This qualitative research aims to determine how language teachers' ontological beliefs on critical pedagogy build teacher identity and language ideology. Participants included 18 public junior high school teachers. Results revealed that critical language pedagogy (CLP) constructed teacher identities against its trajectory. These identities include the lack of familiarity and misunderstanding of CLP, resistance to a critical teaching approach, dependency on the official textbook or learning modules, and confidence in their traditional practices. Similarly, distorted critical language ideologies were also determined, such as language as an apolitical entity, CLP as a threat to social and cultural harmony, L1 as a threat to L2 learning, and the perceived dominance of American English. Both identities and ideologies are attributed to social conflicts and sociopolitical activities that produce oppression and marginalization. Hence, it is recommended that the education sector provide an opportunity to fully understand the role of criticality through dialogue, reflection, and praxes.
TopIntroduction
Critical pedagogy (CP), associated with Paulo Freire, aims to concretize the process of transforming the oppressed into humanized and empowered individuals. Its criticality roots in constructing a just, democratic and liberated society where every member experiences “political, economic, and cultural control” (p. 77). With such a goal, CP rejects the dominance, violations, marginalization, oppression, and inequalities by developing social consciousness (Aliakbari & Faraji, 2011). In language teaching, its criticality is still influenced by the Freirean ideology of teaching for social justice, which is supported by “democratic values associated with equality, freedom, and solidarity” (p. 247). Several approaches are highlighted in achieving such critical language teaching, which include the following: problem-posing, dialogic engagement, praxes (reflection and action), and critical thinking (Crookes, 2021). In Henry Giroux's principal features of critical language pedagogy (CLP), he emphasized the students' subjectivities and voice which is their political nature, in search for truth, equality, and justice through language use (Pennycook, 2017).
While critical pedagogy, generally, has been explored in different contexts across the globe, language teacher identity through CLP remains underrated in research; hence, it is interesting to know how critical language teachers construct their identities, specifically with the influence of radical teaching, which aims transformational achievement and social consciousness (Kubota, 2017). With the complexities of teachers' identities, it was suggested by Higgins (2017) to investigate further teachers' experiences [in using additional language] and their language ideologies for the class. With such intricacies and limitations of critical studies concerning teachers' identities and language ideologies, this study determined to respond to those established gaps, specifically in the Philippine context, where education remains conservative.