This session aims at investigating the role of innovative TESOL materials in the critical posture of learners. I will provide an overview of activities prepared to empower lower-class students to do highly- disputed university entrance exams, as well as the analysis of these students’ discourses about the activities.
In a globalized world, English, as well as TESOL materials (those prepared to teach English to speakers of other languages), have played the ubiquitous roles of tools for both social mobility and exclusion. Thus, this qualitative session seeks to shed light on the possible outcomes of innovative teaching materials in the critical posture of lower-class students towards issues of identities and ideologies and, ultimately, in their own transformation into critical university students. In order to achieve this goal, I will expound a set of activities which I created as a volunteer English teacher in a Brazilian “pré-vestibular social”, which is a free course that aims at empowering learners to do highly- disputed national university entrance exams. At the aforementioned pedagogical environment, located in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, I have based my lessons on the epistemologies of the global South (CONNELL, 2007), as well as on decolonial (MIGNOLO, 2009; BALLESTRIN, 2017) and critical perspectives towards language teaching (FREEBODY, MUSPRATT & LUKE, 1997; TILIO, 2017). Such career experience has proved to be essential for me to be a more culturally- sensitive educator, willing to truly promote a critical pedagogy. Furthermore, I will analyse the ideologies and entextualizations (BLOMMAERT, 2005) of 15 students’ discourses about these materials, on data stemmed from structured interviews and focal groups during my ongoing Master’s research in Applied Linguistics. Overall, I hope that by the end of this presentation, fellow teachers of contrasting backgrounds and places will feel encouraged to create and share their own materials tackling critical topics and innovative approaches.
