Defying the abyssal line: Towards el Buenvivir in English language teaching in Colombia

In this chapter, I briefly describe the concept of Epistemologies of the South to theorize how English teachers create a humanizing curriculum that focuses on problem-solving and community care. A critical ethnographic approach was used to collect the data on classroom observations and interviews to understand the students’ lived experiences in a marginalized neighbourhood in Bogotá, Colombia. I also illustrate how the teachers’ pedagogical approaches were geared towards a pedagogy that addressed various social problems experienced in the school and its surroundings. Challenging the inequality became day-to-day work for the teachers while centering ideas of love, care and hope for a better future. In this process that I have called Slow Buen Vivir (SBV), English classroom pedagogies ultimately looked at living well in harmony with sustaining results for the long term.