Listening as the field of language teaching speaks to itself - 6

Editorial · Hu & Hashim · Ellis · Machida

Reviews of Reviews · 1 · 2 · 3 · 4  ·  Roundup

This is the sixth post in a series reading a single issue of JALT Journal, the May 2026 number, for what the field shows about itself when it speaks in its own pages.

Review of a Review

Social Justice in Language Education: Taking Action
Albert Biel and Fabian Maria Esleben (Eds.) · Multilingual Matters, 2025
Reviewed by Lachlan Jackson, Ritsumeikan University

Jackson opens by noting that teachers often wonder what they are "supposed to be doing," and whether their values should be made transparent. The word supposed is worth pausing on. It may be unwittingly placing authority outside the teacher, rather than in the situation itself.

The question about transparency is worth asking for a particular reason: so that people can question the assumptions in the room, think for themselves, and take part in a respectful dialogue in which they are not being coerced or judged. Framing this as a matter of handling controversial or political topics sensitively can obscure the more fundamental issue, which is present regardless of whether the topic appears controversial: whether the people in the room, students and teacher, are being consciously or unconsciously coercive or judgemental toward one another, or indeed of themselves.

Jackson picks out the book's call for teaching that goes beyond "mere foods and festivals," the surface markers of a culture, and its sense that the work involves "more than just teaching language." The assumption underneath is that content is the answer. Change what is taught, bring in the right material, and the transformation the field is looking for will follow. The transformation is placed in the environment and the materials, not in what happens inside the person. Enjoyment, empathy, and openness are left implied, as though the right content would bring them about on its own. Enjoyment of the moment, of actually being in the situation and working with the material, is nowhere on the map. The book may address this somewhere, but it is not what comes through in the review.

Jackson highlights a chapter that turns the question "who benefits?" onto social-justice research itself. It is a good question, and it is to his credit that he picks it out. It is also asked within a particular frame. "Who benefits?" can easily frame benefit as a fixed quantity, held by some and owed to others, to be redistributed so that balance and justice are restored. Because social justice education is often perceived outside its own circle as strident or controversial, it can spend a good deal of effort defending itself against the charge of indoctrination. A different framing of the same question would help. Rather than "who benefits?", it could ask how this might be made to benefit everyone, how it could be a win for all sides rather than a win for some at the expense of others. Take the criticism that commercial materials perpetuate inequities. Framed as it stands, it tells the publishers what they should stop doing. Framed the other way, it would ask how those materials could be made to serve everyone better. It is the same point, turned from an accusation into a shared problem.

Jackson notes the book's encouragement to ask the "tough questions" that an interest in social justice inevitably invites. Challenge belongs to all good teaching, and so does nurturing. A teacher needs both, and both need to be reflected at the level of the curriculum and the whole educational system; they work together. What is missing is a conscious acknowledgement that challenge and nurturing belong together in teaching of any kind, whatever the content. When "tough questions" is singled out as a feature of social-justice teaching, challenge is separated from the ordinary work of teaching and tied to a particular kind of content. This is an educational point, and education is the thread that runs through the whole of this issue, signalled by the editors and present in every piece, even where it is not held clearly in view.

Jackson highlights the book's emphasis that students should never be asked to debate whether certain groups should have rights. The concern behind this warning is understandable: no student should be made to feel that their dignity is a proposition to be accepted or rejected by classmates. But here is another word taken from the book and passed on without examination. There is, of course, a place for debate in education. The difficulty is not the topic alone. It is the way debate is thought of here. At its best, debate is not about who wins. It is about exploring an argument and coming to see that there is more than one way of looking at the same thing. The danger in the social-justice approach is that the outcome is decided in advance: the debate is run, but the conclusion it is meant to reach is already settled, and the exploration is not real.

The volume treats social justice as a guiding principle, and the review presents it in the same way. The term is used as if its meaning were already clear and shared. The core value that is orienting this work is itself a question the review leaves unasked. Is the book’s guiding view of social justice education itself open to question? Jackson does not take the review into fundamental critical analysis of this kind, but instead examines each chapter in turn.

The word critical — as it appears in critical pedagogy or critical approaches to language teaching — is worth examining in the same way as social justice. Both terms are used in this review as though their meaning were already clear and not in need of critical examination. What might we come to if we subject the notions of criticality and social justice themselves to critical thinking? We might understand that both can be seen as independent of prescribed content or predetermined social and political positions. Criticality, seen this way, is the capacity to notice the frame one has been living inside, including the unconscious acceptance that one’s worth and enjoyment can be defined by others, and the recognition that the freedom to enjoy being oneself is available moment by moment.

A classroom moment shows what this can mean in practice. During a conversation with a young man, I noticed his face growing tense as he struggled to answer my question. I said, simply, that his face looked very tense. Until then, he had been focused on the external problem of answering to my satisfaction, unconsciously accepting that my expectations were the standard by which he had to measure himself in that moment. This is one of the ways in which we allow others to define our value for us, often without noticing that we are doing it. There was in it no more than a small chipping away at a wall that had built up around him — a wall that had been quietly defining for him what it means to be a learner in a classroom. The conscious cultivation of conditions in which such moments can happen — in which that wall can be chipped away at, little by little — may be a more useful way of thinking about social justice education than the addition of controversial content to the curriculum.

One chapter examines teacher agency through the institutional, cultural, and employment conditions that shape a teacher’s work: job security, mandated materials, the expectations of the institution. These are worth examining in their own right. The question of what is influencing you as a teacher, and what hidden values and assumptions are driving those influences, does not have to be approached only through the lens of social justice. It is a question any teacher, in any context, might usefully ask of their own situation. The chapter frames the subject within the goal of taking action for social justice, and Jackson follows that framing without questioning it. Seen more broadly, it is a subject that reaches beyond any single field and might find a wider hearing if it were asked without that assumption already in place.

Among the chapters Jackson finds most thought-provoking is one on anti-fatness. The deeper issue it points to is not fatness itself but the habit of ranking and comparing people, and of setting norms that people are expected to meet. When someone cannot meet those norms, or feels they cannot, they are made to feel inadequate. This is the problem that runs underneath the whole social justice concern in language education. The list of issues — bodies, sexuality, race, language background — keeps growing, but what all of them have in common is the failure to accept people as they are, and the damage done by measuring one person against another. Once that is understood, the deeper pattern can be addressed through many kinds of content, including moments where the issue itself is not overtly named.

Jackson appears in the review mostly as a competent member of the field. He shows that he can move easily in its language and hold his own in its terms. His own presence as a practising teacher is not visible, surfacing really only in the last sentence of the piece, where he recommends the book to "anyone curious about taking their teaching in a more critical direction." What is brought forward throughout is academic command, but the review’s list-like approach does not gather itself into a coherent critical view of its own. The reviewer we see is the academic field-member, and the teacher is held back.

Does the teaching self need to be so invisible in such a review?