Hybrid professional becoming: a critical–affirmative lens to bi/multilingual teacher professional identity

This article revisits Hybrid Professional Becoming (HPB) as an empirically informed lens for understanding bi/multilingual teacher professional identity in superdiverse educational contexts. Drawing on hermeneutic phenomenology and narrative inquiry over time with 16 immigrant English language teachers in Australia, it examines how professional authority is constituted, contested, and reworked through migration, language, and institutional power. Entangling transnationalism, transculturalism, translanguaging, and transdisciplinarity, HPB conceptualizes becoming as recursive, affective, ethical, and politically contested through five interconnected dimensions: mobility, power, affect, agency, and cosmopolitan imagination. Participants’ narratives reveal how native-speakerist hierarchies constrain professional recognition while multilingual practices and professional relationships create contingent possibilities for reconfiguring authority without guaranteeing emancipation. HPB advances multilingual teacher identity scholarship by interrogating the institutional and epistemic conditions governing professional authority. It offers a critical–affirmative and decolonial orientation toward transforming teacher education, accreditation, professional learning, and policy beyond inclusion as accommodation toward more equitable professional knowledge and recognition.