Mario López-Gopar's Decolonizing Primary English Language Teaching should be read by all practicing and aspiring educators who wish to experience the power of pedagogy to transform lives and challenge oppressive social structures.

Decolonizing Primary English Language Teaching is a book about many things – the education of Indigenous students, teacher education, the teaching of English, critical pedagogy. But fundamentally, it focuses on effective education – what teachers need to do in order to help their students learn.

It is also a book about identities – fluid, shifting, constantly in motion, shaped by relationships, often vulnerable, emerging tentatively across multiple trajectories. Decolonizing Primary English Language Teaching vividly documents through stories, images, videos and analysis, the possibilities that open to us as educators to negotiate identities in ways that generate power for our students and ourselves alike.

This book is also about power and the choices we face as educators about how we position ourselves with respect to historical and current societal power structures. Do we remain complicit with the legacy of coercive relations of power by simply teaching the curriculum handed down to us or do we challenge the constriction of identities and reduction of learning opportunities enforced by these power structures? Decolonizing Primary English Language Teaching shows very clearly that effective education for students whose communities have been marginalized over generations necessitates a process of decolonization – on one side of the coin instructional repudiation of coercive relations of power, and on the other side teacher/student interactions that collaboratively generate power. In other words, educators who aspire to 'effectiveness' must wrench this construct from its neoliberal moorings and reposition it as a set of interactions that reject the curricular constriction of identities in favor of instructional relationships that create classroom spaces for the (re)construction of identities.

The internalization of shame (and sometimes anger) is illustrated in the account told by Miriam, one of the student teachers, about her husband whose father would get really angry when other people would speak Triqui to him as a child.