TESOL Burgos 2025

Darío Luis Banegas

Roots and routes in social justice in English language teaching: Who’s on board?

• What are the roots of social justice in ELT?
• What routes have educators, researchers, and students created and walked on?
• Who's on board?

social justice as a philosophy of education

CRITICALPEDAGOGY

ADVOCACY

SOCIAL JUSTICE IN TESOL

Villacañas de Castro et al., 2021

widening the quantity & quality of material resources

Porto, 2023

civic action in a community centre

Tavella & Fernández, 2023

intercultural literature with native Mapuche communities

Martín-Beltrán et al., 2020

immigrants & autobiographical storytelling

Şanal & Özkaynak, 2023

linguistic justice

Mortenson, 2022

EAP on relevant materials

DEMOCRACY

+ INFO

RELEVANCE

+ INFO

INCLUSION

+ INFO

"For this project to happen, I had to re-evaluate and recognise my own stereotypes and what I think the social reality is like around me. As I was searching for materials, I learnt a lot as a person. That got me thinking about me as a social actor, a social agent who, as a teacher, can have a more active role in society to attend to equity."

"In order to respond to social justice, I changed the approach. I started giving the students tasks that would enable them to discuss local issues such as discrimination. And so, my approach became more communicative, but not about talking about the weather. It was primarily critical. It was about issues the students have been through, things we could all do in our daily lives to bring about change."

Gracias

Banegas, D. L., Sacchi, F., San Martín, M. G., & Porto, M. (2024). Teachers’ and student teachers’ conceptualisations and enactment of social justice in English language teaching: a case in Argentinian secondary schools. Teachers and Teaching, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2024.2411957Martin-Beltrán, M., Montoya-Ávila, A., & García, A. A. (2020). Becoming advocates: Positioning immigrant youth to share, connect, and apply their stories as tools for social change. TESOL Journal, 11(4), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.567 Mortenson, L. (2022). Integrating social justice-oriented content into English for Academic Purposes (EAP) instruction: A case study. English for Specific Purposes, 65, 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2021.08.002 Porto, M. (2023). A community service learning experience with student teachers of English: enacting social justice in language education in a community centre. The Language Learning Journal, 51(2), 178–194. https://doi.org/10.1080/09571736.2021.1971741 Ortactepe Hart, D. (2023). Social justice and the language classroom: Reflection, action, and transformation. Edinburgh University Press. Şanal, M., & Özkaynak, O. (2023). Raising multilingual learners’ awareness of social justice through translanguaging pedagogy. Focus on ELT Journal, 5(2), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.14744/felt.5.2.1 Tavella, G. N., & Fernández, S. C. (2023). Reflecting on a community service-learning project for English learners in Argentina from a decolonial perspective. In H. Castañeda-Peña, P. Gamboa, & C. Kramsch (Eds.), Decolonizing applied linguistics research in Latin America: Moving to a multilingual mindset (pp. 126–146). Routledge.Tikly, L., & Barrett, A. (2011). Social justice, capabilities and the quality of education in low income countries. International Journal of Educational Development, 31(1), 3–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2010.06.001 Villacañas de Castro, L.S., Cano Bodi, V., Hortelano Montejano, A., Giner Real, C., Gómez Pons, I., Mesas Tomás, B., Sanz Martínez, C. and Tortosa Gozálvez, C. (2021), Matter, Literacy, and English Language Teaching in an Underprivileged School in Spain. TESOL Quarterly, 55(1), 54-79. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.572

References

"Social justice can enable the learners to develop their English and linguistic resources and learning strategies as they complete activities and read, listen, write, and talk about a diversity of issues that are important to them locally. That will let them see that learning English is important because it’s another conduit to talk about what matters."