Writing ourselves towards praxis: critical duoethnography as dialogic reflective practice in Vietnamese EFL teacher development

We examine how critical duoethnography became a sustained form of critical reflective practice (RP) within our professional development (PD) as two Vietnamese university English as a foreign language (EFL) lecturers. Over six months, we produced collaborative journals and recorded conversations in Vietnamese. Some conversations were informal, while others were structured around earlier reflections. We later re-analysed the full corpus to ask how the process shaped our PD. Four interrelated processes emerged: surfacing our institutional complicity, negotiating conflicting identity positions, re-authoring ourselves through each other, and moving from reflection towards praxis. Our analysis explains how these processes became connected in this case. A partner first interrupted a familiar account. Continued dialogue then opened that account to reinterpretation. New self-understandings made action more imaginable, while later exchanges made us answerable for what we had intended to try. Translation extended this process because it returned us to meanings that had remained implicit in Vietnamese. Our marriage also formed part of the method by bringing shared history into the inquiry and making care inseparable from critique. We interpret these case-specific patterns as suggesting that critical duoethnography may function as developmental infrastructure when it gives reflection continuity and keeps professional intentions available for return.