Situated lives and human-centred practices in TESOL: Teachers, learners and changing contexts

Abstract

What does it mean to be a language teacher at a time when the roles of teachers and learners, and the technologies mediating their work together, are being rapidly reconsidered? This is not an entirely new question for TESOL, as teachers have always worked amid changing learner needs, institutional expectations, educational policies, and technologies (Uysal & Gao, 2026). Yet the growing presence of GenAI, alongside increasingly multilingual and multimodal learning environments, has brought renewed attention to teacher expertise, agency, identity, and professional judgement. Rather than being treated as individual attributes, these dimensions are increasingly understood as socially mediated and contextually situated (Tao & Gao, 2026). Technological change adds further complexity by reshaping the conditions in which agency, participation, identity, and pedagogical relationships are negotiated and enacted (De Costa, 2025; Tao & Gao, 2026). At the same time, it reinforces a longstanding recognition that TESOL is enacted through relationships: between teachers and learners, between educational aspirations and institutional realities, and between pedagogical possibilities and the contexts in which they are realised. Questions of how teachers develop and sustain their professional identities, how learners negotiate language, culture, belonging, and agency, and how practices developed in one context can, or cannot, travel meaningfully to another therefore remain central. Rather than displacing these concerns, current technological and social changes make context, judgement, participation, and responsiveness even more salient.