Dr Michelle Bedeker has 25 years of teaching experience in primary, secondary, adult and higher education sectors. She holds a PhD in Language and Literacy Studies, Masters in Education (Applied Linguistics/Language Education), Honours in Education (Curriculum and Pedagogy) and a Bachelor in Education degree from the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. Also, she was awarded Erasmus Mundus Scholarships to complete a PhD course in Bourdieu Sociology of Education at Uppsala University, Sweden and Masters Courses at Tromso University in Norway which included English as Newspaper Language, Visual Ethnography, Language and Gender as well as Narrative Literature. In her doctoral thesis, she combined Bourdieu’s Sociology of Education, Narrative Ethnography and Systemic Functional Linguistics to explore the writer identities constructed at secondary schools. Data was collected at two schools (disadvantaged/advantaged) which illustrated how mismatches in the South African language curriculum, pedagogy and national exit examinations hold serious ramifications for first-year writer identities and their ability to navigate writing discourses valued at universities. Therefore, her research agenda lies at the intersection of sociology of education, applied/educational linguistics and ethnography to make visible how the entanglement of context, time and history impact on multilingual teaching and learning. To sum up, her teaching and research experience include Sociolinguistics, English Language Teaching Methodologies, Academic Literacy, Bilingual Education and Systemic Functional Linguistics (genre-based approaches to teach and assess writing).