Being an educator of English Language Teachers and embracing a decolonial perspective may seem a contradiction. Often times, when talking about this doctoral program to colleagues of other disciplines, they look puzzled because in their worldviews, it would be not possible to form teachers to teach the language of the empire while at the same time problematizing the very same field from the vantage point of decolonialism. But, the world is not black and white. The world has many colors, shades, and textures. And, although we try to keep consistency between our discourses and practices, we also acknowledge that we live in constant contradictions, and are full of questions, doubts, and uncertainties. That is a part of who we are, as well as an important component of the intellectual and academic work.

One of the questions that constantly hunts us, and we munch about with our doctoral students in the research seminars, has to do with: what would entail a serious pursue of qualitative research in the Global South? We are yet to have the answers. However, in this chapter I would like to take a risk and discuss some of my reflections, which ideally would keep pushing us, the ELT community, out of our comfort zone.

For the rest of this chapter, I’ll be using the voice of a first person singular, thus accepting my responsibility for the ideas that I am about to present. In trying to answer such a complex question, I will only deal with the role of researchers as well as the challenges and possibilities I see for them. I would like to start by reviewing the contribution of quantitative and qualitative methods in the production of knowledge and truth. I consider that this is a necessary discussion if we are interested in undertaking research from a decolonial perspective where these concepts are decentered. Then, I will address the need to engage in epistemological reflection in ELT. After that, I will discuss some challenges and difficulties that embracing a decolonial perspective might entail, particularly when adopting an Epistemología del sujeto conocido (Epistemology of the Known Subject), and finally I will close this chapter with proposing some possibilities for doing research in ELT from the South.