Introduction

There are long and diverse strands of thinking about how schools and schooling, teaching, curriculum, and learning could be conceptualized and developed so as to foster what is often loosely called social justice. Many of these strands go back (in Europe) at least to the French Revolution. The original term that encompasses this area is ‘radical pedagogyFootnote ¹’ (that is to say, a pedagogy suitable for radicalsFootnote ² or radical purposes; cf. Crookes, Reference Crookes, Long and Doughty2009). Emerging out of this area in the post-World War Two era, one version of this thought and practice that has become somewhat influential in language teaching is ‘critical pedagogy’, and ‘critical language pedagogy’ (CLP) is a key term used to refer to applications of the concepts of critical pedagogy to second language (L2) contexts.

Since CLP (by definition) takes stances opposed to the mainstream in many aspects of its theory and practice, it is not surprising that this tradition has a comparatively slight professional and academic literature. Its development has been quite slow and gradual, because only a handful of specialists have had the favorable conditions necessary to explore it and put down the results of their efforts in print. (For an account of opposition faced, see Morgan, Reference Morgan1997).

In this timeline, I draw out some of the main threads in the development of CLP. It is, necessarily, a simplification, and subject to the constraints of a developing genre in this journal, and of publication and referencing space, as well as the partiality or subjectivity of the author.Footnote ³ In addition, ‘The appearance of a continuum generated by the quality of ideas is not always the case. Looking through the rear view mirror of final publications may be misleadingly coherent. I think it's the little skirmishes, disruptions and individual transgressive acts by authors/researchers and editors that are the real drivers of change’ (Brian Morgan, personal communication).

The timeline refers to key concepts for CLP. As with any specialized area, there are central concepts of importance, and researchers have taken time to explore, develop, or clarify these. In CLP there are a few terms which are sui generis (such as Critical Pedagogy itself) and there are others which, while common terms of art or theoretical concepts in applied linguistics and elsewhere, have to be explored in answer to the question ‘how does or should CLP address this area?’ – for example, Race. Without such theoretical clarification, or in some cases instantiation and conceptual exposition, practical work cannot easily go forward. In the first group of terms are Critical Pedagogy itself, Critical Consciousness, Critical Dialogue, Criticality, Critical Literacy, Code, Feminist Pedagogy, Critical Needs Analysis, and Critical Vocabulary. The latter group would include Sexual Identity/Queer Theory, Race, Class, Emotion, Assessment, not to mention Teacher Development, Teacher Education, Heritage Language Learner, and World Languages.

The timeline lists certain initial or breakthrough publications. That is, when I have felt comfortable in saying ‘This appears to be the first work of its kind’, I have pointed it out. Since the timeline should attempt to show what came about and when, and by implication, what was not present when, I have in a few cases noted the prolonged absence of what might have been expected earlier: for example, CLP's early failure to engage with Race, or similarly its lack of engagement with Sexual Orientation as it relates to teaching and to the instructed learning of an L2 (which, when it finally appears, is not very explicitly motivated by previous CLP work).

The body of work considered in this report shows some degree of progress and the accompanying timeline suggests a pattern of gradual growth over more than 40 years in our field. Insofar as there has been progress, it has mostly manifested itself as a broadening or expansion of the initial ideas beyond the main L2 (English), beyond the initial institutional context (adult English as a second language) (ESL), beyond an initial social justice-related category (Class), and beyond initial countries (say, the US and Canada). The literature in this tradition begins in the 1970s with general conceptual overviews and accounts based on practice (often in the form of small case studies or partial narrative discussions). These draw inspiration from outside applied linguistics, from the key sources of critical pedagogy (of the late 1960s and early 70s), initially an approach to first language (L1) adult literacy. By the 1980s, there are theoretical treatises, a handful of significant examples of materials, and a few extended works combining empirical report with curriculum theory and materials presentation and analysis. In keeping with developments in critical pedagogy elsewhere in educational (non-language specific) contexts, it began in the mid-1990s to engage with newer sites and causes of oppression, namely gender and sexual orientation, though not until the turn of the century did it consider race (and to a small degree, culture). The 1990s through to the turn of the century saw an increase in the depth of theoretical work and breadth of practical reports but not until the beginning of the century is there work on world languages and in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts. As CLP has spread geographically or culturally into EFL countries, it has appeared in areas which some observers might have thought quite unfavorable to such challenging practices.

Many reports are at the level of a one-shot attempt at implementing a CLP, and in form and content are a simple case study report, very often examples of teacher research (usually without explicit connection made to that tradition of action research). They contain empirical data, but it is unusual for that data to have been collected, analyzed, or reported with a high degree of research methodological sophistication or explicit signaling of theoretical or conceptual rigor. I am not saying these works are necessarily of poor quality; rather, they must be considered as reports from a front-line which has some degree of danger and difficulty, and thus likely to be partial, not always polished, or deliberately reflect a writing style intended to be maximally accessible. However, by contrast, a few publications (including some key works preceding L2 applications) are indeed polished, book-length accounts, whether the result of years of work reflected upon by major figures in critical pedagogy, or the materials and curriculum of substantial projects. A number of studies, written within the last decade or so, can be identified which probe key concepts (as opposed to considering an entire range of thought), or focus on a specific area of practice (as opposed to a case or a classroom). In addition, we are seeing more substantial literature reviews ranging over sets of case studies, as well as longer works (e.g., book-length edited collections) bringing together diverse perspectives. So, the literature is certainly more substantial than it was, even if the practices of CLP remain (as perhaps they always will) outside the mainstream and therefore reports of them simply will not be numerous.

In developing this timeline, I have something of a responsibility to identify progress in research if I can find it. One datum suggesting progress is the fact that over the last ten years, more dissertations have been done in this area than ever before. That is, while smaller studies of the kind mentioned in the previous paragraph continue to appear, there are also some longer and more complex works coming out the most recent of which are dissertations that have yet to be published in article or book form.

As for research methodology, the predisposition toward the case study is accompanied by a broadly qualitative research perspective. Few, if any, works used an experimental or quantitative approach. I have singled out just one such for listing in the timeline (Ashtiani & Babaii, 2007Footnote *), and this case does not have a strong connection to other CLP studies. Understood broadly, this ‘research methods predisposition’ also suggests an inquiry orientation in which holistic understanding, rather than causal explanation relating together selected factors, is the preferred goal. Similarly, the overall approach could be described as inductive and exploratory, in that this work moves forward gradually accumulating more and diverse cases, rather than posing explicit hypotheses which are then subjected to test. This would be consistent with advice provided by the person to whom the tradition in question is often attributed (Freire), who commented that there was no one método Freire and that he (that is, his ideas) had to be reinvented for each circumstance or context (Freire, Freire, & de Oliveira, Reference Freire, Freire and de Oliveira2016).

The most obvious gap in the timeline and the body of literatures of CLP is ‘with beginners’. There are also few studies pertaining to young learners (though there are some; Kim [2014*] is my marker here). World languages, as an area, appears very early but remains tiny by comparison with studies of English, whether in ESL or in EFL contexts. And an area in which there is developing work but which is most practically important in its limitations is still Materials. There are conceptual reasons for the latter (the very local vision that CLP has of what is needed in the area of curriculum and materials). But that does not get us out of the problem that as a result it is certainly hard to quickly show what CLP might look like. Without something moderately tangible, such as published materials, this is difficult. If the question is ‘What would I use to teach a L2 in this way?’, my answer, as a teacher educator, could be ‘Go and read Brian Morgan's [1998*] book’; but this is not so immediate as ‘Here's a sample lesson plan or typical textbook that may work with your kind of students’. Finally, on this theme, since testing and assessment is one of the areas where power and oppression particularly manifest in language teaching, the fact that language testing has some growth is encouraging (thanks to the efforts of Shohamy [e.g., 2001*]) in particular, but it is still one of the least fleshed-out parts of the domain, certainly relative to its importance.

In the timeline, the reader may be able to see the gradual expansion through initial compressed sketches of theory and practice (mostly concerning the acquisition of first language and literacy) from Freire in the mid-twentieth century, moving almost immediately through expansion of ideas in terms of L2 curriculum, case studies, and materials examples. Then the line broadens out, addressing gender, sexual identity, and eventually race (and culture), while accruing further cases in non-Western countries and EFL contexts. There is a substantial deepening of theoretical and practical understanding as we enter the present century, and an extension to language teacher education that was more or less absent earlier. There is also a gradual move toward other L2s; for example, while we have spent decades with almost exclusively English as the L2 of CLP, in the new century we have footholds in less commonly taught languages such as Japanese (Kumagai & Iwasaki, 2011*) and Filipino (Parba, 2018*), or even isiXhosa (Lewis, 2019*). Though having mentioned these conventional ‘sites of oppression’ (gender, sexual identity, and race, which should be accompanied by their classical first such term: ‘class’), perhaps it is worth citing that, as a critical observer looking across the wider field of applied linguistics as a whole, Block comments (Reference Block2014, p. 166) on the continuing absence of ‘class’ from studies of L2 teaching: ‘There seems to be little space for conversations about … how teachers might incorporate into their teaching the raising of class consciousness among their students.’

In compiling the entries for the most recent decade, I have had to be more selective and have tried to note in particular studies that can be pointed to as indicating something like accumulation of knowledge, or the continuation of lines of work. This seems to take more the form of a deepening (though still partial) understanding of practice in areas already adumbrated in earlier work. Perhaps I can optimistically characterize these publications as providing greater depth to topics only very lightly sketched or hinted at before. For example, Shin established that CLP was not impossible in the English classes of South Korean high schools (Shin & Crookes, 2005*); a decade later, West (2014*) demonstrated how it can be done in even more challenging parts of that country's English education system (the private cram school). Or more broadly, Freire (1967*) having posited ‘critical consciousness’ as an essential goal and requirement of critical pedagogy, very recently Leal (2018*) provided empirical data concerning what that looks like and how it might be arrived at among L2 teachers. Or less obviously critical but at least participatory, the broad thrust of Shohamy's work on critical L2 assessment can be seen as complemented by the detailed study of the benefits of a participatory approach to classroom EFL testing previously mentioned (Ashtiani & Babaii, 2007*) as well as a promotion of this sort of thing to teachers by Murphey (2017*).

In educational contexts of increased surveillance, the future of any approaches not mandated by central authorities is not bright. But in an era of wide (internet-mediated) access to even the long tail of alternative perspectives, perhaps this contribution of key items of hard-won understandings of CLP will inspire still more attempts at emulation and development.Footnote ⁴

The fourth column in the timeline identifies major themes addressed in the works cited, as follows:

• C – Culture

• CM – Curriculum and materials

• EAP – English for academic purposes

• EFL – English as a foreign language

• ESL – English as a second language

• K – Key concepts

• O – Overviews, surveys, introductions, theoretical works

• T – Teaching

• TA – Testing and assessment

• TE – Teacher education and development

• WL – World languages