Researching TESOL Professionalism: A Practitioner‐Led Agenda for Reimagining Pedagogy and Policy

Abstract This article interrogates the fragmentation of professionalism in TESOL, focusing on how practitioner knowledge, pedagogical aims, and research legitimacy are shaped under global market pressures. Drawing on collaborative inquiry through the London TESOL Research Forum (LTRF), a network of teacher educators and researchers from more than 15 institutions, we examine how MA TESOL programmes, particularly in global cities like London, have become sites of credentialism, curricular standardisation, and epistemic exclusion. We identify ten key issues facing the field, including the bifurcation of teaching and research, the marginalisation of practitioner expertise, and the tokenistic engagement with multilingualism and decolonisation. These concerns are situated in a broader critique of how institutional branding, international student markets, and hiring practices are reshaping what counts as TESOL professionalism. In response, we propose a research agenda grounded in practitioner‐led inquiry and pedagogical renewal. We outline six future directions for research, including rethinking what constitutes valid knowledge, re‐centring pedagogy, and embedding local linguistic and educational ecologies into curriculum design. The article argues for a more inclusive, inquiry‐oriented, and context‐responsive model of TESOL professionalism—one that reclaims teaching as a site of knowledge production.