The loving turn in ELT: Healing the wounds of coloniality: An introduction

In today’s world, English language teaching (ELT) grapples with dominant monolithic and monoepistemic ideologies that continue to perpetuate linguistic inequities and social, racial, and epistemic injustices. From the enduring ‘wounds’ of racialization (e.g. García et al., 2021; Subedi, 2008; Veliz et al., 2024) to processes of standardization (e.g., Dovchin, 2020; Dovchin & Dryden, 2022; Jenkins & Leung, 2019) and other inequitable practices (Meighan, 2022; Meighan & Veliz, 2026), ELT researchers, teachers, and educators confront challenges that shape both pedagogical practices and students’ lived experiences. In this context, these challenges are deeply intertwined with issues of diversity, multilingualism, and multiculturalism, as English continues to function simultaneously as a global lingua franca and a gatekeeper of legitimacy within educational and social hierarchies (Gimenez et al., 2025; Tupas, 2019; Veliz, 2024). Yet, cultural and linguistic diversity is still frequently positioned as a problem to be erased in English-dominant settings rather than as an asset to be valued, reinforcing the ongoing invisibility of minoritized languages and epistemologies. In response, there is a growing recognition of the need for a loving decolonial pedagogy – a transformative and inclusive approach that seeks to dismantle colonial hegemonies embedded within educational systems while foregrounding care, relationality, and lovingness in pedagogy (Mignolo, 2011; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; Pirbhai-Illich et al., 2017).