This article describes the theoretical principles underlying the research component of the Bachelor's program of Basic Education with an Emphasis in English at a public university in Bogotá (Colombia), and an exercise of syllabus revision that served to link theory and practice through the research component of the program. The aim of the exercise was to reflect upon the syllabus and discuss how, from the different components of the program, student-teachers can understand research as the bridge to link what they learn in class and their practice in school contexts. A group of teachers revised the theoretical foundations as well as their practice in each cycle of the program, using the main tenets of critical pedagogy, teacher research, reflective teaching, and case study.

This article reports on a doctoral research that sought to unveil the identities present in the communities to which four English as a foreign language preservice teachers belong. The study was carried out with a decolonial perspective that included an interepistemic dialogue among narrative inquiry, narrative pedagogy, and the indigenous research paradigm. The main instrument of data collection was autobiographies. The participants and the researcher analysed data jointly. The findings indicate that the preservice teachers’ identity construction is mutable and not essentialised. Mutable as it changes over time and not essentialised since it involves social, cultural, and personal dimensions.

This study aims to describe the pedagogical practices that take place at the Language Institute of a university based on the observation of classes, questionnaires and interviews of teachers and students. In order to achieve the purpose of the project, the researchers adopted a qualitative approach and also combined an ethnographic perspective which denotes a constant reflection on the part of the teachers who participated as objects of the study. The results of the study demonstrate that most of the teachers employ the PPP (Presentation, Practice, and Production) model to language teaching and that the students make use of direct and indirect strategies in order to help themselves learning.

This paper presents a review of studies on communities in ELT in English-speaking countries and Latin America, including Colombia. The purpose of the article is to show that it is necessary to understand the senses Language Preservice Teachers make of the concept of communities and the ways they relate to each other and their teachers. Also, there is a unitary concept of community in the policies related to English Language Teacher Education in Colombia, a naturalization of the concept of community and patterns of regularity, stability and interdependence in research related to communities in English Language Teaching that make invisible how the English Language Preservice Teachers make sense of the concept of community in their affiliations or no affiliations with particular groups. Understanding the senses the English Language Preservice Teachers make about communities might bring to the fore other ways of knowing that can contribute to the improvement of the design of teacher education programmes.

In this article I will summarize a small scale project carried out at a private university in Bogotá, with eight undergraduate students. The project aimed at finding out what their oral discourse informed me about their beliefs regarding gender and ethnicity. It also had two other purposes: First, to give the students the opportunity to reflect upon the complexity of the world we live in and the many perspectives involved in this complexity and second, to make students active participants in a democratic society. To achieve these goals a selection of texts written by non-canonical, female and Afro-American writers was given to the students. I conducted five informal interviews, which were audio-taped. The analysis of the responses given by the students showed that there is an internalisation of the values which characterises the Western society we live in. A society ruled by dichotomies such as male/female, white/black and rich/poor, who perpetuatepower relations that favor certain groups over others.The students became active participants by becoming more critical and making decisions about how to improve further editions of the textbook they currently use and suggesting the editors to create a more inclusive book.