ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I explore the ways in which academics critical of the Colombia Bilingüe TESOL policy have framed their critique around the rejection of the transnational dimensions of the policy, understood as the involvement of non-Colombian organizations, their knowledge and expertise. As will become clear in the course of the chapter, the “movement of knowledge” and expertise in the context of TESOL in Colombia is often understood as being one-way. I explore how this transnational involvement is rejected by local academics and educational practitioners and describe how the production and circulation of such critique means that an oppositional stance to transnationalism in TESOL has become a key element of a critical pedagogic register, now an established register in TESOL teaching and teacher education in the country. I will then turn my attention to how this register spreads, and consider my own attempts to introduce this critical pedagogic register to an institution in which an outright rejection of transnationalism would have been counter to the institutional orientations. I consider how this implementation led to the emergence of an alternative, hybridized, critical pedagogic register which has an ambivalent relation to the transnational, rather than an outright rejection of it. I offer some final thoughts reflecting on the fact that this “hybridized” register ultimately leads to the acceptance of the knowledge and expertise mobilized by transnational organizations and consider how this register may provide privileged access to the labor market.
