ABSTRACT
Up until now, we have used a fairly conventional academic article writing style and structure in this Special Issue;here in the final paper, we take advantage of a more personal way of writing to share with the readership what, in a broader sense, we think we have been doing and intend to do;and variously locate ourselves with respect to our personal professional trajectories, the field, and the immediate sociopolitical contexts of this work, as well as allude to the processes we have used and the goals we still have. In other words, we need teacher education that discusses critical teaching from a theoretical perspective but that also follows critical pedagogy principles in practice. [...]at the level of educational policies, instead of the implementation of initiatives that focus on control (dictating what should be taught and how), we also need to have teachers’ practices being recognized, valued, and trusted. Through our work as critical educators who work in different levels of education (that is, university and basic and technological levels), we mostly aim at creating spaces for reflecting on possibilities, and perhaps principles, that may elucidate/encourage viable paths for critical language development. For someone born and raised in Paulo Freire’s home country, Brazil, it was exactly my contact with his educational philosophy that made me realize that my duty as a language educator was to go far beyond the teaching and learning of a new linguistic code affiliated with cultural aspects of a dominant and stereotypical target culture.