This doctoral research explores, from a critical and decolonial perspective, the experiences of a group of pre-service English teachers during their transition to professional practice in the Department of Huila, Colombia, through collective narrativization processes. Using collaborative autoethnography, my own journey as a language learner, English teacher, and teacher educator is interwoven with the participants’ stories to understand how their professional identities are constructed in contexts shaped by colonial legacies, institutional tensions, and social inequalities. The methodology unfolded in three phases: writing individual autoethnographies, co-constructing collective narratives, and conducting post-graduation dialogic encounters. Analysis revealed three interconnected moments—crises, epiphanies, and epistemological theorizations—which respectively reflect clashes between expectations and professional realities, transformative learning emerging from critical reflection,...

This dissertation addresses the conversations between nineteen female preschool and primary homeroom teachers of a public school located in Ciudad Bolívar in southern of Bogotá, Colombia and me. We discussed childhood, teenage, education, and work having as a main topic English, its learning, and its teaching. Our pair conversations were recorded, transcribed, converted into stories, and compiled to make a book called ¡El inglés entre nos…! Interpretation focused on the stories’ content (Barkhuizen, 2011; Bolívar, 2012) about English. Our stories represent both the source of data and the sites of co-theorization where thinking other-wise (Dussel, 2012; Fals Borda, 2017; Guerrero Arias, 2010; Meyer, 2013; Palermo, 2015; Suárez, 2011) were the lenses of interpretation. A decolonial option (Mignolo, 2011) was adopted to conduct this research to trace back our learning and working trajectories related to English to understand our being, knowing, and doing of the teaching of the...