Two TESOL Teacher Educators' Reflective Dialogue on Emotions as Critical Inquiry

ABSTRACT This brief contributes to growing scholarship on emotions in language teacher education by conceptualizing and illustrating “emotion as critical inquiry.” Drawing on a reflective dialogue between two teacher educators working in distinct contexts, we respond to four guiding questions that interrogate how emotions can be pedagogized and critically examined in teacher education. Through examples such as emotion logs, mentoring dialogues, and critical autoethnographic narrative (CAN) writing, we demonstrate how emotions function as sites of identity construction, ideological negotiation, and professional learning. We also critically examine the challenges of enacting this approach, including institutional discourses that privatize emotion and the vulnerabilities involved in making emotions visible and attending to them through regulation processes. The dialogue highlights how teacher educator identities, beliefs, and the contexts in which they are embedded shape the possibilities of mobilizing and engaging emotions as critical inquiry. We argue that foregrounding emotions can foster critical reflexivity, support teacher (and teacher educator) wellbeing, and contribute to more socially just and sustainable language education environments and practices.