Canagarajah | 1 Prologue Accommodating student diversity, providing spaces to represent their voices, and facilitating the development of more expansive repertoires of communication and knowledge are becoming important in language teaching. Though diversity is touted as a desirable pedagogical goal, there are serious ethical and ideological challenges for teachers in accomplishing it. To begin with, we cannot stereotype the voices and interests of students based on their nationality or ethnicity. The understanding that identities are hybrid and multiple would suggest that the backgrounds and desired identities of our students cannot be easily predicted. Furthermore, identities and values are always in flux. As we design a pedagogy based on certain expectations, we might be surprised to see students’ interests changing. More importantly, teachers cannot also be expected to have familiarity with the linguistic and cultural heritage of all their students in contemporary classrooms that feature students from diverse backgrounds. One can assume, therefore, that there are many unknowns in teaching for diversity. For these reasons, based on her own failed experience of helping an international student, Ruth Spack (1997) warns: “Teachers should be careful not to create curricula on unexamined assumptions about what students will need to succeed. ... We cannot safely predict what texts and activities will be most beneficial for our students’ development” (p. 8). Increasingly, scholars are arguing that diversity has to be negotiated on an ongoing basis, whether in social or classroom relationships. Rhetorician Krista Ratcliffe (1999) argues that we need a “new code of cross-cultural conduct” for social relationships. She cautions against appropriating the words of others to suit our own cultural frames of reference. In order to adopt a more ethical approach, she advises situating others’ words in the total social and cultural context, adopting a reflexive attitude to consider our own predispositions that lead us to understand others in biased ways, adopting a willingness to negotiate meanings with others with patience and tolerance and, most of all, striving for greater understanding in an “ongoing” manner (p. 207) without premature closure or easy resolutions. Similarly, in teacher development, scholars argue for the need to shape one’s pedagogical knowledge, values, and identities in an ongoing manner, based on our classroom practices and relationships (Johnson, 2009). Negotiations of values and discourses in classrooms can constructively contribute to shaping teachers’ own identities. They can also enable us to rethink our pedagogies as we strive to construct more ethical and effective practices in our teaching. The social turn in teacher development conveys to us that pedagogical practice is not a mechanical process of deploying predesigned curricula and pedagogies in all contexts (Johnson, 2009). Teachers will be creative and agentive in shaping relevant curricula based on their changing knowledge and beliefs from their ongoing teaching practice. For this reason, many teachers realize the need to become researchers themselves. It is possible to combine teaching and research without letting one’s biases distort the findings. Methods such as classroom ethnographies, action research, and narrative research enable practitioners to produce useful knowledge on teaching (see Lankshear & Knobel, 2004 for an introduction to these methods). By combining teaching with research, practitioners are able to reflect on the unpredictability inherent in negotiating diversity and develop relevant knowledge for instruction. NUS CELC 5 th Symposium Proceedings Negotiating Diversity in English Language Teaching: A Tragedy in Four Acts 1 Suresh Canagarajah Penn State University, U.S.A asc16@psu.edu