This chapter presents our attempt to decolonize primary English language teaching (PELT) through the main intervention of the CEAR Project: the student teachers' praxicum. As stated in Chapter 1, even though the praxicum was conducted in pairs or trios, it was a collaborative, heteroglossic and intertextual endeavor (Bakhtin, 1981; Blommaert, 2005), which was connected to a larger group of 10 student teachers and myself, as the teacher educator. During the praxicum, the student teachers and I developed the continuous reflexive integration of thought, desire and action (Pennycook, 2004) in order to decolonize PELT. During the praxicum, our multiple voices engaged in the dialogue that we established among ourselves, with the host teachers, the principals of the schools and the children. We appropriated each other's utterances and those we encountered in the theories behind decolonizing PELT. We also made connections between the texts we were creating in the praxicum (e.g. the syllabus and lesson plans, teaching materials, identity texts, and so forth) and the lives of the children on an ongoing basis. In the following sections, I present our attempt to decolonize PELT, describing the first day of praxicum in each school followed by a comparative analysis. In this chapter, I also show the children's transition going from shame to alphabetic literacy developers, emphasizing the change that occurred, as children became our teachers.

The First Day of Praxicum at Horizons School

Claudia and Betty get off the FI-UABJO van. They carry a big box full of books, folders, paper, markers, crayons – and many different emotions. As they make their way through the children running around the basketball court, they go over their lesson plan for their first day. It will be Claudia's turn for the first 15 sessions, and Betty will finish the praxicum. They have already jointly planned a complete critical thematic unit and will start on the second one soon.