Teachers promoting advocacy through social justice English language education: A collaborative action research study

Abstract

This article reports on a 2-year collaborative actionresearch project carried out in 2022–2023, which investigatedthe intersection of social justice and advocacy inEnglish language teaching. The aim was to describe howEnglish as a foreign language (EFL) teachers working atstate secondary schools in two Argentinian cities harnessedtheir agency to mobilise advocacy among their secondaryschool students. Theoretically grounded in social justicelanguage education, advocacy in language education, andteacher agency, participants were seven in-service EFLteachers, five pre-service teachers, and 220 secondaryschool students, of whom 30 were adult learners. Researchinstruments comprised open-ended questionnaires, teachingartefacts, lesson plans, classroom observations andinterviews. Reflective thematic analysis was used. Findingsindicate that the teachers enacted a set of principlesas their identity as advocates for social justice throughsituated pedagogical practices: (a) teachers’ reflexivity, (b)shift from a focus-on-form teaching approach to criticalapproaches to language teaching, (c) localisation, (d)social responsibility and action cultivation and (e) synergybetween teachers’ and students’ agency. Teacher agency,mobilised through reflection and action, became a drivingforce and an organising device. Implications for languageteacher education for social justice and advocacy areconsidered.