Collaborative Auto-ethnographic Reflections on Experiences of Migrant Learning and Teaching in Australia

Due to an increasing number of multicultural, and multilingual migrants to Australia who are becoming language teachers, there is a growing demand for language educators to improve their understandings of these linguistically and culturally diverse students. With consequential change occurring throughout our transitional journeys as teachers, teaching and learning needs to develop dynamically. To this end, we use our individual and shared reflective experiences as English teachers and researchers to weave the threads between our respective journeys from China to Australia, and from the U.K. to Australia. Using a collaborative auto-ethnography research method offers readers opportunities to actively respond to the text. We hope that encountering the cultural nuances in these transitional journeys may be of benefit both to academics in language programs and teacher candidates in TESOL programs. First, in sensitizing readers to become more culturally aware and competent and, second, showing how cultural identities continue to evolve in vibrant, multicultural and multilingual contexts such as we experience in Australia.