ABSTRACT
The concept of accompaniment is central to the formation of teaching philosophies and practices as well as language beliefs. This chapter focuses on the language beliefs of five graduate student instructors in an academic outreach program, SKILLS. The participants were asked to define their language beliefs and describe how these connected to their teaching in the SKILLS program. Their responses included themes of home and family, agency, political awareness and action, power and education, and expression. Each participant framed their language beliefs as constructed through multiple influential experiences, relationships, nationally based ideologies, and their own social roles in varied contexts. The instructors presented their experiences within the SKILLS program as influential on these complex and changing beliefs through engagement with each other, the students, and their professors. The chapter also focuses on the reflexive turn taken by the author towards more fluid and dynamic methodological choices, intended to remove the researcher from ethnocentrism.
