Understanding and Promoting Inclusive TESOL through Participatory Community Engagements: A Duoethnographic Study

This duoethnographic work of a teacher educator and a teacher candidate (TC) took place during an undergraduate-level TESOL methodology course where actual classroom practices were affected by the Syrian Refugee Crisis in Türkiye. Problematizing the existing educational policies and teacher education practices, the authors engaged in community-based participatory research to collaboratively reflect on their identity tensions in a critical context. The authors report the process of understanding translingual and inclusive language pedagogies such as translanguaging through a series of community engagements, self-study, and co-author meetings. The findings demonstrate that the authors’ use of duoethnography to reflect on their tensions through community-based studies allowed them to analyze refugee learners’, teachers’, and schools’ needs and actual practices. The authors argue that identity tensions when juxtaposed in collaborative autoethnographies of teacher educators and TCs can inform agentic teacher learning.