AAAL 2026: Invited Colloquium

Critical PAR in Applied Linguistics and Language Education: Advancing Social Justice Through Decolonizing Research

Conveners:

Discussant: 

Jonathan Daniel Rosa, Stanford University

Colloquium Abstract

Critical participatory action research (critical PAR) is an inclusive, collaborative approach to research rooted in justice-oriented epistemology that decolonizes research by co-producing knowledge with those most affected by the research. In applied linguistics and related disciplines, scholars have increasingly turned to critical PAR to address urgent issues of educational inequality and linguistic justice. This colloquium brings together scholars engaged in critical PAR to advance equity for language learners across varied educational contexts. Rooted in principles of justice and liberatory practice, critical PAR seeks to disrupt hierarchical researcher-participant relationships, reframe how knowledge is produced, and foster meaningful action. As Torre et al. (2015) write, critical PAR emphasizes “a stance committed to engaging knowledge and expertise beyond the ‘ivory tower’” by co-creating research with members and communities (p. 540).  

Panelists will present projects that illustrate the co-production of knowledge with language educators and learners in diverse settings, including Indigenous communities in Southern Mexico, a newcomer high school in the United States, a Spanish-English bilingual classroom in a U.S. elementary school, and an intercultural bilingual Spanish-Kichwa school in Ecuador. Collectively, these projects highlight how critical PAR enables participants to co-construct knowledge, theorize from lived experience, and take action toward transformation. By decolonizing relationality in research, these projects push the epistemological and methodological boundaries of research, challenging the field to reckon with whose voices are legitimized in research and how research agendas are set. As a social justice endeavor, we engage in inquiry that is deeply embedded in communities and committed to change. 

This colloquium includes four paper presentations, a response by Dr. Jonathan Rosa, and a concluding dialogue on the affordances, tensions, and possibilities of doing critical PAR in applied linguistics. Together, we aim to open a generative space for reimagining research as a collective, critical, and liberatory practice in the field of language education. 

This team of language educators has worked together in multiple critical participatory action research (PAR) projects to advance multilingual and decolonial activities related to language assessment, broadly understood. We come together from different areas of the world because of our shared values and interests as language educators. Our engagement with critical PAR, we argue, has been an integral aspect to the longevity of this partnership. In this presentation, we foreground our work with Asociación Mexicana de Evaluación de Lenguas Indígenas (AMELI-Association for the evaluation of Indigenous languages in Mexico). Founded in 2018, AMELI exists to bring people together to discuss assessment and related concerns within Indigenous communities in Mexico, with a focus on South Mexico and Oaxaca, where many of the team members live.

In this presentation, we begin with an overall framing that analyzes the intellectual and ideological configuration within well-established language assessment practices that embody early 20th-century Anglo-American psychometrics and which assume language as individual “ability.” We explore the implications as seen from a mid-20th century Global North capitalist liberal social order. We contrast these understandings of assessment with four guiding principles for Indigenous language assessment. Developed during our AMELI meetings, these guiding principles posit the (ir)relevance of established tenets of assessment in favor of interdependent relationships and community-defined values related to language and language use. Within our discussion of these principles, we include interviews and life stories from individuals from different Indigenous communities in Oaxaca on the topics of language, community, and collaboration. We conclude with a reflection on the implications of such work on underlying conceptions of fairness and justice in language assessment.

Counteracting Xenophobia and Racism Through Anti-Oppressive Language Pedagogy and YPAR with Immigrant Youth

Kongji Qin, New York University

Immigrant youth suffer from xenophobia and racism on a regular basis, which impacts their learning, well-being, and identity. Supporting immigrant youth in addressing xenophobia and racism through anti-oppressive language pedagogy is a matter of educational equity. This presentation reports on the collective learning from the Immigration Literacy & Dignity Project, a participatory action research project that used multiple methods to explore how an intergenerational research collective of educators, students, and university-based researchers can support immigrant youth to engage in critical inquiry and linguistic activism to counteract xenophobia and racism. The project included two phases: this first phase examined how one English language arts teacher, one social studies teacher, and the university-based researcher, through collaborative practitioner research, co-created a unit of language curriculum on immigration, inequality, and inquiry for developing immigrant youth’s critical literacy and racial literacy. The second phase explored how immigrant youth were supported in youth participatory action research to counteract xenophobia and racism on social media through critical media analysis and countering storytelling. Drawing on fieldnotes, interview data, and instructional materials, I illuminate (1) the complexity in negotiating the concepts of immigration, inequality, and racism for co-designing the curriculum, and (2) the power of YPAR in developing immigrant students’ critical literacy skills, critical consciousness, and critical civic engagement. This project shows the possibility and power of anti-oppressive language pedagogy and YPAR in addressing inequality through language education. 

Participatory Co-Design for Elementary Science Classroom Assessment that Centers Translanguaging

Caitlin G Fine, Metropolitan State University of Denver

Classroom assessment (CA) can be a powerful site for students to receive feedback and for teachers to modify instructional decisions (Brookhart, 2023). Unfortunately, people who are most impacted by the use and implications of CA (students and teachers) often have the least power in the system (Moss, 2008; Shepard, 2021). What is more, CA systems continue to privilege ideas written in English - a practice that can give teachers invalid feedback about students’ content area knowledge (Fine, 2022; Gottlieb, 2023). This paper presents results from a participatory co-design project focused on developing a suite of bilingual/multimodal CAs for a fourth-grade life science unit in a classroom of Spanish-English bilingual learners. The study is framed around participatory design research principles that highlight the importance of teachers’ involvement in co-design due to their localized understanding of student/community needs, historical knowledge of the district, and experience with potential systemic injustices (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016). Co-design team members were Sophia, a Spanish-English bilingual teacher, Author and Irene, two English-Spanish bilingual researchers and Mia, an English-speaking elementary science district supervisor. Data included meeting transcripts and artifacts, observation notes about classroom enactments, and pre and post interviews. Analysis entailed multiple rounds of inductive and deductive qualitative coding using a constant comparative method (Miles et al., 2020). Analysis focused on instances where Sophia’s contributions and perspectives informed CA development. Findings highlighted how Sophia’s deep knowledge of the science curriculum and student and community needs informed CA designs that embraced dynamic bilingualism and multimodal communication for sensemaking. While Sophia regularly shared her dignity-oriented stances about developing students’ bilingualism and biliteracy, she also shared ‘waves of doubt’ related to multimodal components of CA designs due to district-wide language allocation policies and expectations that students demonstrate learning through written responses. This work offers implications for linguistically sustaining CA design.

Collaborative Plurilingual Pedagogies and Kichwa Heritage Language Education in Ecuador

Nicholas Limerick, Teachers College, Columbia University

This paper discusses an initiative to co-author a Kichwa (Ecuadorian Quechua) heritage language textbook in collaboration with educators and students at one intercultural bilingual school in Ecuador. Scholars have highlighted the perils of curricularizing minoritized languages for instruction (e.g., Valdés 2017), and this paper considers how some of those challenges arise in Indigenous language resurgence efforts and whether and how such perils might be overcome. The project is grounded in participatory action research and critical language awareness research. The idea for this textbook co-authoring project emerged from my previous ethnographic research on standardization and language shift in making Kichwa a language of the state, which revealed that many Kichwa speakers do not identify with, and may even struggle to understand, standardized Kichwa. It also responded to the concerns and desires of educators from a school where the researcher has long been involved. Together, we co-wrote a textbook that aimed to excite young people to develop an intermediate level of proficiency in reading, writing, speaking, and listening in Kichwa. The process occurred over years of collaborative writing, followed by one academic year of piloting and revising the textbook. Textbook content goals included raising awareness for the politics of standardizing Indigenous languages and valuing and modeling different ways of communicating in Kichwa, such as varying dialects, alphabets, and incommensurate differences from Spanish while also acknowledging and drawing from students’ strengths in Ecuadorian Spanish. This presentation focuses on the language ideologies that surfaced in the process of producing and piloting the textbook. 

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