This paper attempts to understand the role played by the diverse working contexts in the professional lives of a group of in-service teachers, who graduated from two universities (PUC-Rio and FFP/UERJ) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. These teachers were familiarized with Exploratory Practice (EP), a critical-reflexive modality of Practitioner Research, included in their undergraduate curricula. Within the EP framework (Allwright & Hanks, 2009), space was made available to reflect upon the need to understand the quality of life – both personal and professional – experienced by students and teachers inside and outside their EFL classrooms. As exploratory teacher educators, we claim that (future) teachers' professional development depends on going beyond the technicalities of teaching methods and raising teachers' awareness of the social and institutional contexts where teaching and learning occur. The focus of this paper is to investigate how the collaborating teachers discursively relate their professional contexts (Sarangi and Roberts, 1999) to their understandings of the basic ideas of EP and its role in the everydayness of their classroom lives. The data were gathered through exploratory conversations held with the participating teachers during a British Council-funded project, which focused on the 'delayed impact' of EP as experienced by 44 Brazilian teachers. Working within a qualitative research paradigm, we, as part of the research team, analyzed the teachers' discourse, collaboratively seeking to identify emerging themes associated with the primary purpose of the project – understanding the sustainability of EP in these teachers' professional practices. We adopted an emic perspective to data analysis and worked from the participants' perceptions and understandings of their own teaching. This procedure evoked (i) the teachers' comprehension of what EP means to them, (ii) how it is part of their daily classroom routine, (iii) how these teachers have been surviving in the profession, and (iv) whether EP has offered them a viable alternative to professional pressures. Our overall understandings are that, for the participating teachers, in their diverse specific contexts, EP is a sustainable approach, not only within teacher education but also within language teaching and learning. We also came to understand that, on account of institutional limitations, some of these teachers have to follow guidelines and school curricula and do not engage in Potentially Exploitable Pedagogic Activities, which would characterize canonic EP classes. They acknowledge that their way of surviving in their local professional contexts is by agentively profiting from the learning opportunities generated during classroom interaction. These practitoner perceptions enabled us to understand that, for these teachers, adopting such an exploratory attitude towards issues brought about by their students has offered them a viable and inclusive alternative to classroom management and lesson design, which are generally imposed by globalized educational institutions. Allwright, D. (2003). Exploratory practice: Rethinking practitioner research in language teaching. Language Teaching Research, 7(2), 113–141. Allwright, D., & Hanks, J. (2009). The developing language learner: An introduction to Exploratory Practice. Palgrave Macmillan Sarangi, S., and C. Roberts, eds. 1999. Talk, work, and institutional order. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
