TOWARDS PLURIVERSAL LANGUAGE EDUCATION: INTERVIEW WITH DR. YECID ORTEGA

The interview that follows was held online via Zoom Platform on September 1st, 2025. The online meeting was recorded and later transcribed through Turboscribe. Adjustments were made to ensure clarity and consistency, but traces of oral discourse were kept to maintain the dialogical nature of the text.

Following Paulo Freire’s understanding of the pivotal role of dialogue in the promotion of social justice, this special issue also features an interview as a way to discuss possibilities for Critical Language Education. Our interviewee is Dr. Yecid Ortega, who has been committed to critical, creative, anti-racist, and decolonial worldviews in research and education for over two decades. Throughout his trajectory, Dr. Ortega has been exploring the pluriversality of social, cultural, and linguistic experiences of the most marginalized communities in society (Immigrants, Refugees, 2S/LGBTQIA+, Neurodivergent, Older Adults, etc.) in formal and nonformal contexts and grounded by alternative critical, creative, arts-based, and community-oriented approaches.

Leonardo: First of all, we would like to thank you for the opportunity to engage in dialogue with you, Prof. Yecid Ortega. Dialogue is the basis of Paulo Freire’s emancipatory education, so we thought it would be essential to have the opportunity to learn from and with other critical-oriented scholars such as you in this dossier. In this special issue of Ilha do Desterro, themed English language education for social justice: epistemologies and praxis, we have gathered studies that bring a critical perspective to the teaching of English in different contexts. More specifically, as the call for papers stated, we were interested in “the praxis of dialogical, democratic, and transformative English language education, highlighting the political role of English teachers amidst educational and social backlashes.” Unlike positivist understandings of science, a critical perspective requires us to position ourselves, not only because our job as educators and researchers is not neutral, but also because an understanding of our position in the world (that is, how we came to be who we are and how we can change in the search for transformation) is paramount for the type of work we do. Thus, we would like to initiate this conversation by asking you how your identity connects to your work as a professor/scholar. In other words, how do you think you have developed a critical orientation towards English language education? And what does the term critical mean for you?

Yecid: First of all, I would like to thank you for the invitation. I agree with you. I have also been following the work of Paulo Freire for many years since I was in Colombia. As you can imagine, I read the Pedagogy of the Oppressed. That’s like a Bible to me. And I do believe in the dialogic idea of knowledge exchange. So, thank you for the invitation.

My background and lived experiences started in popular neighborhoods, the margins in Bogota, in Colombia – that’s where my passion for education started a long time ago, 30 years ago or so. And I do believe education in general is the great equalizer for people. Instead of having those who do not know education and those who know education, education gives equal opportunity for everybody to know something. And English specifically, I do believe it is or can be a tool for critical thinking. But overall, as you mentioned, I follow something really important about Paulo Freire, which is praxis. And for me, throughout my scholarship and my work, praxis is key, an important aspect in teaching, but also in research.

Some of the teachers that I work with argue that actions are louder than words. And they take these to their classrooms and their lesson plans and the projects they are doing, because something they teach in their classes of English as a second language or as a foreign language is how these words translate into their communities. So, for me and for these teachers, in the end, criticality or being critical means being able to not just question or challenge the status quo or the inequalities or the social injustice of the lives of our students or the teachers or our communities, the city, the country, etc… But also to do something about it, something that transforms lives and transforms the students’ lives. And, more specifically, the students’ lives of those who have been at the margins in favelas in Brazil or the immigrants and refugees in different parts of the country, the neurodivergent communities, the LGBT community, the indigenous communities, etc. So how can the work that we do by teaching English become this tool not only for just talking about criticality and social injustice? And also: how can we enact this or put it into action?

Priscila: Otherwise, we just end up talking about criticality but not actually engaging in real action. We agree with you, and that is in line with the way we have been working as well.

Leonardo: Yes, because Freire started from the practical element, it was from the grassroots, just like you mentioned. So Freire was not theorizing and then later applying his theory. It was the other way around. He was thinking about the communities and their needs.

Yecid: Theorizing from the ground, or something that I have called “theorizing from the streets”. In Colombia, I know there has always been an appreciation for Paulo Freire. There is a Colombian scholar, Orlando Fals Borda, who had similar ideas, and he engaged in action research or participatory action research in Colombia. And then, the rest of the world took it as a way to transform our communities through research from the ground with the campesinos, with the indigenous people, with the Afro-Colombians. And that is just circling back to the original question. That is where my heart is. My heart is with the most marginalized communities and frameworks, such as Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and praxis and conscientization as well. Those things are at the core of the work that we do.

As you mentioned, Priscila, it is not only talking about it or writing about social justice, and then you get the book you published and put it on the shelf, or write a paper, and just a few people read it. It is more about the impact that your work is translated into. The students actually reply to you, talking about how much they have learned in this class and saying, “now I am able to do this and now I am aware of this and I did not know this before”. So I think that is key and that is core for language education, specifically for marginalized people, people in the Global South. For anybody, but more specifically for those who have been at the margins, that is my view.

Priscila: Definitely. On the other hand, it is also important that we develop a theoretical understanding, right? Because the more we study and make sense of theory and also contribute to producing theory, the more we are able to connect it to practice. With that in mind, I would like to move to the second question. Critical English language education, which may be considered by some as a minority perspective within Applied linguistics, has developed as a research area, also impacting the classroom. In that context, practices and concepts have mostly been localized (that is, contextually dependent), although guided by core principles such as social justice orientation. In that sense, what are the main theories or traditions that inform your work in the area? How do you differentiate a critical perspective from more traditional approaches to language teaching?

Yecid: Thank you for that question. I think that is a very important question to answer. As we know, language education and Applied Linguistics are mainly about research and the education of languages. However, in the past years, there has been an increase in criticality, especially critical applied linguistics that questions relations of power, such as language, policy, race, gender, and other discrimination aspects in language teaching, language research, etc, whether it is in the classroom or whether it is in the educational system. But most recently, there is a huge movement that goes a little bit beyond that, moving towards decolonizing Applied Linguistics as well. So, we have critical applied linguistics. And now, we are seeing the emergence of more decolonizing Applied Linguistics, or decolonizing language education. And I believe the main idea is to level the playing field for everybody. Horizontalizing the prospect so we can see a great movement of amplifying the knowledge of minority languages and indigenous languages to decentralize it from the dominant languages, such as English, French, or Spanish, which are colonial languages. Some of the work I have been doing is based on critical theory that has emerged in our field with Nelson Flores, Jonathan Rosa, Vijay A. Ramjattan, who have also been inspired by Alastair Pennycook, or most recently Sinfree Makoni and Ryoko Kubota in respect to critical decolonial aspects, but also social justice oriented by my friends, Neta Avineri and Deniz Ortactepe at the University of Glasgow. And all of these ideas have emerged in the past few years.

We are in a great moment right now where English is not seen anymore as the language of power; our focus is on how this language can be used as a tool for social justice. However, one critique or concern about this is that most of this scholarship or most of these theories are coming from the Global North, usually the United States, sometimes Canada, sometimes Europe. And then my fear at times is that we in the Global South (Colombia, Brazil, Southeast Asia, etc) look at the north and we take these concepts and these theories and we transpose them into Latin America and into our communities as if they were the law.

Sometimes, we do not pay attention to the work that has already been done within our communities. You know, like in Brazil, there are so many examples, and probably you know better than me about all the amazing work that has been done in different communities for twenty, thirty years. And then we read the work of Alastair Pennycook, who is in Australia, or Ryoko Kubota, who is here in Canada, or others like Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa, who have been talking about Raciolinguistic ideologies in the United States, but it is important to keep in mind that they speak or respond to their own context, right? Still, somehow, people take it as a universal law. And that is my concern, although, yes, I love those theories and those concepts that are coming from these authors that are in the Global North. It is now important to pay more attention to what our students, our teachers are doing, right? We should be reading and citing each other’s work, I should be learning about what the folks in Brazil have been doing, for example. I know Lynn Mario Trindade Menezes De Souza, who is well-known worldwide for his work. For me, it is important not only to look at those concepts in the Global North, but it is also equally important to see concepts that are being developed by the Global South, in Latin America, such as what people are doing in Mexico, in Colombia, Brazil, Peru… We can also read what is being produced in Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese as well, and bring that knowledge too. For example, Paulo Freire’s concept of conscientização was translated into critical consciousness in English. And I say: no, it is not critical consciousness, it is conscientização, why don’t we use the original word? Whenever I get a chance, I will try to use the original word because it makes more sense. It is embedded, context-dependent, and culturally embedded.

Leonardo: I think what you are saying relates to the history of language or additional language education in general, because for a long time, this is what we have been doing: we have imported different approaches and methods for language teaching, and then we have tried to find those recipes. This is connected to neoliberalism too, which brings us to the third question.

The field of English language education is not immune to neoliberalism. In Brazil, for instance, English has become the only mandatory language to be taught in basic education according to the new Common Core Curriculum. In a multilingual country - with several indigenous languages, Brazilian sign language, and many languages other than Portuguese spoken and used by immigrants, refugees, among others -, and located in Latin America in which Spanish is widely used, only English has been considered necessary for basic education curricula. Although it is argued that English should be approached as a lingua franca, we can observe the influence of the private sector and the interest of the market in the teaching of English. This is a result of coloniality as well. Bearing this in mind, how do you see our role as English language professionals who teach the “language of the oppressor” (Rich, 2016)¹?

Yecid: I always say that is the million-dollar question, because when you are a critical scholar, when you are a decolonial scholar, people come and ask you: “yeah, you are all about being critical, you are all about decolonial, but you are teaching the language of the oppressor, of the elite, the language of the empire”. And then that makes you feel like a fraud or like a double-standard person. Yes and no. I know Spanish, that is my first language, and I also speak English, and you two know Portuguese, and you probably know some Spanish, and you also speak English as well. But then, I ask: how does that make us the bad guys? Yes, English, Spanish, and Portuguese are colonial languages, the languages of the oppressed. But as critical scholars, is it our role to fight for the erasure of those colonial languages and advocate for minor languages or indigenous languages to emerge instead? Is finishing those colonial languages, evaporating, killing them, what we really intend? It sounds like it would be the same colonial system that was imposed on us when the Europeans came and eradicated our indigenous languages. So, I think that this is a very utopian way of thinking because it will be almost impossible to eradicate or dismantle or erase all the colonial languages from the Global South, and they are not going to go away tomorrow. What can be done instead is to use those languages as tools for social justice.

It is like using the master’s tools to destroy the master’s plan. In other words, instead of using these languages to advance neoliberalism, colonization, and capitalism, we can use these languages - in our case, English - to amplify awareness on the inequalities, and also to propose solutions to those inequalities or social injustices. So instead of simply teaching, for example, English for businesses or to get a job, we can learn to use the language to create an awareness of the social problems and also create projects that attempt to solve those inequalities. In my work, which I have been doing for a while, I have been working with teachers who teach English, so you can be aware of your own inequalities in the neighborhoods about poverty, homelessness, unemployment, all of these things. And then once you are aware, you can propose projects or ideas on how to address them and use the English language to let everybody be aware in the school or in the community. One example that I always give: some students in Bogota, they raised awareness about stray dogs and cats and they worked on a project using English, but with a purpose, I would say. They created posters, and they put the posters in English and Spanish around the school so people would be aware of the situation. They also raised some money, and then during a week or two, they raised money to bring food to these stray dogs, and they went into the streets and fed the dogs. Obviously, it is not a big thing, but what happens here is that it creates that little seed for social justice that eventually, we hope, as scholars, teachers, researchers, we hope that seed sprouts in two or three years when they move out of school.

Priscila: If we think about language as a means to simply get ahead, then we end up teaching the language as if the language did not belong to us. But if we see language as part of who we are, then it guides our actions. When I reflect on this, I think that although a language may originally come from the colonizer, like English, for example, or even Portuguese, it does not mean it belongs to the “other”. If you think about Portuguese in Brazil, for instance, it comes from Portugal, but we have transformed the language so much that nowadays it is also our language. It is not someone else’s language, and it is through this language that I exist as a person. So, social justice guiding principles, through language, can be used to promote change in the world, right?

Yecid: I think you are right, Priscila. As you mentioned, languages do not have to be static, and sometimes that happens: we are going to the classroom to teach this solidity of language instead of trying to focus on identity and meaning.

Priscila: Exactly. And, as regards practical examples, how do you think coloniality has been resisted in English language education? Many of the articles in this issue present localized examples of emancipatory language education, especially in the context of Brazil. Do you have examples of how resistance to colonial forces has been enacted by English language teachers and learners in the Global South, considering your own experience or the experience of colleagues? And, also, how do you think we can give more visibility to these voices from the Global South?

Yecid: There are many examples. But sometimes people think that resisting means to fight and to throw stones. And, in fact, it may mean something different, as in the example I am going to give you. It is about fighting the colonial mentality, right? So, there is this teacher who, the first thing that she does in the morning, is to ask her students to write a few sentences about how grateful they are that day or what they are grateful for. And this is very simple, it will probably take them 10 minutes or so. But because many of the colonial mentalities promote the dehumanization of the other, this may be a way to fight against that. For this particular teacher, it is a way to fight back, or as you mentioned, resist the colonial force. By asking the students: “How are you? What makes you human? Who are you grateful for?”, she is looking at them as individuals. And most of them are grateful for their mom, their dad, their grandma, their dog, because they are alive, all of these things. And then, sometimes, the students say: “nobody, absolutely nobody asks us about ourselves and who we are and how we feel. Most of the teachers come here and simply greet us, saying welcome back to class, open your books on page number 25”. Resisting may mean going against this colonial way of doing things, the structural way of doing things. And, like I said, sometimes that means doing a little thing. So, we do not always have to march in the streets; sometimes, something as little as a daily action that addresses the colonial mentality can be the way to go.

And yes, there are currently tons of scholarship and classroom examples similar to this. There is a huge movement right now for plurilingual ethno-education, for example. My own work, for instance, on trans-cultural linguación, which is teaching language and culture using multiple languages. In other words, I dream not of an English class or a French class or a German class or a Spanish class or whatever, but the language classroom. And the language classroom is that classroom where students learn from each other’s cultures and languages, multiple languages. In my own book, “Pluriversal Applied Linguistics” (De Gruyter Mouton, 2025)², I propose language education in line with equal education and other types of education, that is, a multidisciplinary world where what I call pluriversalizing language education can happen.

Leonardo: Great. Since you have mentioned how we should approach language repertoires and not just consider languages as fixed entities that are separate from each other, I would like us to think about academia. As critical scholars, not only do we teach a colonial language, but we are also inserted in a space that also reproduces coloniality. As critical scholars, we should question the very hierarchical and compartmentalized manner in which science is promoted. If a critical perspective is one that is committed to social justice and based on praxis, what do you think our role is in the process of breaking the walls of the ivory tower? Which principles can guide us in this process?

Yecid: Right, absolutely. As critical scholars, we all should question everything, but beyond questioning everything, we also need to attempt to make those changes at a personal level, not only at a societal level or a school level, system level, but sometimes we need to change ourselves first. By doing so, we need to embrace a new paradigm, a new mentality that de-hierarchizes the roles and the positions, the relationship between teacher and student, the relationship between researcher and participant, human and non-human. In other words, it has to be at a personal level first: to let go of the ego, the power relations, and really see others as equals. Unless we change that particular part, our practices will not change. In other words, if you are a teacher or a professor who thinks that you have the knowledge and you sit down there, you read the articles and simply want to quiz your students about the articles, that is not critical. You can read critical work, but you are not engaging in critical work, right? I guess the only principle that can guide us into this process is the principle of changing our mindset, changing our view, and changing the way that we see things. And once that happens, then the other things follow.

Priscila: I could not agree more. If you think about our role as teacher educators, for instance, it is very important that we walk the talk, right? Because even though the texts we talk about and the theories we discuss in class teach us a lot and are thus very important, if we are not performing them, if we are not enacting these theories in our own actions, we end up teaching, by example, to do the other way around. So I agree with you, Yecid, it is very important that we walk the talk and allow dialogue in our classrooms so we learn with our students. I guess all the questions we have been asking go back to the idea of dialogue and praxis, don’t you think?

The next question I would like to ask focuses on the relation between technology and critical language teaching. According to Freire, critical education is about reading not only the word but also the world. For the educator, the aim of the educational process should be to foster the development of conscientização, which can enable us to reflect and act upon our contexts. This is an ongoing and never-ending process. Considering the pervasiveness of technology in our lives and its impact on teaching - and, more specifically, the advance of artificial intelligence-, do you think there is a role for it in critical language education?

Yecid: I think that I have a few points here I would like to talk about. Number one: as critical educators and scholars, we need to be critical of technology, especially artificial intelligence. For example, the ethical aspects: where is my personal data going every time I use AI? Who is going to use the data? What are they going to do with the data? Most likely, they use it to train more artificial intelligence and eventually sell it to corporations. And we all need to be aware of these things that are happening when we sign in, accept terms and conditions, etc. We need to be aware that what you put or what the students put on those apps is not 100% safe. And we need to be aware of those things and allow awareness to rise in the classroom.

The second thing that I want to mention is that Artificial Intelligence is here to stay. This is just the beginning. And we need to learn how to use it in ways that make sense for us as critical researchers and as educators. For instance, the way we evaluate or assess language has to be different from the typical quiz or test. Students need opportunities for creating and thinking, otherwise technology may think for them.

And then, the last thing that I wanted to mention is that the more AI technology and apps exist, the more people will use it, then it will become cheaper or easier to use it too. And I believe the value of being human will increase, and human relations or human relational teaching will be a commodity. Let me give you an example: in the future, you will see elite schools advertising the fact they have human teachers and they may charge more money because they have human teachers, while public education will rely more and more on AI technologies because it is cheaper and produces faster results. You can have many students using AI technologies, whereas you can have only a certain number of students with one teacher, a human teacher, and you can charge more money for that particular class. So, I personally advocate for more human-to-human relations in different forms of learning in public schools. This way, we counterbalance and resist those colonial mentalities that we were talking about earlier. So, in other words, AI is just another form of colonization, I guess, of the mind.

Leonardo: In this scenario, it is not education anymore, because it is about transmitting knowledge, reaching a specific result, then it is not about the process, right? So I think we need to go back to Freire, because Freire talks about the humanizing aspect of the educational process.

Yecid: I think Paulo Freire will never be out of trend. Fifty years ago, he was talking about humanizing pedagogies already, although he was talking about humanizing as opposed to capitalist, industrialized mindsets, which, in a sense, is the same as AI technology, right? So you will see in the near future, folks like me advocating for more and more humanizing pedagogical approaches in the classroom. We will tell the students, “Don’t bring your laptops, don’t bring your phones, we’re going to engage in this particular activity...

Priscila: I agree with you, Yecid. I am already doing that in my classes. I already tell my students: “leave your laptops at home, because I need you 100% here, I am not teaching you any recipes, we are going to build something together, so if you are typing everything I say in your laptop, then you are basically just getting something from me, and I have nothing ready made to give you, we are working on this together and you need to be a part of it”. Of course, there is room for technology in the classrooms, but sometimes all you need is 100% of presence there so students truly participate in dialogue and engage in actual thinking.

Yecid: You are right, Priscila. I encourage you to keep doing this, and that is how you fight or counterbalance that colonial mentality.

Leonardo: Now, I would like us to reflect on the complex context we live in. In spite of the fact that Critical applied linguistics has defended the importance of diversity, interculturality, and multilingualism in language education, the sociopolitical scenario worldwide is pointing to a different direction. Contemporaneity has been marked by “English-only” policies, xenophobia, anti-immigration discourses and practices, and genocide. Many educators - including ourselves - feel threatened and censored in some contexts. At the same time, the seriousness of the era we live in is a sign of the need for critical education. How do you think teachers and researchers can support each other in this process so that we do not lose sight of the transformative potential of language education?

Yecid: Yes, in the current state of affairs, we all feel threatened, and critical education, more specifically, is threatened by the white supremacy, far-right, etc., because they are fearful that their powers and their privilege are being taken away, and they want to threaten those who think differently. As you mentioned in your own question, supporting each other is key, and I am mostly talking about teachers supporting each other, creating communities of practice, sharing practices, sharing resources, advocating for those who are demoralized, creating alternative forms of teaching and learning. But overall, the mentality or the ideology needs to shift, as I said earlier.

If you are one of those teachers who think one way to learn English is by speaking 100% in English, then you will not be able to accommodate other languages or other forms of expression or pronunciation. If you do not change that mindset, you will not change your actions. A lot of work needs to be done in conscientização as well, so teachers, parents - and everybody! - need to be on board with helping and supporting each other. Let me give you an example: one of the teachers that I worked with for a long time said, “the government, the school, and the director want me to train these students for the standardized test, but as soon as I close this door, then I teach whatever these kids actually need. They do different things, games and puzzles and art, and these kids are the happiest learning those things”. She also mentioned having a colleague and exchanging information and resources and helping each other. She says: “we do this because if we’re going to sit down here waiting for the government to give us the resources, the materials, books and software and computers and infrastructure, that is not going to happen, so if we do not come back as community and help each other and support each other, nobody is going to come and teach us and help us”. So the answer to your question is in the question itself: we need to support each other, so get together, create networks of teachers, groups of teachers, reading groups of teachers, and support each other. To be honest, I have been around for a while in different countries and different educational systems, and it is the same: succeeding in standardized testing is expected to increase funding, but the teachers know that, besides the test, they must focus on whatever the students actually need. And they could not do this unless they were supporting and helping each other.

Priscila: Your answer made me think of two things: one is that teachers in schools are hardly ever heard, but they are the ones who know what should be taught to their students because they are the ones who truly know students, so teaching policies and curriculum should also reflect and be built with the participation of teachers. The other thing I wanted to mention is that, very recently, Leo and I, with a friend of ours, Professor Hamilton de Godoy Wielewicki (UFSC), have finished collecting data for a piece of research we are working on funded by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq). We have talked to English teachers in Santa Catarina about the challenges that they have been facing and also the kinds of strategies they have been using to deal with those challenges, especially after the pandemic. Interestingly, one of the aspects that came up in the answers of many of these teachers was exactly related to the importance of communities. They gave examples like finding support in each other’s work, going to their colleague and talking to them whenever you have a question or when you do not know how to respond to a challenge. These communities seem to allow teachers to develop resilience and to actually engage in the improvement of their contexts. And I think that this connects really well to your previous comment, but also with the last topic we would like to address in this conversation.

Although this interview is to be published in an academic journal, which may be of predominant interest for people who are inserted in the academia, one of the goals we have with this special issue is to actually create a dialogue with teachers who are in the classrooms or students who want to become teachers and who are going to engage in the process of critical language education in the grassroots. In that sense, we would like to hear from you, Yecid: how can critical pedagogy manifest itself concretely in the classroom? What advice would you give to language teachers that are interested in adopting a more critical approach? What reading recommendations or strategies would you give for those who have recently entered or discovered the field of critical language education?

Yecid: What I usually advocate for is: try to publish other things that are not typically found in an academic journal. I think this exercise that we are doing today, dialoguing, is a message that we are sending out there, that there are other ways of doing things, right? And I also believe that inviting an actual school teacher to interview for a journal like this to tell us what it is that they do in their classroom is relevant, because one of our jobs as critical educators and critical scholars is to amplify this work so that it is known. Allowing publications to be different from the “standard”, as dialogues, narratives, infographics, for example, are ways in which this can be done. I will give you the example of the Journal of Sociolinguistics. It has a podcast, and this podcast is a form of knowledge dissemination. So more editors and journals now are accepting other forms of publication as well.

In relation to the other part of the question, critical pedagogy is about addressing inequalities in society. And the English classroom should be this hub or lab for activities that resonate with the needs of the communities. So my advice for teachers is to listen to students, what they want, what they need, and what they are currently doing, and what they could potentially do once they graduate. And I know it is not easy, but it is about trying. So, in general terms for recommendations, as I said earlier: read as many local scholars as you can, and scholars from the Global South are important here. What are the indigenous people doing? What are the Afro-Brazilian people doing? What is key for them? I know that, in Brazil, for example, Kyria Finardi, Lynn Mario Trindade Menezes de Sousa, Ana Paula Martinez Duboc, and others have been working on critical perspectives on language education. And I guess it is also important for us and for the readers of this particular journal to ask the ultimate question: how can I amplify the work of my fellow teachers or my students? For me, that is true decolonization.

Priscila: I completely agree with you. Leo, Hamilton and I have recently published a book entitled “Que história é essa, teacher? Reflexões sobre a Formação Docente de línguas Adicionais” (Pontes, 2025)³, in which teachers and students have written chapters telling their stories and reflecting upon them. It is a book made of narratives about teaching and learning, and I believe narratives are also valid and important, not only empirical research. We need to find spaces for other types of discourses in academia. Another example is that we have also been trying to produce some podcasts here at UFSC (like Teaching in Critical Times⁴ and 7070⁵, which can both be found on Spotify and other streaming platforms) exactly because it is a way of getting to people, right?

Yecid: Yes! Just to give you an example, I know a student who worked on a videocast using their phone and in it they talked about language. And that is a good way to see how you can use the language live. And people are attracted to this; whereas when we publish an article, we do not always go viral.

Leonardo: That makes sense. Well, we are getting to an end. Thank you so much, Yecid, for accepting to dialogue with us! That was such an insightful conversation.

Yecid: Thank you so much for the invitation. This was such a great idea to have a dialogue, a conversation. I am glad to know about the work that you both are doing. I encourage you to keep doing this work. Do not back up; defend your ideas, defend your work. I know it is not easy, especially in academia, but try to do as much as you can to respond to the needs of those you are serving locally, your own students, your own teachers, whoever you are working with. Your work makes more sense when students give you positive feedback, and you see the result of your work. That is better than a hundred citations.

Priscila: Thank you so much, Yecid and Leo, for the opportunity!

End notes

• 1
  Rich, A. (2016). Collected poems: 1950-2012. W.W. Norton & Company.
• 2
  Ortega, Y. (2025). Pluriversal Applied Linguistics: Implications for Language Teaching and Research from the Global South. De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111242880
• 3
  Farias, P. F., Wielewick, H. G., Silva, L. (Eds.). (2025). Que história é essa, teacher?: Reflexões sobre a formação docente de línguas adicionais. Campinas: Pontes Editores.
• 4
  Silva, L., Farias, P. F. (Hosts). (2020). Teaching in Critical Times [Audio podcast]. Spotify. https://open.spotify.com/show/2fKY4c1LMSryMy3pWDF7ir
• 5
  Farias, P.F., Wielewick, H. G. (2020-2024). 7070 [Audio podcast]. Spotify. https://open.spotify.com/show/6Bw5YnX40nNTJf2lZXDVi4

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

Does not apply.

References

• Rich, A. (2016). Collected poems: 1950-2012. W.W. Norton & Company.
• Ortega, Y. (2025). Pluriversal Applied Linguistics: Implications for Language Teaching and Research from the Global South De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111242880
  » https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111242880
• Farias, P. F., Wielewick, H. G., Silva, L. (Eds.). (2025). Que história é essa, teacher?: Reflexões sobre a formação docente de línguas adicionais Campinas: Pontes Editores.
• Silva, L., Farias, P. F. (Hosts). (2020). Teaching in Critical Times [Audio podcast]. Spotify. https://open.spotify.com/show/2fKY4c1LMSryMy3pWDF7ir
  » https://open.spotify.com/show/2fKY4c1LMSryMy3pWDF7ir
• Farias, P.F., Wielewick, H. G. (2020-2024). 7070 [Audio podcast]. Spotify. https://open.spotify.com/show/6Bw5YnX40nNTJf2lZXDVi4
  » https://open.spotify.com/show/6Bw5YnX40nNTJf2lZXDVi4

Edited by

• Guest editors:
  Leonardo da Silva, Priscila Fabiane Farias, Graham V. Crookes

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  17 Nov 2025
• Date of issue
  2025

History

• Received
  09 Sept 2025
• Accepted
  20 Sept 2025