Promovendin: Irene Althaus
Keywords: Language teacher professionalization, critical language pedagogy, sustainability-oriented language education, affective-reflective professionalization, professional identity and agency
Gutachtende: Prof. Dr. Elena Makarova (Universität Basel), Prof. Dr. Edina Krompák (Universität Basel, Pädagogische Hochschule Luzern)
Projektbeginn: HS 2025

Abstract
This cumulative dissertation examines affective-reflective professionalization in sustainability-oriented language teacher education. From a critical language-pedagogical perspective, language education concerns not only linguistic competence, but also how social realities are discursively constructed, whose voices are heard, and how learners position themselves in relation to cultural difference and global challenges (Crookes, 2022; Gerlach & Lüke, 2024) – concerns that are inherently relevant to sustainability (Maijala et al., 2024). Thus, Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) enters this project not as a topic to be added to the language curriculum, but as a conceptual horizon that foregrounds uncertainty, conflicting values, global interdependence, and the professional demands these pose for language teachers. The Swiss Lehrplan 21 references sustainability as a cross-cutting theme (D-EDK, 2016), yet how it can be meaningfully taken up in language education remains unclear. While emerging work demonstrates that language curricula can be organised around sustainability themes (de la Fuente, 2022; Maijala et al., 2024), ESD in education more broadly often remains fragmented and subordinated to other curricular priorities (Wals & Benavot, 2017), and pre-service language teachers report uncertainty about implementation (Goller & Rieckmann, 2022; Maijala et al., 2023). Addressing this gap requires attention not only to curriculum design, but also to the affective and reflective dimensions of teacher professionalization (Korthagen, 2017).

For language teacher education, these demands raise questions about how teachers understand and enact their professional role. Critical language pedagogy is particularly relevant here, as it calls for language teachers who question established practices, address injustice, and support learners’ capacity for critical engagement (Crookes, 2022; Gerlach & Lüke, 2024). Becoming such a teacher requires professional identity – the dynamic, socially negotiated ways in which teachers understand themselves as professionals – and professional agency, understood as the capacity and willingness to act on one’s professional values within institutional conditions (Eteläpelto et al., 2013; Priestley et al., 2015). These two dimensions are intertwined and mutually constitutive. Yet engaging with sustainability-related issues in language education frequently evokes discomfort, ambivalence, and tensions around professional identity, what Zembylas (2013) terms "troubled knowledge": knowledge that unsettles existing assumptions, identities, and professional certainties (Grund et al., 2024; Maijala et al., 2023). This resonates with ESD 3, which reframes sustainability learning as open, emotionally demanding, and processual rather than as the transmission of predefined sustainability knowledge (Pettig & Singer-Brodowski, 2025), underscoring that these affective dimensions are central, not peripheral, to professional learning (Korthagen, 2017). The dissertation therefore asks: How can language teacher education support the professionalization of pre-service teachers and teacher educators as critical, sustainability-oriented language educators?

Three interrelated articles address complementary levels of analysis. Article 1 (Althaus & Perrin, 2025, already published) reports an explorative case study of a bilingual English/French didactics module at a Swiss university of teacher education (n=46 pre-service teachers). It examines how students engage with sustainability via transculturality, cultural representations, stereotypes, and plurilingual practices, and identifies a key gap: while students develop confidence in cultural analysis, affective dimensions and professional agency for enacting critical, sustainability-oriented teaching remain largely unaddressed. Because such affective-reflective spaces depend not only on student learning but also on teacher educators’ own professional identity and agency, Article 2 shifts focus to teacher educators as co-learners in a Swiss-Brazilian Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) project on Linguistic and Global Citizenship. Drawing on polyethnographic methods informed by phenomenological and duoethnographic traditions (Olt & Teman, 2019; Norris & Sawyer, 2012), teacher educators from Switzerland and Brazil keep multimodal diaries and participate in dialogic meetings in which they juxtapose and renegotiate the meaning of emotionally significant moments. The analysis traces how affective-reflective processes shape professional identity and agency across institutional and sociopolitical contexts. Article 3 is a conceptual paper that develops the notion of "affective-reflective spaces" for sustainability-oriented language teacher education, understood as pedagogical and institutional arrangements in which emotional engagement can be noticed, shared, and examined through dialogic reflection. It draws on targeted literature and illustrative episodes from Articles 1 and 2. It proposes the design principles and contextual conditions under which such spaces can support professionalization and elaborates the affective-reflective professionalization model.

Taken together, the three articles contribute to an empirically informed model that traces how emotional engagement and dialogic reflection, under specific pedagogical and institutional conditions, can support the development of professional identity and agency in sustainability-oriented language teacher education. Methodologically, the dissertation offers procedural considerations for polyethnographic, multimodal research in international partnerships, including strategies for reflexivity, layered consent, and negotiated authorship (Hill et al., 2023). Substantively, it develops empirically grounded concepts and design principles for supporting the affective-reflective professionalization of language teachers as critical, sustainability-oriented educators.

Literatur
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