James Coda is an assistant professor of world language education in the Department of Theory and Practice in Teacher Education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Since pursuing his doctoral degree, he has developed a focused line of research that has drawn on the insights of deconstructionist theories to study how Teaching English to Speakers of Other Classrooms (TESOL) and World Language Education (WLE) contexts and teachers can engage in criticality. By questioning how languages are taught and invoking teachers’ critical thinking in relation to the teaching and learning of languages, this focused line of research intends to cultivate a language education that not only aligns with ACTFL’s and TESOL’s standards of comparing and contrasting cultural and linguistic practices, but rather, assisting teachers in understanding the historicity of these linguistic and cultural practices that have become normalized in our world thereby allowing for transformative experiences in the classroom and beyond. More recently as generative AI is becoming prominent in our personal as well as our professional lives, it is critical that language education and applied linguistics scholars document and study how generative AI is impacting our field. Therefore, his research line is now examining how the intersections of generative AI and language teaching related to teachers’ work in the classroom.