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This paper looks at the construction of two bilingual English as an additional language (EAL) teachers' positionings during a two-day student staged protest against a perceived racist incident in a London secondary school. It examines how these bilingual teachers' ethnicity and language resources in Turkish and English are employed by the school to (re)produce a discourse of diversity which attempts to level out difference. It looks at how the bilingual EAL teachers manage their multiple roles within this institutional discourse through the foregrounding and backgrounding of ethnicity, language, knowledge production, and 'self' in several school contexts throughout the two-day event and beyond. The data for this study come from two student-produced texts. The first of these texts accuses the school of racism while the second, by a different group of students, refutes the claims made in the earlier text. Analysis is extended beyond these texts to look at the interactions which happen around them within the school community. Through an ethnography of communication, the paper shows how the bilingual teachers mediate, negotiate and action identification positionings towards and away from the dominant discourse of institutional sameness. It finds that these bilingual teachers both collude with and challenge this discourse.
