Latin America Writes Back is an essential read for educators, scholars, and anyone passionate about engaging with the transformative potential of language education from the perspective of the Global South. A call to freedom, autonomy, and dignity in pedagogy, this volume is a practice in 'making the familiar strange' as it invites us to rethink and revolutionize how we teach, learn, and empower through language education.

Cristian R. Aquino-Sterling, Associate Professor of Multilingual Education, Texas Tech University

It is important to write about local pedagogical practices. In writing about their classrooms, teachers develop a reflective knowledge about their practices. They share their practices with other teachers in the locality to develop a collective knowledge useful to their colleagues. And, more importantly, they speak back to dominant pedagogical traditions and theories to develop alternate practices that decolonize education. Latin America Writes Back is eminently suitable for accomplishing these goals and more.

Suresh Canagarajah Evan Pugh, Pennsylvania State University

Drawing centrally on Freirean perspectives on education, Tonelli, Egido, and de Paula have artfully brought together a volume that foregrounds humanizing, critical, and locally-sensitive case studies on language education praxis across Latin America. This volume contextualizes possibilities for critical, decolonial, and intercultural language education that recognize the agency of teachers and students who navigate conflicting realities within the classroom and beyond. This unique addition to scholarship on teacher education, EFL, and language education powerfully demonstrates how writing can be much more than a systematic and symbolic representation of language. Writing embodies reflection and resistance and brings change into action through collaborative pedagogies.

Vander Tavares, Associate Professor of Education, University of Inland Norway

Over the last years, decolonialities have been problematized in the areas of languages (language education, language teacher education, and applied linguistics) in Brazil. Decolonialities have been extremely important for those scholars and educators who-through the questioning of the modernity and its pillars (capitalism, neoliberalism, universalism, colonization, and coloniality, amongst others)-fight for a more equitable world through their language classes and projects. For Menezes de Souza and Duboc (2021: 900), 'decolonial studies have fought against the universal fictions of modernity that reject the value of local modes of knowing and being; secondly, it also reasserts how decolonial thought, which has emphasized different local cultural systems to the detriment of the past five hundred years of a singular global history, is incompatible with any attempt towards normativity, even if it tries to replace a previous normativity traversed by coloniality.' As we can see, these ontoepistemological perspectives have been extremely fruitful for Brazilians and Latin Americans educators, as put forward by the authors of this book. Decolonial options have not only helped us regain our voices, but also rethink the founding philosophies that grounded our modern(ity)/colonial praxiologies. This book presents the complexities put forward by the decolonial project, through many lenses and ontologies. Therefore, it is definitely a great contribution to the fields of language education, language teacher education, applied linguistics, sociology, and philosophy.

Daniel Ferraz, Professor in the Department of Modern Languages, Universidade de São Paulo

Latin America Writes Back is a powerful chorus of educators, researchers, and critical practitioners who refuse to be silenced or subsumed. Writing from their local contexts and lived realities, they reclaim authorship as a collective act of resistance-disrupting colonial legacies in language education through grounded praxiologies, curricular critique, and critical reflection. This volume doesn't simply respond-it dreams, resists, and reimagines from the South. It breaks silences, nurtures ideological clarity, and calls us into deeper solidarity. A must-read for anyone committed to justice-oriented language education and the liberatory potential of teaching, research, and writing grounded in place, memory, and collective struggle.

Zhongfeng Tian (???), Assistant Professor of Bilingual Education, Rutgers University–Newark.

Latin America Writes Back is deeply grounded in the realities, challenges, needs, and potential of Latin American schools. It critically examines the universalized paradigm of the West that undergirds monolingual language ideologies and the ongoing push for standardized frameworks and systems in early childhood classrooms, higher education settings, and teacher preparation programs. However, with coloniality and oppression come resistance and refusal. Across the studies in this volume, we see powerful implications, as well as responses and practices enacted by subjects on the margins for the possibilities in language education. Weaving together multiplicity, relationality, critical reflection, and professional autonomy, this volume highlights the importance of local teachers as policymakers and planners who are uniquely positioned to confront colonial legacies in education and develop locally-responsive approaches to curriculum and instruction.

Mariana Lima Becker, Assistant Professor, University of Georgia