Decolonial and antiracist teacher education practice: Challenges and alternatives

Abstract Decolonial and antiracist perspectives offer critical and humanizing approaches to supporting justice‐affirming language teacher education. In this commentary, we provide a conceptual grounding for decolonial and antiracist pedagogies as constitutive of justice‐affirming language education. These pedagogical approaches encourage students, teachers, and teacher educators to question normalized assumptions that reinforce inequality among groups of people from diverse backgrounds, perpetuate colonial oppression of Indigenous peoples, and undermine our relationality and respect for land and environment. While decolonial and antiracist approaches envision the construction of more just societies and human relations, some caveats need to be addressed and overcome. These include the tendency to conflate decoloniality with social justice, which leads to neglecting the ongoing colonial oppression experienced by Indigenous people; scholars’ complicity with the neoliberal pressure and competition that exacerbate the theory–practice gap; the misconception that North American justice discourse is universal; and injudicious participation in cancel culture as an exclusive approach to promoting a social justice agenda. We advocate for more open, contextual, and restorative practice by centering the intertwined synergy of teacher identity and critical reflexivity in teacher education and, simultaneously, demanding that our institutions take equal responsibility for transformation.