A few years ago, when I was in Colombia (in South America) for a conference, many English teachers were having conversations about the peace agreement between the far-left guerrillas and the government. Some teachers came to me and wondered whether English teaching had anything to with peace or even social justice. At that time, I thought, “I have never heard about such a connection,” so I started digging a little bit about it and there was not much literature related to the issue out there. Coincidentally, I was at the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) conference in Orlando that year. I stumbled upon a panel where Rebecca Oxford was presenting; I was fascinated by her talk about peace education in applied linguistics and English teaching. I guess it was destiny that was putting me in the direction of my future work. A while after, my supervisor came to me and showed me a book that sparked even more my curiosity towards my work for social justice in English language teaching.
