Profile: Issues in Teachers' Professional Development

Critical Pedagogy, Social Justice, and the “Neutrality” of Academic English

Critical pedagogy (Freire, 1968/2000) suggests that education is never neutral; it is always political. It either sustains or disrupts social hierarchies. He further argues that this oppressive function is maintained through the banking model of education, in which teachers deposit knowledge into students. To counter such a model, he promoted a problem-posing approach grounded in dialogue, reciprocity, and the co-construction of knowledge, in which teachers and students become co-investigators in the pursuit of critical consciousness (conscientização). In this equation, teachers are seen as public intellectuals, rather than “high-level technicians carrying out dictates and objectives decided by experts far removed from the everyday realities of classroom life” (Giroux, 2024, p. 115).

From this foundation, social justice education emerges as an extension of critical pedagogy. Like the concept of social justice itself, defining social justice education is a challenging task. It has no single definition; rather, its meanings shift across contexts and communities (Cochran‐Smith et al., 2009). Bell (2016) conceptualizes social justice as a dual concept: its goal is the full and equitable participation of all groups in society, and its process must be democratic, participatory, and affirming of human diversity and collective agency. In this sense, social justice education must enable individuals to identify unequal power relations that operate at both individual and structural levels, locate themselves within these structures, and think critically about the production and nature of knowledge itself (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2017).

Social justice education and language education are inherently interconnected, as “language [as] a political instrument, means, and proof of power” (Baldwin, 1997, p. 5) is quite often used to oppress, colonize, and marginalize. However, the very political nature of language makes the language classroom a crucial site for examining these power dynamics and reclaiming language as a tool for liberation. These questions become particularly salient in EAP, which is a field often viewed as pragmatic and politically neutral (Benesch, 2001). However, just as no language is neutral, viewing language and its instruction as neutral means overlooking their potential to promote social justice. In particular, treating (academic) English in this way not only ignores the inherently situated and subjective nature of language but also contributes to the reproduction of dominant discourses and practices embedded in English (Canagarajah, 2022). For this reason, both the structural orientation and the content of academic English need to be reoriented, as this can create space for socially engaged and justice-oriented teaching. For instance, Mortenson’s (2022) classroom-based case study is a good example of how EAP lessons can critically engage with race, systemic inequity, and rhetorical agency through literature and reflective writing. Her study showed how academic literacies and activist sensibilities can be simultaneously developed through social justice-informed curricula.

Bringing critical pedagogy and social justice into EAP involves reimagining both what we teach and how we teach it. It entails a shift from compliance to critique to transformation, opening up what Breen (2024) calls “a pathway of access for marginalised voices within an increasingly polarised and xenophobic world” (p. 2). This shift does not necessarily reject the teaching of “academic” skills, but recontextualizes them as part of a broader pedagogical project to equip students not only to succeed within existing systems, but to question and take action to dismantle them.

Social Justice in the Turkish Educational Context

Türkiye is ethnically, linguistically, religiously, and culturally diverse. Most of its population is ethnically Turkish, but it also includes many minority groups such as Kurds, Arabs, Circassians, Laz, Armenians, Greeks, Jews, and Assyrians. Recently, this diversity has grown with the arrival of Syrian, Afghan, and Ukrainian refugees.¹ Turkish is the only official language, but Kurdish, Arabic, Armenian, Lazuri, Syriac, and many others are also spoken across the country (Eberhard et al., 2023). Most of the population identifies as Muslim, mainly Sunni, but there is also a significant Alevi community, along with Christian, Jewish, Yazidi, and non-religious groups (KONDA website: https://konda.com.tr/).

Despite this level of diversity, Türkiye has never been a place where social justice has truly taken root. Since the founding of the Republic in 1923, state-led modernization efforts aimed at establishing a Western-oriented, secular nation-state have often marginalized communities that do not fit the linguistic, religious, or ethnic identity supported by the state. Efforts to build a unified national identity have come at the cost of suppressing minority identities. Even after the transition to multi-party democracy, citizens’ rights have been frequently restricted by repeated coups. Although there was a brief period of democratic reform in the early 2000s, including modest expansions in linguistic, ethnic, and religious freedoms, these reforms were short-lived. Many have been hollowed out or later reversed as populist rhetoric and conservative nationalism have reasserted themselves. Today, many minority groups in Türkiye—including ethnic, linguistic, and religious minority groups, LGBTQ+ individuals, and refugees—continue to face systematic marginalization and pressure to assimilate (Aktoprak, 2024; Ince Yenilmez, 2021; Özkaynak, 2025).

It is possible to trace the roots of this marginalization and the lack of understanding of social justice in the country to the education system, with each level overseen by the state. For a long time, this structure excluded certain segments of society from education (see the Headscarf Ban in Türkiye). Although some exclusionary policies were recently abolished, the educational system has continued to promote a state-sanctioned, narrow vision of identity. For instance, the Inclusive Education Initiative, which seeks to integrate Syrian students, has been shown to reflect a Sunni-Islamic and nationalist framework that sidelines non-Sunni and non-Turkish groups (Toker, 2021). This approach is in stark contrast to the approach that previously sidelined religious people.

Despite this, there are efforts that push back against dominant narratives and explore more inclusive pedagogies. Initiatives such as Social Justice in ELT (https://www.socialjusticeinelt.com) have brought together preservice teachers to develop lesson plans that address human rights issues, environmental justice, and inequality. The Critical ELT Materials platform, created by students at Middle East Technical University, offers freely accessible teaching resources as alternatives to commercial textbooks. Emerging research similarly highlights the value of affirming students’ full linguistic and cultural identities in English classrooms. Şanal and Özkaynak (2023) found that when multilingual university students were encouraged to draw on their entire linguistic repertoires, they engaged more meaningfully with social justice topics. Likewise, Şenbayrak and Ortaçtepe Hart (2024) suggest that informal spaces, like conversation clubs, can become sites of critical dialogue when facilitators intentionally foreground issues such as gender, ethnicity, and inequality. Özkan and Öz (2025) indicate that Turkish ELT and ELL teacher candidates conceptualize critical pedagogy as social justice but often struggle to enact it due to limited preparation and structural support. Finally, studies on technology and justice (e.g., Yılmaz & Söğüt, 2022) highlight the dual role of digital tools, which can expand critical awareness and participation but also reproduce inequities when access and policy structures fall short.

In sum, while Türkiye’s diversity has the potential to serve as a foundation for inclusive and pluralistic education, the sociopolitical and educational landscape shaped by the historical and ongoing marginalization of different segments of society makes it difficult to implement such initiatives. However, within this constrained environment, there are meaningful efforts by teachers, students, and researchers to carve out spaces for critical engagement and social justice.

Positionality Statement

We, the authors of this paper, were all born and raised in Türkiye and educated in public schools within sociocultural and institutional contexts similar to those of our participants. Our own socioeconomic, cultural, and educational experiences have exposed us to various forms of social injustice in the country. Like the instructors in this study, we did not receive formal training on social justice in our teacher education programs. Over time, however, our teaching experiences with diverse student populations and our engagement with critical scholarship have deepened our awareness of these issues. We do not approach this study with the aim of critiquing instructors for what they lack; rather, we hope to contribute to a broader conversation about the challenges of teaching for justice in constrained environments. Writing this paper has required us to reflect on our own positions throughout, recognizing how our perspectives are shaped by similar limitations, and approaching our participants’ narratives not from a distance but with empathy and shared experience.

Context and Participants

We conducted this study with four EAP instructors working at four Turkish universities. For the participant selection, we first identified the universities that offer EMI programs. Subsequently, we selected five of these universities randomly and reached out to the chairs of the relevant departments that offer EAP courses to distribute our participant recruitment flyer to their instructors. Four instructors responded to our invitation and agreed to take part in the interviews (see Table 1 for demographics). Cemre and Ebru were working in large public universities in Ankara and Istanbul, respectively. Selen and Ozan were employed in large private universities in Ankara and Izmir, respectively. All four instructors were teaching first- and second-year EAP courses. They had linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms, including students from varied regional and international backgrounds. The instructors teaching in public schools also had refugee-background students; however, the instructors working in private institutions mostly had local and international students.

Public universities in Türkiye are tuition-free. The private ones, on the other hand, are known for their hefty tuition. Although instructors can enjoy a limited degree of agency in course content creation and materials selection, they must follow a centralized curriculum mandated by the Council of Higher Education. Institutional cultures, public and private alike, often emphasize apolitical professionalism and nationalist ideologies while viewing the English language as a marketable asset that their students need to acquire to thrive nationally and internationally (Özkaynak & Arslan, in press). These features shape instructors’ possibilities and constraints for integrating social-justice-oriented inquiry into EAP, influencing what topics are taken up, how they are framed, and how far discussions can proceed within institutional dynamics.

Cemre: Embedded Critical Literacy

At the time of data collection, Cemre was teaching first- and second-year EAP courses at a large public university with mixed local and international cohorts, including refugee-background students, mostly from Syria. When asked about her views on social justice, she based them on her graduate school coursework. She mentioned that she had taken critical theory courses that included readings by various critical scholars. She was particularly impressed by Freire’s concepts of the oppressed and the oppressor. Those concepts gave her a way to name dynamics she had long sensed but not been able to pinpoint. She had come to realize that “equity is not sameness” and started to read schooling as a space where normalized routines can slide from being oppressed to unintentionally reproducing oppression. She said: “I realized that throughout my education, I was always the oppressed . . . at some point, people normalize it so much that they themselves start becoming the oppressor.”

That stance eventually translated into the design of courses and materials. Working with her colleagues, Cemre co-authored reading and writing materials that embedded social justice questions into the genres students were expected to study. The materials invited students to analyze public discourse (e.g., Black Lives Matter, MeToo Movement) while they were practicing summarizing text, synthesizing information, and developing their arguments. Cemre described this as disciplinary literacy with a social justice purpose: “While [students] think they’re just writing essays for academic writing, they end up discussing these very topics.”

As one of the challenges of integrating social justice into her lessons, Cemre mentioned occasional heated moments when some local students were unable to relate to the experiences of refugee-background students. She stated that those students were particularly sensitive to topics related to national identity and migration. For instance, some of them tended to begin classroom discussions with what she framed as an ethnocentric stance: “At first, they’re like, ‘[This is] my country, my land…I should be the one getting the jobs…but [immigrants] are the ones finding jobs,’ and so on.”

In such moments, Cemre intervened and tried to employ dialogic scaffolding strategies by asking perspective-taking questions. For instance, she explicitly asked her students whether they had even been forced to leave their own countries because of war or other coercive factors. Through such dialogic questions, she aimed to help students surface their assumptions and reevaluate their interpretations about other people’s lives.

Emotionally charged stories told by some of her students also posed significant challenges to Cemre’s social justice teaching. For instance, she recalled a moment when a Syrian student shared her traumatic wartime experience in class:

She told us that she was holding her baby, dying in her arms, while her two children were tugging at her skirt…everyone froze. I’m usually a cheerful person, but that day I didn’t know what to do for a moment.

Cemre stated that it was a very difficult moment for her, as she had to contain her emotions as well. However, she handled the situation tactfully and implicitly wove the story into a classroom activity, as she had with other topics previously. To do so, she paused the activity before the break and acknowledged the emotional weight of what had been shared. After the break, she shifted to a short reflective freewriting activity on “respectful and compassionate listening.” By doing so, she linked the students’ lived experiences to a tangible classroom practice that, according to her, promoted empathy.

Another challenge was discussing religion and politics, which Cemre tried to avoid in class. She did so because she believed those topics had the potential to derail class objectives: “We’d just lose focus, honestly. Such topics take the discussion somewhere totally different, and then it’s just time down the drain.”

Cemre’s case showed how she tried to translate a critical social justice framework into concrete pedagogical practice. She was able to navigate emotionally charged and ethnocentric tensions through embedding challenging topics into academic tasks and using dialogic scaffolding. As a result, she could position her EAP classroom as a space for developing academic writing skills and fostering critical empathy.

Ebru: Reactive Student-Led Openness

Ebru was also working at a large public university, teaching first- and second-year EAP classes. Her social justice stance was more of an ethical inclusiveness that extended beyond human concerns. When asked how she would define social justice, she proposed that it is not only for human beings but, in her words, “it should apply to animals and plants whose rights must be equally protected, too.”

Regarding her enactment of social justice in her classroom, she believed her approach fostered an atmosphere of openness and responsiveness. For instance, instead of deliberately planning social justice units, she tried to make space for those conversations when her students brought them up. Then, she guided the discussion “in a completely neutral way,” which she suggested welcomed different views and ensured that everyone felt safe participating. As a result, the common pattern in her social justice pedagogy was student-led emergence.

However, Ebru’s student-led emergence strategy did not always effectively prevent tense moments from arising. On one occasion, she recalled that a Pakistani male student’s comments about religion were met with a strong reaction from a Turkish female student: “It was about religion, I think…something that linked language and faith. A Pakistani student shared his view, and then a female student responded with ‘that’s wrong!’, and suddenly there was conflict.”

Then, Ebru’s neutrality shifted, and she felt the need to intervene to calm the students. As a result, she changed her approach and decided to state the discussion norms and what could and could not be discussed in class, including religion. This approach eased the tension but showed a reactive, not proactive, way of handling tough conversations.

Ebru also mentioned several constraints that limited her ability to integrate social justice topics. She contextualized this by explaining that the nature of classroom discussions has changed over her career, stating that “7-8 years ago, students themselves used to open up these topics and enjoyed debating them.” However, she observed a significant decline in this willingness, noting mutual avoidance between her and her students regarding sensitive issues, which she attributed in part to a broader societal trend of self-censorship. She explained this dynamic by saying,

[The student-led emergence of sensitive and social justice-related discussions] has decreased very, very much. Even if I want to open it up by asking, I hesitate because I worry they will feel bad and avoid it. I don’t want to put them under pressure [to speak]. They also hesitate in the same way. There is a mutual avoidance.

Furthermore, she felt pressure to cover the mandated curriculum, which led to anxiety about falling behind schedule. She expressed that this “coverage anxiety” often took precedence over planning deliberate social justice lessons, despite her personal interest in critical pedagogy, particularly after her graduate school coursework. As a result, instead of creating full units with clear justice goals, she added quick prompts connected to the day’s text or genre.

Ebru’s approach showed both the promise and the limits of student-led emergence in social justice pedagogy. While her openness fostered inclusivity, the lack of proactive structures left her navigating tensions reactively and constrained by curricular pressures.

Selen: Acknowledged but Absent

Selen was a graduate student and an EAP instructor at a large private university, teaching academic English to classes of 25-30 students, who were predominantly engineering students. Her approach to social justice was characterized by deliberate caution and a primary focus on maintaining a safe, conflict-free classroom environment.

Selen defined social justice in terms of contemporary issues affecting specific groups, mentioning “wars, the country’s economic situation…how these affect people,” and specifically cited “women or minority groups, and LGBT.” However, this conceptual awareness did not translate into proactive integration in her teaching. She explicitly stated a preference for avoiding politically charged topics: “Frankly, I prefer my students not to be too political. I ask this of them.”

Her strategy was one of containment; she would permit student-initiated comments only if they were directly relevant to the lesson topic, such as a discussion on travel, but would quickly intervene against any discourse perceived as hostile.

This cautious approach stemmed from several factors. First, Selen expressed a lack of confidence in her own knowledge to facilitate discussions on complex social issues. When gender equality was discussed, it was often because her engineering students raised concerns about the field’s male-dominated nature. In these moments, she relied on eliciting student perspectives rather than guiding the discourse: “Because I don’t have much knowledge about these topics myself, I feel the need to ask them.”

Second, she identified a lack of institutional support, noting that the prescribed curriculum and textbook provided minimal material on social justice. Therefore, her primary strategy for inclusive teaching was to treat all students equally and maintain individual communication, but she did not employ specific pedagogical methods to critically engage with systems of power or inequality.

Despite her personal avoidance, Selen believed that social justice topics should play a more significant role in EAP. She argued that for students to write effective opinion essays, “these topics should not be taboo.” She acknowledged the limitations of her own practice, stating that her classes probably did not foster social change because she did not dedicate enough space to such topics. Furthermore, she expressed a willingness to participate in professional development on the subject, contingent on tangible institutional support. She suggested that “if there were financial support, people would approach it more willingly,” indicating that dedicated resources and prepared materials are necessary prerequisites for many instructors to engage effectively in social justice pedagogy.

Selen’s case portrayed an instructor who, while conceptually acknowledging the value of social justice, practices a pedagogy of avoidance. Her teaching is shaped by a perceived lack of personal expertise and a scarcity of curricular guidance, which ultimately positions social justice as a desirable but logistically infeasible endeavor.

Ozan: Procedural Equity Pragmatism

Ozan was an EAP instructor who had been teaching for a year and a half at a private university with a diverse, multinational student body. His approach to social justice was pragmatic and cautious, which was summed up by his motto, “everyone’s life is their own.” He tied this understanding to gender equality and inclusivity, which formed the basis of his conceptualization of social justice.

Regarding the implementation of social justice pedagogy, Ozan stated that he avoided initiating discussions on politically or religiously sensitive subjects. He explained that “this is Türkiye, after all; we sometimes can’t predict where a topic might lead.”

His primary concern was navigating the unpredictable nature of such discussions. However, he made a significant and deliberate exception regarding gender equality. Noting the male-dominated demographics of his engineering classes, he actively worked to counter gender stereotypes. He reported explicitly telling students, “There is no such thing as a ‘man’s job’ or a ‘woman’s job.’”

He translated this belief into concrete pedagogical actions and sought to ensure gender-balanced project teams by creating mixed-gender groups to challenge preconceived gender roles. These practices demonstrated a targeted, context-driven approach to one specific social justice issue.

Beyond gender, however, Ozan’s strategy was largely reactive and preventative. He gathered information on student backgrounds to “prevent anything that could potentially create a problem.” When minor tensions arose, his intervention was low-key, aiming to de-escalate without derailing the lesson. He believed that exposure to diversity itself was a primary educator, suggesting that students in a multicultural environment naturally become more accustomed to difference over time.

As the most important challenge to integrating social justice pedagogy into EAP courses, he recognized the lack of professional development and institutional support. He argued that the EAP classroom could serve as a vital space for cultivating social justice with structured, purposeful support. Thus, he expressed a clear desire for professional development in social justice, believing that teachers should not be forceful persuaders but rather socially just models, a goal that could be achieved through such development.

Cross-Case Synthesis

As Thomas (2021) notes, “in a multiple case study, because there are several subjects, each individual subject is less important in itself than the comparison each offers with the others” (p. 186). It is through this comparative lens that the significance of the four present cases emerges, revealing a spectrum of approaches to social justice pedagogy in EAP contexts. These are shaped by the interplay between the instructors’ conceptual framework, their pedagogical strategies, and the institutional and societal constraints they navigate. At one end of this spectrum, Cemre exemplifies a proactive, critical-literacy approach, systematically embedding social justice into curriculum design and using dialogic scaffolding to transform tense moments into teachable opportunities for critical empathy. In contrast, Ebru and Ozan represent variations of a pragmatic, reactive approach, though with different emphases. Ebru’s initial strategy of student-led emergence, grounded in ethical inclusiveness, proved fragile in the face of conflict. Ozan demonstrated a more targeted pragmatism, actively promoting gender equity through procedural measures while systematically avoiding other sensitive topics to maintain classroom harmony. Finally, Selen embodies a pedagogy of avoidance, in which a conceptual belief in social justice is stifled by a perceived lack of expertise and institutional support, and by a primary focus on maintaining a conflict-free zone.

Despite these differing approaches, common, significant challenges emerge across all cases. These include navigating intense emotional disclosures and managing student conflicts arising from deeply held beliefs. Furthermore, a palpable sense of caution permeates the instructors’ practice, stemming from the unpredictable nature of discussions in the Turkish sociopolitical context and a lack of structured institutional support or professional development.