ABSTRACT
Language teachers have certain ideological or political inclinations, ranging from neutral, conservative, liberal, to radical. Although my ideological position during the early years of my teaching career-teaching English as a foreign language in public schools in Japan-was neutral, I gradually integrated socially relevant and critical perspectives into my teaching, perhaps because I had always been supportive of social justice while I was growing up. During my doctoral work in Toronto, Canada, in the early 1990s, I was introduced to critical pedagogy and critical applied linguistics through coursework and informal discussions with peers. Since then, I have taken critical perspectives in teaching Japanese as a foreign language and language teacher education in North America. However, a classroom incident, which happened a few years ago, provided me with an opportunity to critically refl ect on the ways in which critical pedagogy had been implemented in my classroom (Kubota, 2014). This enabled me to further critically refl ect on my teacher identity as a critical pedagogue especially with regard to my ideological positioning vis-à-vis my students’ and the ways in which I had engaged students in what I regard to be critical perspectives. Drawing on this experience, I will discuss issues of identity relating to language teachers and language teacher educators who support critical approaches to pedagogy.
