Rethinking Global Englishes and moving toward reparative redress for language-minoritized and racialized TESOL practitioners

Abstract

In this article, I propose an ontological break in Global Englishes-oriented research and teaching practice, and a critical-ethical movement beyond the five foundational paradigms of GELT. I do this by first drawing on two philosophical perspectives on liberation and justice—Enrique Dussel’s (2013) ethics of liberation and Ol ufẹ́ mi O. T a ıw o’s (2022) constructive and distributive model of reparative justice—and then conceptually linking them to two critical perspectives outside of the Global Englishes paradigm, that is, Flores & Rosa’s (2015, 2022) raciolinguistic perspective and Canagarajah’s (2023) decolonial crip linguistics perspective. The conceptual work that I present here involves mapping out a critical-ethical frame- work, a pedagogy for repair, that seeks to redress rather than reproduce structural injustices in ELT. The framework prioritizes the uptake of ethical research questions and positions and provides a heuristic for rethinking ELT in ways that allow us to be wholly committed to con- tinuing TESOL’s “transformative journey as an adaptable profession” (Rose & Galloway, 2019, p. 222). I argue that it is by critically addressing issues of injustice and ethically centering our work on the lives of language minoritized and racialized ELT/TESOL practitioners that we will ensure the long-term adaptability and sustainability of the teaching profession.