Conference Program

Over the past five years in Canada, and globally, the teacher’s role in education—long recognized as crucial—has grown more complex. Rapid technological change, a global pandemic, and recruitment and retention difficulties have resulted in an increasingly stressed workforce (Awde, 2024). At the same time, unprecedented global migration (UNHCR, 2025) has reshaped classrooms, creating newly culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) learning environments that require teachers to navigate complex identity and belonging dynamics. In New Brunswick (NB), a province located in Atlantic Canada, for example, in 2017, students came from 40 countries; by 2024, they represented 150 countries, and the overall student population had increased by 20% (GNB, 2025). What have teachers experienced in this rapidly evolving context?

Little is known about how teachers’ identities develop in newly CLD environments and how well-being and practice might be affected (Gregersen et al., 2020). Growing cultural and linguistic diversity has been identified as a key challenge (Aydin, 2023; Yildirim, 2019), yet the literature on teachers' experiences in CLD environments reveals variation in beliefs, experiences, and recommendations. Strain and tension, often connected to low self-efficacy and/or deep value misalignment (for example, see: Acheson et al., 2016; Babaii et al., 2020; Nazari et al., 2022; Peterson & Jenson, 2025), can lead to disillusionment, burnout, or leaving the profession (Ben-Said, 2014). Recent literature, however, has shown that this tension can also stoke agentive action for change (Betancurt & Gallego, 2025; Tekin, 2024; Truong et al., 2025; Yuan & Burns, 2017). Recognizing that a research and narrative focus on damage in complex systems has not amounted to change (Tuck, 2009), it is evident that teachers must consider how to remain aligned with their values as a form of resistance and sustenance in an increasingly complex role.

In this presentation, I argue that the phenomenon of teacher joy, which I conceptualize as deep and positive alignment with self and personal praxis, is a potential way through and beyond stressed systems. Joy - agentic, relational, collective, and politically situated (Ahmed, 2017; Emmons, 2020; Muhammad, 2023) - is often expressed through culture and language, making it deeply important in CLD environments as a democratic force that embraces diversity, fights assimilation, and inspires change. To discuss this phenomena of teacher joy, I draw on a critical literature review, a theoretical framework grounded in Black, feminist and Indigenous theories of knowledge that reject pathologizing narratives and embrace complexity (Belcourt, 2020; hooks, 2001; Lorde, 2007), and a sociocultural consciousness that believes that humanizing pedagogical practices like translanguaging open space for identities to flourish (Koyama & Kasper, 2022; Nieto, 2013). I also draw on reflexive commentary emerging from my experiences as a first-generation high school graduate-turned-teacher, teacher leader, and teacher educator in a rapidly diversifying rural Canadian province to discuss the rationale and methodology for my upcoming research on teacher joy in newly CLD learning environments. The pedagogy of joy I describe is grounded in feminist resistance, collective reflexivity, and communities of practice.