“Well-Being and Collective Care for Multilingual Teachers”

Language teaching, as other forms of teaching, has been mainly viewed in ways that are characterized through individual traits where teachers themselves are viewed as “good teachers” or “bad teachers” (Kumashiro, 2012). In providing such characterizations, language teachers and their identities are not usually viewed as part of systems and in relationship to others but rather, in individualistic ways. In similar and interconnected ways, language teacher emotions as central to well-being have been problematically treated as residing within the individual rather than as products of individuals in systems of power and within institutions (Benesch, 2012).

In this presentation, I show how in our own collective as language teacher educators, we push on the ways in which holistic well-being is usually constructed as an individual and potentially fragmented state for language teachers, rather than as a collective process, by describing our own teaching and shared practices as well as teacher candidates’ visible work.