Introduction

In this introduction, Park, one of the editors of this collection, chronicles how this project began. She recounts her earlier days in the PhD program at the University of Maryland, College Park, when introduced to Paulo Freire as the beginning of the ways in which she embraced the work and knowledge of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Starting in 2000 and coming to an awakening moment of restructuring the existing second language teaching graduate course in 2013 to putting this edited collection together in 2020, she introduces each emerging teacher-scholar’s work in Chapters 1 to 23. The first 12 chapters are content-related chapters penned by emerging teacher-scholars in the ways in which they came to understand Freire’s work. The final 12 chapters are designed by emerging teacher-scholars to place critical pedagogy in the heart of classroom contexts. These classroom activities and course assignments can be modified in any educational contexts.