CRITICAL LITERACY,FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING AND THE EDUCATION ABOUT RACE RELATIONS IN BRAZIL Míriam Jorge Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (Federal University of Minas Gerais _ Brazil) As TESOL practitioners, we should engage in daily critical re- flections of how our ideas of race influence what we teach, how we teach it, and how we understand our student (Kubota, 2009) Introduction This article explores how language education can align with education about race relations in order to challenge the race-based beliefs that perme- ate Brazilian society. It focuses on facts about language teaching that can help us answer questions such as: does race matter in language teaching? If so, why does it matter? What role does race play in learning/teaching dynamics? Reflecting on these questions can be a starting point for creating learning opportunities that focus on race relations in an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classroom. I will examine some possible answers or thoughts that can contribute to the conversation about education on race relations in Brazil. Teaching and learning EFL involve direct or indirect interactions be- tween groups of speakers who are culturally, racially and linguistically distinct (Kubota; Lin, 2009). In this way, language teaching, one way or another, conveys racialized images of students, teachers, and characters that inhabit language teaching textbooks (Kubota; Lin, 2009). Although race is widely studied in different knowledge areas, such as education, an- thropology, history and sociology, studies that focus on race and English Language Teaching (ELT) are still rare. The ones available, according to Kubota and Lin (2009), usually align studies of race with those of gender and class. These studies also address power, identity, subjectivity, social (in)justice, and other themes that are vital for all aspects of second lan- guage education. Even though Brazil is the cradle of Critical Pedagogy 1 , the situation there is not different than other parts of the world where English is taught as a foreign language. Although some scholars defend critical approaches to language education, very few of them connect issues of race to EFL teaching, such as Moita Lopes (1996, 2002, 2006), who de- fends an (un)discipline(ed) Applied Linguistics, and Ferreira (2006), who emphasizes the social responsibility for ELT to address themes that are able to promote ethnic-racial equality in this field. The Brazilian guidelines for English Teaching in High Schools (OCEM) 2 presume that EFL teachers use a critical literacy approach to lesson C  2012 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 79