues, to reveal how equity/inequity gets “baked into” school space: “over time, the social production of space in both its material and symbolic dimensions contributes to the sedimentation of inequality through the uneven distribution of schools and other socioeconomic resources…” (p. 137).

Our comparative research between two upper secondary schools and over time within both schools reveals multiple, de-empiring “pathways.” Estonia’s Basic Schools and Upper Secondary Schools Act (2025a, § 21/1) states that language of instruction in upper secondary schools is Estonian (meaning at least 60% of the student’s total learning is in Estonian). What Estonian instruction means in practice, and how the curricular division is organized depends on (1) the school, (2) the year, and (3) the student. At the school level, when the first group to begin upper secondary school in 2023, students in school A had four program of study (POS) possibilities – 60/40 with extra Estonian support, 60/40, 70/30, and 80/20. In the 60/40 and 70/30 programs, with physics and math taught in Russian. School B students had only the 100 percent in Estonian option. The micro, school-level de-empiring of language has further revealed itself over the next two academic years at school A. In that school, the program of study (POS) plans dropped the 60/40 and 80/20 options and introduced 100 percent for students entering in 2025/2026. While the end point of the change is clear – to 100 percent in Estonian by September 2030– the tempo and form (i.e. percentage models) of the change continues to evolve. By spring 2025, when it became clear that the Russian-language teacher and Russian-medium Physics’ teacher would not be returning the next year, NARG decided to move forward with the 70/30 and 100 percent POS options.  Students have the right to choose, as much as the institution allows, to learn Estonian as a second language or as a mother tongue. The choice of Estonian-language class impacts the number of foreign languages in POS the and the choice of 12th grade state exams.