Krompák, Edina; Hilsdorf Rocha, Cláudia; Maciel, Ruberval Franco (November 2025). A polyethnographic study of teacher educators’ affective and reflective experiences. In: Symposium – Socially and Emotionally Responsive Language Education. Luzern. 13-14. November 2025.

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In the face of environmental disruption, social inequalities, and economic disparities, educational institutions seek to align with UNESCO’s sustainable development goals (United Nations, 2015). In language education, transculturalism is a key competency for negotiating diverse perspectives and supporting community well-being (de la Fuente, 2021). This presentation reports a method-in-progress polyethnographic study embedded in the Swiss-Brazilian Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) project Linguistic and Global Citizenship, a partnership of the University of Teacher Education Lucerne (PH Luzern), the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), and the State University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UEMS), and centers explicitly on teacher educators as researchers. The project foregrounds sustainable language education and draws on linguistic citizenship (Stroud, 2018) and global citizenship education (UNESCO, 2014), with Freire’s critical pedagogy as orienting stance (Freire, 1970/2018). Because sustainability education is treated as mutual transformative learning, with educators also as learners, a learning space is created to question and change “taken-for-granted frames of reference (meaning perspectives, habits of mind, mindsets)” (Mezirow, 2000, p. 7).
Methodologically, the study uses phenomenological polyethnography (Olt & Teman, 2019), integrating hermeneutic phenomenology (van Manen, 2016) with duoethnography (Norris & Sawyer, 2012) and works reflexively with, rather than bracketing, researcher preunderstandings. The Swiss-Brazilian teaching team generated multimodal diaries across key phases (course preparation; on-site visit in Brazil; on-site visit in Switzerland) and a recorded researcher dialogue. Analysis employs the Becoming, Unlearning and Relearning scaffold (Hill et al., 2023) and Somerville (2007, 2008) pauses to attend to absences/silences. The study centers affect within a reflective and transformative view of educator learning. Prereflective multimodal diaries are revisited dialogically to trace shifts in stance and practice (Mezirow, 2000) and links to beliefs/identity/mission (Korthagen & Vasalos, 2005; Korthagen, 2017). Discomfort is treated as pedagogical and political (Zembylas, 2012, 2013, 2021), while positive emotions broaden attention and build enduring resources (Fredrickson, 2001), consistent with positive psychology (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000).

Against this methodological and theoretical backdrop, the analysis addresses the following questions:
1. How do teacher educators/researchers express emotions, tensions, and values through their multimodal diaries?
2. How does engaging in polyethnographic reflection foster new understandings of sustainability, sustainable language education, and intercultural collaboration?
3. In what ways do COIL experiences challenge or extend professional identities as educators and researchers?
The aim is to render positionalities, tensions, and emotions visible as resources for learning and collaboration, without collapsing difference into consensus. Rather than presenting findings, the presentation shows how this hybrid methodology structures inquiry in transnational teacher education and enables critical engagement with roles, responsibilities, and assumptions in collaborative projects.

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