Undoing discourses of deficit with EAL learners: The centrality of social relations in teachers' curriculum work

Teachers of English as an Additional Language learners in high schools have long navigated the seemingly intransigent deficit thinking about their learners' capacity to engage fully with the intended or required curriculum. These learners are frequently constructed as the problem, as if the curriculum exists in a vacuum. This gives rise to the need to explore how deficit thinking about students, as core actors in the web of curriculum relations, may be challenged through the curriculum work of specialist English language teachers. In this paper, I use critical discourse analysis to explore how the pervasive deficit discourse can be differently construed through language use in two dimensions: power (social hierarchy or low‐high) and solidarity (social distance, close‐far). Three teachers were interviewed, and their lessons were observed to explore how social relations with diverse learners are rendered in the teachers' language. Findings show that by adopting a more nuanced stance towards their learners, many of whom are refugee‐background and have interrupted schooling, the teachers speak back to deficit views, offering alternative ways of positioning diverse learners in relation to required curriculum. Images of curriculum as transmission are disrupted, presenting it rather as complex entanglement with social relations.