1 TEFL as Hydra: rescuing Brazilian teacher educators from “privilege” Clarissa Menezes Jordão In: WHY ENGLISH? Confronting the Hydra. Pauline Bunce, Robert Phillipson, Vaughan Rapatahana and Ruanni Tupas (eds.), Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2016. Available at http://www.multilingual-matters.com/display.asp?isb=9781783095841 The Hydra Descends upon us Teaching English in Brazil has been subjected to the doctrine of the communicative approach, mainly in its three-fold assumption of “nativeness” as a model of proficiency, English-only in class, and which English is to be taught. Brazilian teachers tend to see themselves as knowledge consumers when it comes to English: teaching methods and textbooks are considered best when developed in England or the U.S.; native-speakers of English are regarded as superior and many teachers get nervous when meeting one; references to English language and culture drive the national imaginary first and foremost to England and the U.S., rather than anywhere else. There is no doubt we have been subjected to the four dimensions pointed out by Kumaravadivelu (2012) as in urgent need of an epistemic break : dependency on Western knowledge production, center-based cultural competence, center-based methods and textbook industry. Such dependency on Western knowledge and its knowers positions Brazilian public school teachers of English and teacher educators (TEs) on a tightrope. On the one hand we are expected to challenge English as manifested by American influence all over the country; on the other hand we are supposed to emulate specific native-speakers of English – those whose accents and ways of using English are legitimated, and to reproduce their knowledges and ways of being. Public school English teachers in Brazil are seen as knowing very little English, having limited resources and professional knowledge, working in restrictive conditions, facing undisciplined and demotivated students, teaching in violent environments. When taken from the perspective that informs our imaginary, Brazilian public school English teachers are represented as incompetent, working in devalued places where effective language learning is conceived of as impossible. As TEs, we reproduce such mainstream knowledge about language teaching: teachers are organized in small groups according to the results of international placement tests to measure their language proficiency; lessons for teachers take place in well-equipped classrooms, with imported textbooks in an English-only environment. This creates “sanitized” classrooms for teachers’ learning and reinforces the message that effective teaching is impossible in public schools. The chapter analyses a cohort of Brazilian TEs working at a language teacher education center over a period of two years. We were a group of TEs in partnership with in- service Brazilian English teachers. Both teachers and TEs had varied teaching experience in public schools, ranging from 0 to 30 years. Some had PhDs and Master