Epistemological entanglements: Decolonizing understandings of identity and knowledge in English language teaching

This article explores how educators might move towards decolonizing our understandings of identity and knowledge. How might we both acknowledge and move beyond the reality that knowledge about identity is simultaneously constructed by colonialism and inseparable from the teaching and learning of English? Drawing on ethnographic data, including observations and interviews, from two studies of teacher identity, one of English teachers collaborating in Tanzania and one of MA-TESOL students in the U.S., this article conceptualizes identities outside the confines of colonial ideologies and Global North-dominated theories. Drawing on Santos's epis-temologies of the South and Ubuntu-inspired identity-in-community, the authors describe how localized notions of identity among English teachers can challenge and reformulate those dominant in Global North education.