Language Pedagogy and Teacher Identity:
A Decolonial Lens to English Language Teaching from a Teacher Educator’s Experience
[...] Identity is a central category in ELT (English Language Teaching). For instance, several studies have been conducted to document English language teachers’ identities (ELTIs) and how they are constructed [...]. However, identity continues to be seen and researched within what Mignolo (2009) labels as the colonial difference. The colonial difference operates by converting differences into values and establishing a hierarchy of human beings ontologically and epistemically. Ontologically, it is assumed that there are inferior human beings. Epistemically, it is assumed that inferior human beings are rationally and aesthetically deficient.
In this respect, the ELT field has witnessed how colonial constructions of ELTIs have been combined with factors such as race, gender, ethnicity, class, language, and others [...].
Therefore, ELP (English Language Pedagogy) is a remnant of coloniality. In particular, ELP in ELT has separated the subjects from their bodies/identitary features and their geographical location regarding the teaching practice [...]. This attempt is evident in the insertion of the notion of competence as the only discourse mostly reproduced in teaching and teacher education. This unidirectional/dimensional discourse is what has caused that “English language teaching and learning identities are more oriented towards that goal of identifying decontextualized forms of being in the field of teaching” (Castañeda-Peña, 2018, p. 18). For instance, Grosfoguel (2010), when discussing coloniality, claims that: “By breaking the link between the subject of enunciation and the ethnic/racial/sexual/gender/epistemic place, Western philosophy and science manage to create a myth about a real universal knowledge that masks, that is, conceals not only the speaker but also the epistemic, geo and body-political place of the structures of colonial power/knowledge from which the subject speaks [...].
In line with decoloniality by Mignolo and Walsh (2018), we think of ELP otherwise – as “the ongoing serpentine movement toward possibilities of other modes of being, thinking, knowing, sensing, and living”; a movement only possible if those who enact ELP name it, reclaim it, and commit to “changing, disrupting, and dismantling the hegemonic relations” [...].
Therefore, I would like to resort to intersectionality – the intersection of different identitary features – to allow the recognition of whom we are based on what we do, as “who we are and from where we speak is highly relevant for the intellectual projects we are likely to pursue” (Moya, 2011, p. 79). Intersectionality can assist in claiming agency (Stone-Mediatore, 2003) in spaces and territories where colonial histories have been present [...].
Intersectional narratives are then discursive representations of experience in which there is conceptual integration among those conversing. In fact, intersectional narratives serve this study to ground concepts and interpretations for “knowledge co-creation, in which researchers and participants develop shared understandings and develop new ideas” (Galafassi et al., 2018, p. 9). This is why intersectional narratives in this study comprise a relevant theoretical construct indispensable to investigating epistemological ruptures [...].
Available in: https://revistas.unal.edu.co/index.php/profile/article/view/90754. Acess on: Feb. 10, 2026. (Adapted).
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