Critical place‐based pedagogy and language teacher education in the Global North and South

Critical place‐based pedagogies are closely tied to the social space of teachers and learners, aiming to raise awareness and support efforts for positive change. Social space shapes—and is shaped by—language teaching and learning. A critical approach to language teacher education must always engage with space and place, and contextual awareness is a key step in teachers’ critical reflection on their work. This article focuses on language teacher education in multilingual peripheries in the Global North and South. These spaces are characterized by distance from national political centers and language ecologies in which Indigenous and minoritized languages are in unequal contact with national languages and globalized languages. We reflect on two different initiatives to include more local language knowledge into language teacher education in Southern Mexico and Northern Norway, asking why and how these critical pedagogical initiatives came to be, and what lessons can be learned from them. Southern Oaxaca, Mexico, is home to multiple Indigenous language communities, while Spanish holds a position of ideological and material dominance, and English takes an ever‐larger role in both official and unofficial interactions. The Norwegian part of Sápmi, the region where Sámi people live, which stretches across what is now Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, is also characterized by multiple minoritized languages, the national language Norwegian, and an increasing variety of immigrant languages. Navigating these multilingual, unequal spaces leads some teacher educators to reflect and act critically. Drawing on reflections, observations, and interviews with and by teacher educators in these regions, we analyze how teacher educators aim to reflect local realities over time, while also hoping to shape social space in positive ways in the future.