Linguistic and cultural diversity in schools and classrooms ‘call[s] into question the language education policies and practices of teachers and schools and their capacity to respond effectively to the challenges of an increasingly linguistically and culturally diverse school population’ (Young, 2018, p. 23). Indeed, schools may be experienced as a process of othering (Szelei, Tinoca & Pinho, 2021) and linguistic injustice, of identity silencing and hierarchisation (Spotti & Kroon, 2015; Vervaet et al. 2018). Such processes endanger the materialisation of an inclusive school and the living of a full multilingual citizenship (Stroud, 2018). Piller (2016) problematises the mainstream curriculum regarding issues of linguistic justice, which emphasises that schools and teachers are asked to counter-act processes of linguistic subordination and invisibility of plural identities.

Against this background, social justice, equity, and inclusion continue to be critical topics in the field of initial teacher education and teacher professional development, in the context of which scholars advocate the adoption of social justice perspectives with transformative approaches regarding diversity in education (McDonald and Zeichner, 2009; Pantić & Florian, 2015). It is believed that this may be a route to foster future and experienced teachers’ critical awareness of sociocultural and sociolinguistic oppressive teaching structures and mindsets alongside an educational engagement against such structures (Pijanowski & Brady, 2021). García (2017) underlines the importance of all teachers to question how the concept of language is being legitimised in schools and to develop a critical multilingual awareness, which comprises, on the one hand, the awareness of plurilingualism, and on the other hand, the awareness of how plurilingualism in society may be a result of histories of colonial and imperialistic oppression, and of how language use has been naturalised.  

Particularly, language teachers are asked to develop new professional landscapes, in the core of which is the need to interpret the socio-linguistic and cultural complexity of educational contexts, and to envisage the role of languages and pedagogy therein. It is not new that teacher cognition (Borg, 2018; Haukås, 2016; Paulsrud, Juvonen & Schalley, 2023) is pointed out as a driving force to understand teachers’ language awareness and conceptualizations of language teaching. Discussing the link between social justice pedagogy and cultural diversity, Pijanowski and Brady (2021), point out the importance of intellectual and dispositional work to support teachers in the adoption of equity and inclusion. Due to principles of social justice and human rights, pedagogies for linguistic and cultural diversity, such as plurilingual and intercultural education, may be disruptive in how pre-service and experience teachers understand their role and language teaching (Piccardo et al., 2022). According to Boylan and Woolsey (2015), referring to teachers’ identity space and social justice, it is important to involve teachers in the discomforting position of confronting their beliefs and dispositions. It is, therefore, important to understand pre-service and experienced language teachers’ authoring and identity work and representations of language teaching, to discuss the place of competing discourses in their identity construction and in professional learning initiatives.

In this paper presentation, we seek to analyse a set of visual narratives produced by two groups of language teachers in different national settings (Portugal and Switzerland) in order to answer the following questions:

• RQ1: What are pre-service and in-service teachers’ representations of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and of Portuguese as a Heritage Language (PHL) regarding linguistic and cultural diversity, and how do such representations compare to each other?
• RQ2: What professional identity is in the making regarding pedagogy for linguistic and cultural diversity through the lens of social justice?

The participants of the study were 13 English as a Foreign Language (EFL) student teachers enrolled on a professionalising master’s degree for teaching in a Portuguese higher education institution (Group 1), and 53 Portuguese as a Heritage Language (PHL) experienced teachers involved in the Portuguese Teaching Abroad (PTA) network in Switzerland (Group 2). Adopting and arts-based research methodology, the current study took advantage of visual narratives (Kalaja & Melo-Pfeifer, 2019; Pinho, 2023), particularly drawings, as a mediating tool to capture participants’ subjective positionings and identities, particularly as regards plurilingualism and language education. As such, the dataset comprises 39 drawings and written explanations of group 1, gathered in the context of two subject courses – one in the first and the other in the third and last semesters of the degree, between 2016 to 2021 (totalising four cohorts of pre-service teachers); and 64 visual narratives and written explanations of group 2, collected in the context of a three-year professional development project. Regardless of the differences in the timeline, the data collection aimed at gathering the pre- and in-service teachers’ thinking both at the beginning and end of the professional learning situations. Therefore, similar instructions were given to both groups of participants, thus allowing some comparability. Data analysis followed an interpretative approach, according to which we tried to infer and give meaning to the participants’ multimodal discourses. Our main analytical focus was on the content of the visual narratives, which was then complemented by the corresponding written explanations. A first step was to code for themes and then dived in category grouping. Given the purpose of the study, we identified the drawings that explicitly addressed the theme ‘Linguistic and cultural diversity in language education’ in both groups: 16 in group 1 (EFL student teachers) and 8 in group 2 (PHL experienced teachers).

Regarding RQ1, EFL student teacher’s drawings display co-existing, conflicting representations, such as (i) monolingual/-cultural view of classroom communication; (ii) (inter)cultural dimension of foreign language teaching, and (iii) pluri/multilingualism in the classroom. As for the PHL teachers, the drawings’ analysis signals two main representations: (i) oneself as a curator of the Portuguese culture; and (ii) PHL as a site for shared intercultural knowledge construction. About RQ2, teachers’ visual narratives reflect a teacher identity based on ingrained representations of EFL and PHL teaching. While EFL student teachers unveil polarised views and negotiate conflicting subject positions of EFL teaching and themselves as teachers, triggered by learning about plurilingualism and plurilingual education, experienced PHL teachers display a solid representations of language teaching and of their professional identity, resulting from the close interaction with the (social, cultural institutional) contextual professional landscapes and the nature of the learner population. These results will be discussed through the lens of social justice and the role of pedagogies for linguistic and cultural diversity in the promotion of teachers’ plurilingual awareness and identity, and inclusive language teaching practices.

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