Can multilingual curricular space emerge in monolingual schooling? An autoethnography of a KSL teacher advocate’s emotional tensions and agency

Language teacher advocates often confront emotional tensions produced by monolingual schooling, yet less is known about how such tensions become, or fail to become, agency in everyday teaching contexts where formal support is limited. Drawing on poststructural scholarship on teacher emotion and agency, and conceptualizing multilingual curricular space as both ideological and implementational, this autoethnographic study examines how emotional tensions mediated the agency of a Korean-as-a-Second-Language teacher advocate committed to asset-based pedagogy in South Korea. Across four episodes, the study shows that critical emotional reflexivity emerged as the teacher came to read discomfort, frustration, and anxiety in relation to monolingual norms and relational feeling rules. Yet such reflexivity did not readily stabilize into visible action; instead, agency was often redirected toward protective silence or fragile micro-resistance. The findings further show that collaboration with an external research team provided social, material, and discursive resources that made multilingualism sayable and pedagogically usable, enabling concrete pedagogical moves. Finally, the study demonstrates that agency was reconfigured through the affective curricular work of building a multilingual writing space. It contributes to research on language teacher emotion and agency by showing that agency is mediated by available resources and reshaped through affective curricular space-making.