The seminar will build on some of Freire’s principles like dialogue and problem posing to look at where Critical Pedagogy is rooted, how it has evolved and how it has influence important developments in ELT. For way to long the field of ELT has withdrawn itself from real life contexts despite the call from scholars like Pennycook who in the early 90s talked about the need of Critical Pedagoy in TESOL. In this seminar we invite students to dialogue and problematize issues like the following: Critical Pedagogy as engagement in public discourse about languages and language education (e.g., react to racist, colonialist, sexist, homophobic, essentializing discourse circulating in multimedia, social networking platforms, and in government statements). Critical Pedagogy in action at multiple levels of an education system (e.g., at the level of institution-wide language policy, at the level of classroom/lesson design, and at the level of student-teacher interaction).

And Critical Pedagogy as engagement in current sociopolitical struggles in the field (who qualifies as an effective teacher, what language varieties are included in the curriculum, what is the appropriate endpoint of a language student's study, who owns English varieties, etc.) We are very aware that these topics represent a very small sample of the issues that could and need to be addressed in the field so the invitation is open to the participants to continue exploring them.