ABSTRACT
This stimulating book is steeped in the personal and professional experience of two academics: one from France and the other from Argentina, who, having emigrated to Australia and received their higher education credentials there, became university teachers and researchers of a foreign/second language and culture and decided to reflect on the professional identity of language educators in Australia. The result is a passionate and moving study that makes us hear the silent voices and grasp the unseized spaces of 15 highly educated language professionals who remain underestimated and underused by their institutions and by the various fields of research they belong to. Whether they gained their credentials through degrees in literature, cultural studies, history or applied linguistics, the vagaries of their personal lives and the unpredictabilities of the job market led them to become teachers of language. Many of them did not have any prior teacher education – they learned on the job and ended becoming fascinated by the unexpected questions their students were asking and by the problems of intercultural communication that emerged in their classrooms. They became professional teachers and professional researchers – loved by their students but misrecognized by their institution and snubbed by their fellow researchers as “mere methodologists”. And yet they are very often the teachers their students will remember the most years later. They are the entry point to many of the urgent issues that these students will encounter throughout their lives: what it means to speak more than one language, to be a member of more than one culture, to emigrate and marry someone from a different language and culture, to raise a multilingual family, to switch fields of research and to belong to various communities that have their own strategies of inclusion and exclusion.
