May 2025 – Volume 29, Number 1
https://doi.org/10.55593/ej.29113r4
Social Justice, Decoloniality, and Southern Epistemologies within
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| Author: | Edited By Vander Tavares (2023) |  |
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| Publisher: | Routledge | ||
| Pages | e-ISBN | Price | |
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| pp. 252 | 9781032365008 9781003332336 |
$160.00 (Hardback) $47.65 (e-book) |
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Brazil’s language policies, which are deeply rooted in colonialism, have historically enforced a monolingual ideology, prioritizing Portuguese and sidelining diversity and indigenous languages (de Souza & Nascimento, 2022). This is also replicated in TESOL as a bias towards inner-circle hegemonic Global North varieties when teaching English, which can often delegitimize other expressions of the language. Since the early 2000s, Brazilian scholars have drawn on decoloniality to explore why and how English has gained attention in this educational context. The edited volume Social Justice, Decoloniality, and Southern Epistemologies within Language Education: Theories, Knowledges, and Practices on TESOL from Brazil by Vander Tavares invites readers to reimagine TESOL through the lens of decoloniality, asking not only who gets a seat at that table when discussing language teaching, but who “owns the table, who does the inviting to the table, and who is considered eligible to be invited” (Menezes de Souza, 2022, 04:42). Adding to the Routledge series Global South Perspectives on TESOL, Tavares’ volume aligns with other works in the series while occupying its own niche by focusing on English language education and scholarship in Brazil. It challenges prevailing hierarchies in language education and proposes practical frameworks for incorporating marginalized voices. The biggest strength of the collection lies in its practical accounts and reports on activities and contexts relating to language hierarchies, inequities, racism, and their reflection in the classroom. These localized pedagogical views on language and teaching contexts resonate with TESOL contexts beyond Brazil, applying to educators, policymakers, and researchers in contexts affected by colonial legacies and inequalities in South America, the U.S., and worldwide.
The book is organized into five parts and eleven chapters, with each contributing to a practical approach to English language education in Brazil. The authors explore themes ranging from the colonial legacies of language education to practical enactments of decolonial pedagogies. Part I situates English language education within Brazil’s history of social and material violence, reflecting on how colonial legacies persist in TESOL practices. This section critiques the erasure of Indigenous and African cultural identities and examines how Indigenous children’s literature can create opportunities for learners to engage with cultural differences and challenge power imbalances. Part II shifts focus to teacher education, incorporating Southern epistemologies to imagine pedagogy. The authors discuss reflective, experiential approaches to their teaching praxis. One example is the discussion about the National Pre-service Teacher Education Program (PIBID), where undergraduate students engaged with Brazilian films to reflect on sociocultural realities distinct from Global North perspective on movie culture. The pre-service teachers posted reflections about films online, engaged in peer discussions, and connected their observations to their teaching experiences and public education challenges— an approach which is considered particularly effective here in developing critical consciousness about social inequalities.
Parts III and IV of the book emphasize Southern-based knowledges. Part III engages with ‘more classroom-based’ theories, while Part IV presents decolonial and Freirean ideas or attitudes applicable to TESOL contexts. These chapters focus on case studies of educators mixing affective and emotional student engagement with decoloniality. Drawing on theories such as Duboc and Siqueira’s (2020) “English as a Lingua Franca feito no Brasil (made in Brazil),” teachers are encouraged to practice epistemic disobedience through moments of questioning dominant ideologies in the classroom. This disobedience is exemplified through classroom examples, such as using Eduardo Galeano’s poem ‘Los Nadie’ to question Eurocentric linguistic hierarchies in language varieties and to engage students with other epistemologies. Other practical applications include critical resume analysis activities that explore social identities in the professional world, and task-based language teaching where students research and create infographics on gender disparity in their own educational contexts. Notably, a chapter commemorating Paulo Freire’s centenary bridges his ideas of consciousness in dialogue with TESOL, adding depth to the book’s decolonial orientation and connecting it to its Brazilian Freirean roots. The final section, Part V, discusses the hegemony of English in research and teaching within Brazilian higher education. Chapters within this section expose systemic barriers faced by local academics, such as pressure to publish with a lack of institutional support. The last chapter particularly stands out, as it proposes Afrocentric pedagogies and Afro-Brazilian cultural themes in English education as a counter-narrative, offering an antiracist autoethnographic perspective on teaching English in Salvador, Bahia, one of the landmarks of black culture and heritage in the country.
This collection stands out for its methodological and theoretical diversity, showing how TESOL is implemented across various Brazilian contexts. Through various theoretical reflections, case studies, and practical applications, this book amplifies Southern voices to reposition them at the center of critical, timely discussions on language teaching. Representation, marginalization, and exclusion are major themes illustrated through activities and reflections that touch on democracy, identity (race, indigeneity), and social justice, often sidelined in dominant TESOL paradigms. Thus, it offers readers actionable practices through pedagogical reflections and assignments for those working with TESOL. Some of the activities in the collection include analyzing children’s literature to frame family diversity in the elementary classroom; implementing writing feedback practices that prioritize dialogic, localized assessment over native-speaker norms; and employing a five-step reflective framework for teachers to redesign their syllabi. While educators often read about decoloniality at the theory level, they are often left wondering how to “put that into practice”. Tavares’ collection brings hands-on narratives and activities on how decolonial ideologies can be enacted in real teaching environments. That is why the book’s intended audience is broader than just Brazil: this book is a must-read resource for educators, researchers, and policymakers anywhere in the world who might be invested in questioning and reshaping language classrooms drawing on justice-oriented frameworks.
While the volume is insightful, it leaves some areas underexplored. For example, given the significant size and cultural impact of the Afro-Brazilian population, one might expect a deeper engagement with their experiences and histories in language education. Racism is still embedded in Brazilian linguistic ideologies (de Souza & Nascimento, 2022), which has an overwhelming effect on this population. Afrocentric pedagogies are only addressed in one chapter, leaving a gap that future research might address. Similarly, due to its focus on higher education and teacher training, the volume misses an opportunity to explore basic (K-12) public education contexts, where many of the inequalities and systemic challenges in Brazilian TESOL are most visible. Nonetheless, the book compensates for these omissions with its overview of the most current perspectives on English language education and Applied Linguistics in Brazil.
Ultimately, Social Justice, Decoloniality, and Southern Epistemologies within Language Education questions the very nature of Menezes de Souza’s (2022) table. It offers theoretical frameworks and pedagogical activities for educators, teacher trainers, and researchers. Thus, this book is highly recommended for language teaching professionals and teacher educators worldwide, since the volume can be instrumental in providing both theoretical grounding and practical inspiration for those committed towards a more decolonial and socially just future.
About the Reviewer
Thais Rodrigues Cons is a Brazilian-Latina PhD student in Rhetoric & Composition at the University of Arizona. She holds an MA in Applied Linguistics from the Federal University of Paraná in Brazil. Her research interests include Multilingual Writing & Identity, Digital Rhetoric, Writing Centers, Technical and Professional Writing, and the intersection of Decoloniality and Language Education. <tcons<
arizona.edu> ORCID ID: 0000-0003-1168-2089
To Cite this Review
Cons, T. R. (2025). [Review of the book. (2023), Social Justice, Decoloniality, and Southern Epistemologies within Language Education: Theories, Knowledges, and Practices on TESOL from Brazil, by Vander Tavares]. Teaching English as a Second Language Electronic Journal (TESL-EJ), 29 (1). https://doi.org/10.55593/ej.29113r4
References
Duboc, A. P., & Siqueira, S. (2020). ELF feito no Brasil: Expanding theoretical notions, reframing educational policies. Status Quaestionis, 2(19), 231-258. https://doi.org/10.13133/2239-1983/17135
Menezes de Souza, L. M. T. (2022, February 14). Internationalization: On cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitics and communication otherwise [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVSG550MiAg&t=259
Menezes de Souza, L. M. T., & Nascimento, G. (2022). Questioning epistemic racism in issues of language studies in Brazil: The case of Pretuguês versus popular Brazilian Portuguese. In Southernizing Sociolinguistics (pp. 67-89). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003219590-6
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