Three Decolonial Research Methodologies: Interrogating Qualitative Research in English Language Teaching Education

Abstract

Along this reflection paper, we confront our former understandings of research as women teachers-researchers who intend to take the Epistemologies of the South as ways of being feeling-thinking-doing English language teacher education and research. A personal, academic, and collective journey has intersected and driven us into the decolonial turn to research ELT. Moreover, in this paper, we will share our uncertainties and struggles in an overt attempt to question our personal fine-grained colonial paradigms to find possible ways to demonumentalize research. Our research methodologies are intended to overcome a Western rationality of knowledge production that ingrains the ways through which our knowledge, research, and pedagogical practices are to be constructed. Walking the paths of decoloniality, we have moved from universal to more pluriversal understandings; we have constructed, co-constructed, valued and rescued situated knowledges emerging from our experience in our Global South. In the process, we have lived a mobilization of visions and pathways that destabilize and relocate our practices with a deep relation to that sense of locality that is ours. The aim of the following paper is to socialize how, through our research projects, we have envisioned inter-epistemic relational methodologies, hybrid, and testimonial narratives to portray ways to research English language teacher education with a decolonial spirit.